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This book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature.
This book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature.
The articles in The Modern Experience of the Religious, edited by Nassim Bravo and Jon Stewart, explore the many ways in which religion was impacted by the emergence of modernity, particularly after the Enlightenment, which underscored the centrality of human reason and thus called into question traditional forms of religiosity. Modernity raised several questions that are studied by the authors of this volume: What should be the role of religion in a secular or pluralistic society? How does the human being relate to God? Can instituted religion be compatible with modern values such as civil liberties, pluralism or environmentalism?
The articles in The Modern Experience of the Religious, edited by Nassim Bravo and Jon Stewart, explore the many ways in which religion was impacted by the emergence of modernity, particularly after the Enlightenment, which underscored the centrality of human reason and thus called into question traditional forms of religiosity. Modernity raised several questions that are studied by the authors of this volume: What should be the role of religion in a secular or pluralistic society? How does the human being relate to God? Can instituted religion be compatible with modern values such as civil liberties, pluralism or environmentalism?
Abstract
This article explores and discusses different approaches—the theological, the philosophical, and the Sufi—to the knowledge and experience of God within the Islamic intellectual tradition. Throughout the discussion the question that arises is to what kind of knowledge or experience of God do each of these approaches lead. The mutakallimūn (theologians) and the philosophers formulate convincing arguments for the existence of God and His nature. However, the deductive reasoning they both employ has its limits, and their methods contrast with theoretical or speculative Sufism, whose aim is to engage deeply in the systematic account of the experiential knowledge of God. After revising the scope of the arguments for the existence of God of al-Ashʿarī and al-Ghazālī, and then, the arguments of some Peripatetic philosophers of the Islamic classical period, I focus the debate on the contrast between the deductive reasoning and the intuitive knowledge of God according to theoretical or speculative Sufism, introducing Suhrawardī and Ibn ʿArabī. Finally, the article concludes with some remarks and a brief disquisition on what could be the correct path to the knowledge of God.
Abstract
In this article I would like to present a detailed analysis of a crucial episode in Grundtvig’s theological career, namely, his attack against the Professor of Theology Henrik Nicolai Clausen in the little work entitled “The Church’s Rejoinder.” In this text, Grundtvig reintroduced the fundamental debate about what is the character of the authority of the Scriptures and what is the essence of the Church. Grundtvig will propose what will later be known as his “matchless discovery [mageløs Opdagelse]” or “ecclesial view [kirkelig Anskuelse],” namely, that the truth of Christianity is transmitted primarily through what he calls the living word [det levende Ord]: the acceptance of the Apostles’ Creed in baptism and the other sacraments. The main purpose of this article is to examine this controversy in order to understand the reasons that led Grundtvig to hold such a position. This analysis will also allow me to present an overview of the theological context in Denmark during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Abstract
The concept of common sense (sensus communis) serves as the methodological basis of the human sciences. It is inspired by the practical wisdom of Aristotle, which is expressed by the Greek term φρόνησις (in Latin, prudentia) in its original meaning. This paper intends to examine the skeptical or more common sense-based approach to the religious tradition from the Enlightenment to the present day, with an emphasis on the philosophies of religion formulated by Mendelssohn, Feuerbach, Gadamer, and Habermas. All four expressed their doubts about the reliability of speculation as a source of knowledge and consider practice to be the highest and most profound form of theory. They believed that the path to the unification of theory and practice, of language and activity, of understanding and life, lay in a greater distancing from metaphysical speculation and a closer approach to common sense.
Abstract
The Enlightenment promoted an intensified use of critical reason to question traditional religious authorities, hoping to purge faith of superstition, implausibility, intolerance, and mystification. Theologians responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. The most radical embraced the Enlightenment’s critique of inherited beliefs and sought to reduce Christianity to a religion compatible with reason. Others attempted to synthesize Enlightenment sensibilities with traditional teachings by modifying crucial doctrines without jettisoning them. Others rejected some of the widespread Enlightenment philosophical presuppositions and developed alternative speculative systems to reinterpret Christianity. More conservative theologians attempted to resist the Enlightenment critique by appropriating the Enlightenment’s own tools, using inductive argumentation to defend the faith. Others rejected the foundational reliance upon reason and sought to reestablish theology on a new basis, often on an analysis of human subjectivity and religious experience. All of these responses generated issues and trajectories that would dominate theology for the next two centuries and beyond.
Abstract
The question of whether our spirituality is based on our imaginative abilities, or whether it is our imagination that determines the direction of our spirituality, is a crucial issue of this text. The theme of angels as celestial beings, interpreters and messengers, helpers and “brothers of humans” serves as a background for this inquiry. Ancient, medieval, and renaissance thinkers dealt with them extensively. John Scottus Eriugena, a representative of Carolingian Neoplatonism, had a special place in this context. His extensive work Periphyseon is, among other things, a re-thinking and reflection on the images of angels of the time, taken mainly from the patristic tradition. Eriugena was undoubtedly a deeply spiritual and educated man, the translator of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and of other patristic texts. His understanding of angels shows how much spirituality is the daughter of his imagination, and how this imagination has influenced the spiritual life of his later readers. The result is that our spirituality could be understood as a sign of the level of the cultivation of our imagination.
Abstract
In the present text, I carry out an analysis of Kant’s philosophy of religion that shows to what extent it is informed by fundamental theses and principles of Christianity. In contrast to the readings of interpreters who seek to relegate religion in his thought or to fully secularize it, I intend to show that Kant develops a religion of reason that is informed by and runs parallel to the development of the Christian faith but does not end up discrediting it. On the contrary, what I will emphasize is that the Kantian critical method is forced, in different instances (such as in the discussion of evil, divine grace, the role of Jesus of Nazareth as mankind’s savior, and the ethical community), to recognize or admit the possible supernatural transcendence of certain Christian principles—and not only their mere moral worth—and to give a preponderant place to history as a stage of encounter between that which practical reason prescribes and that which comes to meet mankind as part of God’s providential plan. In doing so, I intend to point out that Kant offers us an unvaluable intellectual legacy in which the development of a critical philosophy of religion is unthinkable without the permanent dialogue with the concrete forms and manifestations of religious faith.
Abstract
In the chapter I propose to describe the link between the concept of alterity and the concept of absoluteness. These concepts are connected in the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, and this raises some important questions regarding the concept of alterity. The concept of alterity could be applied in environmental ethics, and it might lead to a solution to some of the problems in this field, but only under the condition that alterity not be necessarily linked with absoluteness, which creates hierarchy and privilege. The chapter will analyze in detail the text ‘In Image of God’, according to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner and show the consequences it has for the ethics of alterity. We will also discuss Derrida’s criticism of Levinas concerning the relation of divinity to alterity, especially the text “Violence and Metaphysics.” The chapter will also criticize Catherine Chalier’s interpretation of Levinas and her book L’alliance avec la nature, where she explains the role of nature in Judaism. The broader goal of the text will be to prove that metaphysical hierarchy is an obstacle to environmental philosophy.