In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel argues that the development of the religions of the world leads up to and culminates in Christianity, which is the one true religion. One key element which separates Christianity from the other religions, according to Hegel, concerns the issue of alienation. He argues that the previous religions all contain some form of alienation, which can be found in their conceptions of the divine. In this paper, I wish to examine Hegel’s view (...) that Christianity alone overcomes religious alienation. What is it that makes Christianity so special in this regard? This is a particularly important issue given that the question of alienation is so central in the post-Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, who all insist that, far from overcoming alienation, Christianity is guilty of causing it. I wish to argue that this issue provides new insight into the old criticism of Hegel as a thinker of abstraction. (shrink)

This paper will attempt a Hegelian reading of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1 lectures to unpack certain apories and paradoxes in Ambedkar’s brief 1932 statement on modern India’s founding figure, Gandhi. In that small text Ambedkar is critical of Gandhi’s seemingly saintly attempt at fasting himself to death. Ambedkar diagnoses that Gandhi’s act of self-sacrifice conceals a type of subtle coercion of certain political decisions during India’s independent movement from British colonialism. In order to unpack philosophical assumptions in (...) Ambedkar’s statement, this paper examines Derrida’s startlingly original insights into animality, law, and sovereignty in confronting two of the Western tradition’s giants in political philosophy, namely Hobbes and Schmitt. My intuition is that Derridean deconstruction can be expanded further by deploying certain Hegelian resources. My ultimate aim is to show how Western notions of man, soul, God, the sovereign, and the state begin to dissolve when examining the Hindu metaphysical cosmology of the caste system. My thesis and concluding reflections argue that only by destroying that cosmological system of politico-metaphysical inequality can a true democratic notion of the sovereign state emerge in the Indian context. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAny conceptualisation of evil, arguably, has to empower us to resist or transform it in our lived worlds. The latter concern motivates this paper much more than a thorough analysis of evil itself. Drawing on Jewish and Christian thought, I tentatively consider evil as resulting from the incomplete or failed cultivation of the humane. Along this line, evil is the opposite of humanity; it is the antihuman, the subhuman, or the demonic. Gratuitous violence, hatred, resentment, and malice manifest this dark (...) ‘power’ of evil. In the aforementioned traditions, peace and justice are conceived as being dependent on the inner order or unity of the soul. Conversely, iniquity – as the manifestation of evil – in the world reflects conflicts or disorders in individual souls. Hence the need to constitute one’s personhood. Such continuous creation takes place through genuine human encounters, where and when love, friendship, and gratitude are allowed to unfold themselves. These ‘dispositions’ are conceived as counterweights to evil. I will work out this argument, but also briefly examine how education, rural and urban planning, economic and political ‘systems’ can either breed or curtail evil. (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel's discussion of the Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit has provoked ongoing debate about his views on gender. This essay offers an interpretation of Hegel as condemning social arrangements that take the authoritativeness of identities and obligations to be natural or merely given. Hegel criticizes the ancient Greeks' understanding of both the human law and the divine law; in so doing, he provides resources for a critique of essentialist approaches to sex and gender. On this interpretation, (...) Hegel views the conflict between Antigone and Creon as tragic because the gendered identities and obligations inherent to Greek Sittlichkeit are naturalized and withheld from scrutiny and revision. In the conclusion, I suggest how Hegel's criticisms pose a challenge to certain approaches to religious ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard endorses Hegel's theory of mediation, the view that relative opposites are mediated. However, I show that Kierkegaard denies Hegel's thesis that there are all and only relative opposites. I develop two of his arguments against this thesis. The first is existential. This argument comes from the dramatic interplay between A, the often disagreeable aesthete of Either/Or I, and Judge William, the dutiful ethicist of Either/Or II. Judge William convincingly argues that the possibility of (...) future aiming human projects is rendered obsolete if aesthetic and ethical forms of existence are mediated opposites. The second is philosophical. This second argument is offered by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I show that Climacus issues a reductio argument that I call "the argument from insufficient difference.". (shrink)

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper begins with several opening passages from the most esoteric writings in Hinduism’s vast, ancient religious-philosophical heritage, namely the Upanishads. The aim is to reveal certain essential connections between the primordial relation between self and sacrifice while exploring uncanny paradoxes of eternity and time, immortals and mortals and their secret linkages. ….

Contemporary philosophy of religion almost allergically reacts to metaphysics. They do so because of the various critiques of the potential reach of reason, which each in their own way argue that God cannot be appropriately approached via autonomous reason. In this article, I argue, on the one hand, that these critiques are furtively inspired by a certain outlook on transcendence, which I call the ‘Protestant view’ and, on the other hand, that numerous contemporary philosophers of religion are slowly starting to (...) appreciate a more ‘Catholic view’ on transcendence, which allows for a more metaphysically ambitious philosophy of religion. (shrink)

A number of contemporary authors (e.g., Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, and John Caputo) claim that Hegel’s Religionsphilosophie provides important insights for contemporary philosophy of religion. John Caputo argues that Hegel’s notion of incarnation as radical kenosis is a powerful tool for postmodern Radical Theology. In this essay, I scrutinize this claim by balancing Hegel’s notion of incarnation with his notion of recognition—the latter of which Caputo removes from a “headless Hegelianism.” I argue that a non-Hegelian, non-dialectic sense of recognition ought (...) to be introduced in contemporary philosophy of religion to remove the confrontation with the Other from the realm of radical trauma. (shrink)

Transcendental materialism is a philosophical perspective that uses German Idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and natural science to offer a materialist account of subjectivity and culture. This essay compares this philosophical framework with recent work in the study of religion and philosophy of religion. While transcendental materialism has until now been unconcerned with religion, it offers parallels with this recent work. It differs, however, in its specific understanding of the material dimension of the dialectical relationship between abstraction/conceptuality and practice/embodiment.

