The metaphysics of morals and politics

Initially my aim was to bring together the following -the early Hegel (particularly his early theory of spirit in connection to his theory of Fate and his early critique of Kantian morality) the religious thinking of William James 1 and the work of three contemporary philosophers, John McDowell, Charles Taylor and A.W. Moore. I then intended to use this material to rethink secularism, particularly the normative constraints that ground the separation of church and state. It is this division that is the ultimate focus of this paper. Some see that this division is of secondary importance to a more fundamental issue, captured under the Weberian term 'disenchantment of nature.' To an extent I agree with them but through a consideration of Hegel's early theory of spirit my aim is to show that prior to any disenchantment of nature that there exists a problematic conceptual or perhaps an attitudinal relation to self and world and that this is a pre-condition of such disenchantment. At the practical level this problematic relation of self and world manifests in institutional division and at a theoretical level the same relation manifests as disenchantment. So, before we can begin to see the world as the realm of law, 2 devoid of meaning and disenchanted, we have to adopt a certain reactive attitude to it. This attitudinal relation is one that I think is based in a fundamental fracture, a form of self-alienation, whereby the self is held to be something alien to nature yet imprisoned within the natural. This fundamental fracture then manifests in human institutional and intellectual life as seemingly irreconcilable oppositions (Appendix 1.)

Sofia Philosophical Review, 2016

Journal of Educational and Social Research, 2017

From Plato to Aristotle, from Augustine to Aquinas from Pascal to Freud and Heidegger the world and philosophical thought has continually interpreted the human nature, the source of morality and religion, specifically what we call (metaphysics). Man of antiquity, the medieval, modern and contemporary has his attitude towards the sacred. But what is happening with the man of our age, what relation does it have nowadays with the sacred, what is his attitude and what are the reasons for this relationship with the sacred. All the above are part of this scientific research paper. To give readers an overview of attitudes of philosophical thought of different times in front of the sacred, what are its meanings at different times and how is the attitude toward the sacred today. Descriptive analysis of the philosophical and religious issues.

History and Theory, 2008

Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary within the secular intellectual culture of the modern academy, scientific findings are not necessarily incompatible with religious truth claims. the latter include claims about the reality of God as understood in traditional christianity and the possibility of divinely worked miracles. Intellectual history, philosophy, and science's own self-understanding undermine the claim that science entails or need even tend toward atheism. By definition a radically transcendent creator-God is inaccessible to empirical investigation. Denials of the possibility or actual occurrence of miracles depend not on science itself, but on naturalist assumptions that derive originally from a univocal metaphysics with its historical roots in medieval nominalism, which in turn have deeply influenced philosophy and science since the seventeenth century. the metaphysical postulate of naturalism and its correlative empiricist epistemology constitute methodological self-limitations of science-only an unjustified move from postulate to assertion permits ideological scientism and atheism. It is entirely possible that religious claims consistent with the empirical findings of the natural and social sciences might be true. therefore historians of religion not only need not assume that atheism is true in their research, but they should not do so if they want to understand religious people on their own terms rather than to impose on them an undemonstrated and indemonstrable ideology. exhortations to critical thinking apply not only to religious views, but also to uncritically examined secular ideas and assumptions, however widespread or institutionally embedded.

If we compare the first (1988) with the second (2012) volume of Habermas's "Nachmetaphysisches Denken", we are struck by a remarkable axis shift. While religion played a marginal role in the first volume’s general argument, now it dominates the scene almost unchallenged. In my paper, I articulate the insight, and try to back up the claim, that this growing interest cannot be explained on the basis of external reasons alone, i.e. as a corollary of the sociological thesis about the recent trajectory of the Western process of secularization (and the associated problems of social integration), but it asks for an internal explanation, i.e one compatible with Habermas’s self-understanding as a post-metaphysical thinker. In the end, I seek to make a good case for the idea that the acknowledgment of the reasons underlying his curiosity for religion as an enduring "Gestalt des Geistes" ought to encourage Habermas to reconsider and weaken his broadly Kantian claim in favor of a post-metaphysical self-restraining of philosophical investigation.

Zygon�, 1992

Ian Barbour's Religion in an Age of Science is a welcome systematic, theoretical overview of the relations between science and religion, culminating his long career with a balanced and insightful appraisal. The hallmarks of his synthesis are critical realism, holism, and process thought. Barbour makes even more investment in process philosophy and theology than in his previous works. This invites further inquiry about the adequacy of a highly general process metaphysics in dealing with our particular, deeply historical world; also further inquiry about the adequacy of its panexperientialism and incrementalism.

