In the accepted view, the basic disposition of believers is one of absolute obedience, humility, and lack of critique, doubt, or, indeed, defiance of God. Only through such a disposition do believers convey their absolute faith and establish the appropriate hierarchy between God and humans. This article challenges this view and argues that, in mainstream rabbinic tradition, the believer is not required to renounce his or her moral autonomy and certainly not his or her understanding of God and the world. (...) Indeed, faith rests on such understanding; moreover, human autonomy is the mechanism through which humans convey God’s goodness and perfection. Their questions and criticism are part of a persistent effort to close the evident gap between their assumptions about God’s goodness and the flawed imperfect reality. The analysis focuses on rabbinic tradition but its implications go beyond it, presenting a model of a life of faith that compels subjects, as believers, to preserve their constitutive foundations as rational autonomous creatures. (shrink)

I focus here on the teleological suspension of the ethical as it appears in Fear and Trembling. A common reading of Fear and Trembling is that it explores whether there are religious reasons for action that settle that one must do an action even when all the moral reasons for action tell against doing it. This interpretation has been contested. But I defend it by showing how the explicit teleological suspension of the ethical mirrors implicit teleological suspensions of the epistemological (...) and prudential, and by articulating how it might be necessary for God to suspend the ethical in order to forgive us for our wrongdoings to others. I also discuss whether God’s commands are implicitly conditional, whether religious reasons to act, believe, and forgive are in each case grounded in divine commands, and what role love plays in each type of teleological suspension. (shrink)

This paper seeks to discern the Kierkegaardian echoes present in the writings of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. While these thinkers share a number of commonalities such as their resistance to categorisation and their imaginative and complex writing styles, Lyotard’s engagement with Kierkegaard has been largely dismissed as inconsequential. However, a modest yet consistent device invoked by Lyotard is Kierkegaard’s paradox of faith from Fear and Trembling. While these references to Kierkegaard read as terse blips in Lyotard’s texts, this paper (...) argues that the Kierkegaardian echoes that can be heard in Lyotard’s writings are crucial for a deeper understanding of Lyotard’s ethical turn. Rather than being insignificant, Lyotard’s direct as well as second-hand engagement with Kierkegaard has profound effects on his philosophy of the differend. By exploring Lyotard’s enigmatic, yet brief appeals to the paradox of faith, this paper shows that Lyotard strikes a chord with Kierkegaard by using the paradox of faith as an intertextual reference to a critique of Hegelian mediation and for discussing the ethical dilemmas inherent to one of the most shocking and incomprehensible events of the twentieth century, Auschwitz. (shrink)