This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato's Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5—6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents (...) the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse's becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological. (shrink)

On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J.J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, Carl Raschke, Robert Scharlemann, and others, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the new conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, to such an extent (...) that traditional appeals to faith in an other world become difficult to take as more than self-deception and willful blindness to our human reality. On the other hand, we hear the assertion of a new lease on life for theology and its traditional affirmation of divine transcendence over and against the putative arrogance of all claims of human autonomy. This claim is advanced particularly by theologians grouped under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. Emanating from England, originally from the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s, this movement includes such theological thinkers as John Milbank, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, and Catherine Pickstock. It has also explicitly styled itself “post-secularist.” I propose that both approaches are based on not very fully acknowledged and often explicitly denied premises in negative theology, which surprisingly emerges as key to fostering genuine possibilities for dialogue among apparently antagonistic theological approaches. (shrink)

This article critically examines the postsecular literature with the aim of dispelling the scepticism about the concept’s theoretical import, critical power and analytical utility. It first presents an overview of the literature identifying two major fields, social theology and politics, within which three major critical leitmotifs are developed: (1) disenchantment and the loss of community; (2) the impossibility of absolute secularity; and (3) the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. In the second section, the shortcomings of problematizations (1) and (...) (2) are highlighted, originating from social theology, and it is argued that they have limited critical potential as they intend to renaturalize the religious. Instead, it is asserted that the concept has critical power when used within the context of a postreligious denaturalization of the secular. In the last section, the focus shifts to the analytical utility of the concept, and the article examines ‘postsecular society’ and ‘postsecularization’ in the light of the previous discussion. (shrink)

This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which attitudes (...) address on the curriculum and whether or not to promote them. I then apply this to the case of religious attitudes and attitudes about religions. I argue that where having or failing to have a certain attitude makes a significant difference to students’ lives, it ought to be addressed by curricula. Where failing to have the attitude is irrational, this failure ought to be remedied; where having the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be discouraged; and where neither having nor failing to have the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be introduced and discussed without encouragement or discouragement. In so far as is practicable, educators should aim to acquaint students with arguments for and against having these attitudes and initiate them into the practice of assessing their soundness. The implications of this theory for extra-curricular influence, such as upbringing in the home, are also explored. (shrink)

Toward the end of his life, Derrida complained that he had been ‘read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about which nobody understands anything'. Derrida, ever the trickster and shape-shifter, had outwitted his audience and even his ardent following by declaring himself religious. This seemed to oddly contradict the universal image of Derridean deconstruction as nihilistic, relativistic, subjectivistic and anti-religious. But Derrida disagrees with this impression of his work, claiming that deconstruction has always been affirmative (...) and has always delivered a yes to life. Deconstruction, according to the late Derrida, is a way of doing truth, of keeping things authentic and open to the possibility of transcendence. He wanted to unravel and deconstruct, not to arrive at nothing, but to affirm a sacred reality that he sensed was undeconstructible. This paper is concerned with the ‘other' Derrida that few seem to know. (shrink)

Philosophers of religion have tended to focus on Freud’s dismissal of religion as an illusion, thus characterising his account as primarily hostile. Those who wish to engage with psychoanalytic ideas in order to understand religion in a more positive way have tended to look to later psychoanalysts for more sympathetic sources. This paper suggests that other aspects of Freud’s own writings might, surprisingly, provide such tools. In particular, a more subtle understanding of the relationship between illusion and reality emerges in (...) his theory, that itself offers a useful way of understanding the meaning and significance of religion for the human animal. By exploring these sources a view of religion emerges which connects it closely with the processes of imagination and creativity. Under this view, religion is more than just a set of hypotheses to be proved or disproved. In religion, we have access to the most deeply rooted wishes and anxieties of the human heart, and thus its investigation enables a deeper understanding of what it is to be a human being. (shrink)