This paper addresses the relationship between religion and science in terms of the link between social science and religion defined broadly as a commitment to a set of values. It takes as a point of departure Myrdal"s contention that "there is an inevitable a priori element in all scientific work". Varying a priori definitions of such key concepts as rationality, freedom, equality and of the nature of humankind, are embedded in all social science theories, and commonly serve to underpin disagreements between contending schools of thought. Hence the quip that the only prerequisite for the study of comparative economic systems is the study of comparative religion. Metaphysics and epistemology are therefore of uncommon importance, but their consideration is nonetheless commonly excluded from the training of social scientists. The social sciences are increasingly dominated by the view that the "big picture" epistemological and metaphysical debates have been resolved and that the way forward now is through empirical testing of specific hypotheses. Yet, as Sen puts it, the understanding of the public good implicit in much of the social sciences is very questionable, and "an incorrect theory can kill". Continuing controversies e.g. of the type between Myrdal and Bauer, Sen and the Washington Consensus, Galbraith and Krugman on US political economy, the need for free markets versus selective government intervention should make clear however that the role of economic philosophy and the need for grounding in it is irremovable. Especially in that sense, there is a need to be more willingly attentive to the link between religion (defined broadly in terms of metaphysics or faith in particular value systems) and social science. The roots of the controversy sparked by Pope Benedict XVI"s controversial 2006 Regensburg address are examined within the same framework. Important links are adumbrated between metaphysics and what evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker calls the new sciences of the mind and of human nature.

Opuscula Sociologica, 2016

Joeri Schrijvers' latest study in contemporary continental philosophy and the possibility of the religious steers immediately toward very familiar terrain: the possibility of atheism, the phenomenon of secularism and the 'return of religion' in recent continental thought. Considering a number of popular writers, such as John Caputo, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, and Jean-Luc Marion, to name only the most prominent, Schrijvers looks not only to how their arguments are rooted in the nuanced philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida, but he also begins to critique the narrow interests they maintain in attempting to overcome ontotheology and metaphysics once and for all (the subject too of his earlier study Ontotheological Turnings, also with SUNY Press). Such efforts, according to Schrijvers, are really a matter of philosophical hubris—that is, of presenting a totalizing narrative that really cannot be declared as such to exist as an enclosed space. By focusing on lesser known figures such as Reiner Schürmann and Ludwig Binswanger, Schrijvers deftly parses the arguments given for moving beyond Christianity in the work of several of the aforementioned authors, and mounts a position that faith without belief is 'phenomenologically impossible' as this formulation leaves our embodied existence out of the picture. In short, these critiques of metaphysics attempt to present a world without love and a love without world. There is a subtle criticism but also defense of tradition that Schrijvers mounts in this book through the turn to love and life as they 'outwit' tradition, while simultaneously grounding themselves in it. It is the task of the book as a whole to preserve metaphysics as a possibility through a philosophical account of incarnation developed alongside Binswanger's phenomenology of love. By contrasting Binswanger with Heidegger in order to elucidate a phenomenology of religious life, Schrijvers promotes a more robust, intersubjective way of being in the world that can more adequately account for the role of love in one's life—an acknowledgement too of the necessity for being-with others (and otherness itself) that describes how we, ontically, do exist in our world, and in the lived institutions and religions that comprise it. We cannot simply abandon such ways of being in the world in favor of a purely abstracted critique of every institutional order. The other before us gives us something that we cannot give ourselves and, to put things rather bluntly, this matters a good deal in terms of how we experience life and love. To abstractly develop an anarchic, gnostic or antinomian critique of all institutional, systematic, ordered and religious ways of being in our world without acknowledging our embodied ('incarnational') reality of needing such forms (such as he charges Caputo, Nancy and Sloterdijk of aiding) is to miss a major feature of what it means to be human. Though this may sound like an overly simplistic account of Schrijvers' rigorous treatment of a much more complex argumentation as it is pursued in each thinker's works, it is a major strength of the book that he is able to distil matters into such clear lines of thought. What struck me time and again while reading this book was its entirely readable quality, as if I were listening to someone who wasn't trying to hastily dispatch a difficult argument as much as it was the voice of someone who has such a strong grasp of the field as to render their commentary in crisp and lucid prose. This book is a reliable guide to a series of ongoing debates in continental thought that have seemed for some time to be at an impasse. My intuition is that this impasse has mainly resulted from somewhat partisan entrenchments (phenomenology versus deconstruction) that refuse to engage with the connections between diverse methodologies. Schrijvers' fine work navigates this impasse with precision and fairness, and thereby gives us a path forward for maintaining embodied religious practice in our world today.