Is there, today," asks Jacques Derrida, "another 'question of religion'?" Derrida's writings on religion situate and raise anew questions of tradition, faith, and sacredness and their relation to philosophy and political culture. He has amply testified to his growing up in an Algerian Jewish, French-speaking family, to the complex impact of a certain Christianity on his surroundings and himself, and to his being deeply affected by religious persecution. Religion has made demands on Derrida, and, in turn, the study of religion (...) has benefited greatly from his extensive philosophical contributions to the field. Acts of Religion brings together for the first time Derrida's key writings on religion, along with two new essays translated by Gil Anidjar that appear here for the first time in any language. These texts are organized around the secret holding of links between the personal, the political, and the theological. In these texts, Derrida's reflections on religion span from negative theologyto the limits of reason and to hospitality. Acts of Religion will serve as an excellent introduction to Derrida's remarkable contribution to religious studies. (shrink)

This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the philosophical core of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century.

In this article, the Heidegger and Derrida controversy about the nature of questioning is revisited in order to rehabilitate questioning as an essential characteristic of contemporary philosophy. After exploring Heidegger's characterization of philosophy as questioning and Derrida's criticism of the primacy of questioning, we will evaluate Derrida's criticism and articulate three characteristics of Heidegger's concept of questioning. After our exploration of Heidegger's concept of questioning, we critically evaluate Heidegger's later rejection of questioning. With this, we not only contribute to the (...) discussion about why Heidegger rejected questioning in his later thought and whether this rejection is legitimized, but also to the rehabilitation of questioning in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The question addressed in this article is to what extent a destructed concept of religion can be said to characterize the philosophical method of Martin Heidegger. In order to approach this question, we first characterize his method as “Vollzug der Fraglichkeit”: philosophy in its deepest sense does not mean to give answers to questions but to ask questions. According to Heidegger, the execution of questioning consists in the “transforming repetition” of the leading question of philosophy in order to ask the (...) basic question of philosophy. In the second part of the article, we reflect on the “religious” character of Heidegger’s method of questioning. The reflection makes use of different etymological derivations of the word ‘Religion’: relegere, re-eligere, religare, relinquere. In the third part of the article, we discuss what Heidegger’s “religious” method of philosophy means for present questions concerning religion. To that end, we finish with a confrontation between Heidegger and Derrida with respect to the “religious” method of philosophy. (shrink)

Mit den "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie" von 1913, von ihm selbst nur als eine "Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie" angezeigt, zog Edmund Husserl die Konsequenz aus seinen Logischen Untersuchungen (PhB 601), die ihn 1900/01 berühmt gemacht hatten: Ausgehend von der dort entwickelten Phänomenologie der intentionalen Erlebnisse sieht er jetzt in der Aufdeckung der Leistungen des "reinen Bewußtseins", dem die uns bekannte natürliche Welt nur als "Bewußtseinskorrelat" gegeben ist, den eigentlichen Gegenstand philosophischer Erkenntnis und in den (...) von ihm eingeführten methodologischen Begriffen der "Reduk tion" und der "Epoché" den Weg, sich über die Beschaffenheit dieses "reinen Bewußtseins", aus dem alle Erkenntnis entspringt, Klarheit zu verschaffen. Die Ausgabe bietet Husserls Schrift text- und seitengleich nach Band III/1 der Husserliana, herausgegeben von Karl Schuhmann; beigegeben sind Husserls Nachwort zu den Ideen von 1930 aus Band V der Husserliana, herausgegeben von Marly Biemel, sowie ein umfangreiches Namen- und Sachregister von Elisabeth Ströker. (shrink)

überall einen richtigen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft giebt, in welchem Fall es auch einen Canon derselben geben muß, so wird dieser nicht den speculativen, sondernden pr.ntischen Vernunftgebrauch betreffen, den wir also iezt ...

Quentin Meillassoux has been described as the most rapidly prominent French philosopher in the Anglophone world since Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. With the publication of After Finitude (2006), this daring protege of Alain Badiou became one of the world's most visible younger thinkers. In this book, his fellow Speculative Realist, Graham Harman, assesses Meillassoux's publications in English so far. Also included are an insightful interview with Meillassoux and first-time translations of excerpts from L'Inexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence), his famous (...) but still unpublished major book. (shrink)

In his book After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux criticizes post-Kantian philosophy for its inability to explain how science is able to describe a world without human beings. This paper addresses that challenge through a consideration of Heidegger’s thought and his thinking about science. It is argued that the disagreement between Meillassoux and Heidegger comes down to a question of first philosophy and the priority of logic or ontology in philosophy. Ultimately, Heidegger’s emphasis on ontology in philosophy is superior in its ability (...) to give a more comprehensive account of science and thinking about things themselves. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency advocates a “speculative materialism” or what has come to be called “speculative realism” over against “correlationism” (his term for [nearly] all post-Kantian philosophy). “Correlationism” is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” As part of his criticism of “correlationism,” Meillassoux argues that it necessarily leads to fideism, referencing the return (...) of the religious in contemporary phenomenology and the fundamentalist fanaticisms of contemporary religion to make his point. It is this criticism of “correlationism” that I will explore in this paper—in two ways. On the one hand, I argue that, at least in the work of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, what Meillassoux calls “correlationism” leads to faith in doubt rather than fideism. On the other hand, I argue that “correlationism” has resulted in fideism only to the extent that it follows Hegel and becomes speculative, which raises questions for Meillassoux’s own “speculative realism” and his faith in mathematics as the means to accessing reality in itself. (shrink)

Problems and Prospects Peter Gratton. uncoveredness of entities that serves as the basis for a true assertion is dependent upon dasein's understanding of being, which lets these entities manifest themselves. hence, as heidegger will say, ...

The current fashions in both analytic and continental philosophy are staunchly anti-metaphysical. There is supposedly no way to talk about the world itself — the philosopher is confined to antiseptic discussions of language, or of other modes of human access to the world. In this provocative work, Graham Harman expands the discussion from his previous book, Tool-Being, arguing for a theory of "the carpentry of things" — a more accessible way of viewing the world that incorporates ideas from Husserl, Levinas, (...) Lingis, and other philosophers. (shrink)

The chapter discusses Quentin Meillassoux's recent interpretation and critique of Heidegger's philosophical position, which he describes as "strong correlationism." It emphasizes the fact that Meillassoux situates Heidegger in the post-Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism that he defines in terms of a focus on the correlation between being and thinking. It is argued that Meillassoux's "speculative" attempt to overcome the Kantian philosophical framework in the name of absolute contingency should be understood as a further development and dialectical overcoming of its ultimate (...) contemporary form, the Heideggerian philosophy of finitude. (shrink)