Once God is no longer recognized as the ground and the enforcer of morality, the character and force of morality undergoes a significant change, a point made by G.E.M. Anscombe in her observation that without God the significance of morality is changed, as the word criminal would be changed if there were no criminal law and criminal courts. There is no longer in principle a God's-eye perspective from which one can envisage setting moral pluralism aside. In addition, it becomes impossible (...) to show that morality should always trump concerns of prudence, concerns for one's own non-moral interests and the interests of those to whom one is close. Immanuel Kant's attempt to maintain the unity of morality and the force of moral obligation by invoking the idea of God and the postulates of pure practical reason are explored and assessed. Hegel's reconstruction of the status of moral obligation is also examined, given his attempt to eschew Kant's thing-in-itself, as well as Kant's at least possible transcendent God. Severed from any metaphysical anchor, morality gains a contingent content from socio-historical context and its enforcement from the state. Hegel's disengagement from a transcendent God marks a watershed in the place of God in philosophical reflections regarding the status of moral obligations on the European continent. Anscombe is vindicated. Absent the presence of God, there is an important change in the force of moral obligation. (shrink)

One of the most frequently asked question is whether Hegel’s idea of God is immanent or transcendent. In Transcending Subjects: Augustine, Hegel, and Theology, Geoffrey Holsclaw attempts to solve this puzzle by contrasting the political theologies of Hegel and Augustine. He argues that Hegel produces a political theology of ‘self-transcending immanence’ while Augustine produces a political theology of ‘self-immanentizing transcendence’. The primary problem with Holsclaw’s dialectical procedure results from its uncritical appeal to a transcendent source for the supersession of opposites. (...) Rather than critically annulling each opposed position, he often resorts to simply describing the inadequacy of positions in light of the privileged ideal of Augustinian transcendence. Holsclaw’s dialectic has not been directly derived from Augustine but from the more recent writings of William Desmond. He translates Desmond’s opposition between the second and third types of transcendence into his own opposition between Hegelian self-transcending immanence and Augustinian self-immanentizing transcendence. Hegel’s apparent ambiguity on transcendence seems to expose him to Holsclaw’s critique. Yet Hegel may, arguably, have never needed to answer this objection because the opposition between immanence and transcendence has already been resolved by Hegel’s dialectic of infinity: for if the opposition between the categories of immanence and transcendence that appears at the level of Spirit merely replicates the vanishing opposition between the finite and the infinite at the level of Logic, then the supersession of this negative opposition between the infinite and the finite into the true and speculative infinity can be virtually replicated for religious consciousness in the supersession of transcendence and immanence into an equally speculative transcendence. Where Holsclaw seeks to supersede immanence into transcendence, Hegel seeks to preserve both transcendence and immanence in the true ‘speculative transcendence’ that corresponds to the true ‘speculative infinity’. The decisive disagreement between Hegel and Holsclaw thus concerns, not merely any relation between transcendence and immanence, but – more fundamentally – the very possibility of superseding the spurious transcendence into a genuinely speculative notion of infinity and transcendence. (shrink)

Between Thought, Religion, and Contemporaneity: the hyperboles of being and the equivocal communication of the sacred (Entre o Pensamento, a Religião e a Contemporaneidade: as hipérboles do ser e a comunicação equívoca do sagrado).The contemporary philosophical thought regards itself as postmetaphysical, post-religious, postmodern, and post-philosophical. It advocates for metaphysics without metaphysics, ethics without ethics, and religion without religion. This paper aims at exploring the possibilities of thinking through the place and role of God, religion, and mystique in the philosophical discourse (...) of contemporaneity, having William Desmond’s thought as a reference. According to Desmond’s thought, there’s an intimate, idiotic, porosity in the call to truth. Thought is communication openness for its own originating source. This means that thought is situated at the knowledge threshold, and it may open up to a reverence attitude in the face of the mystery of being. Through metaphysical metaphors, intermediate names going beyond the univocal determination of metaphysical constructs from the past, Desmond aims at thinking through something which is present amidst finitude, indicating a foremost transcendence going beyond our experience: an upper transcendence essentially asymmetrical to our own transcendence. Such metaphors or hyperboles safeguard the enigma involved in the issue of God and the religious being. This enigma or mystery isn’t something negative, but openness for a fuller and overdetermined agapic origin. Keywords: Metaxology. Religion. Postmodern. Agape. Mystique. Resumo O pensamento filosófico contemporâneo se compreende como pós-metafisico, pós-religioso, pós-moderno e pós-filosófico. Ele advoga uma metafisica sem metafisica, uma ética sem ética e uma religião sem religião. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar as possibilidades de refletir sobre o lugar e o papel de Deus, da religião e da mística no discurso filosófico da contemporaneidade, tendo como referência o pensamento de William Desmond. Para o pensamento desmondiano, existe uma porosidade íntima, idiótica, no chamado à verdade. O pensamento é uma abertura comunicativa para a sua própria fonte originadora. Isso significa que o pensamento se encontra no limiar do saber, podendo abrir-se para uma posição de reverência diante do mistério do ser. Através de metáforas metafisicas, nomes intermediários para além da determinação unívoca das construções metafisicas do passado, Desmond busca refletir sobre algo presente em meio à finitude, que indica uma transcendência primeira que vai além da nossa experiência: uma transcendência superior essencialmente assimétrica à nossa própria transcendência. Tais metáforas ou hipérboles asseguram o enigma envolvido na questão de Deus e do ser religioso. Tal enigma ou mistério não é algo negativo, mas uma abertura para uma origem agápica mais plena e supradeterminada. Palavras-chave: Metaxologia. Religião. Pós-moderno. Ágape. Mística. (shrink)