This book is a translation of a classic work of modern social and political thought. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's last major published work, is an attempt to systematize ethical theory, natural right, the philosophy of law, political theory, and the sociology of the modern state into the framework of Hegel's philosophy of history. Hegel's work has been interpreted in radically different ways, influencing many political movements from far right to far left, and is widely perceived as central (...) to the communitarian tradition in modern ethical, social, and political thought. This edition includes extensive editorial material informing the reader of the historical background of Hegel's text, and explaining his allusions to Roman law and other sources, making use of lecture materials which have only recently become available. The new translation is literal, readable, and consistent, and will be informative and scholarly enough to serve the needs of students and specialists alike. (shrink)

In this article, we offer a rebuttal to a key thesis in Chapter 5 of Engelhardt’s After God: namely, that there exists an “unbridgeable gap” between the dominant secular culture and traditional religious believers. Contra Engelhardt, we argue that it is possible to bridge the gap by employing a strategy that includes, but is not limited to, methods for cultivating understanding and respect and a sense of solidarity. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we elucidate Engelhardt’s thesis in light (...) of some of the key concepts he discusses elsewhere in After God. Second, in the hope of developing understanding and respect, we elucidate the history and teachings that form the consciences of traditional Christian medical professionals concerning abortion, euthanasia, and disfiguring surgeries. Third, in the hope of developing a sense of solidarity, we explain the broad scope of the dominant secular culture’s attempt to limit people’s freedom of conscience rights, showing that it includes not only traditional Christians but also members of other traditional religions, members of mainline religious groups, people with alternative conceptions of secularity, and even faithful members of the dominant secular culture. (shrink)

This review essay examines H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s The Foundations of Bioethics, a contemporary nonfeminist text in mainstream biomedical ethics. It focuses upon a central concept, Engelhardt's idea of the moral community and argues that the most serious problem in the book is its failure to take account of the political and social structures of moral communities, structures which deeply affect issues in biomedical ethics.

In this article, I argue that while Christians should share Engelhardt’s disappointment in how bioethics functions in the world, they should not share his exasperation. I begin by outlining the general argument in After God, its understanding of secularism, and of how such secularism has impacted bioethics. Next, I suggest that Englehardt appears to lean toward disengagement or at least an extremely suspicious sectarianism. Rather, I claim that it is possible for Christians to morally engage in a useful way with (...) others and still base their own moral activity on proper life telos. Such cooperation is not to serve a commonly-held ultimate purpose, but shared proximate ends. That said, the moral discourse with those outside the Church may be necessarily limited by shallow moral acquaintanceship. I argue that the concept of “middle axioms” can be used as a mechanism for engagement with others in this society. Importantly, this approach does not require abandoning distinctive Christian commitments and foundational assumptions. (shrink)

This article retraces progression of Engelhardt’s work so as to place After God in broader context. In The Foundations of Bioethics, Engelhardt argues that given the moral pluralism that is at the core of postmodernity, only a merely formal morality of permission can bind moral strangers in peaceful coexistence. In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt presents a bioethics that binds Orthodox Christian moral friends. After God shows itself more pessimistic about the possibility of a merely formal morality of moral (...) friends and calls traditional Christians to wage a culture war. These reflections close with some criticisms of Engelhardt’s philosophical-theological project. (shrink)

Professor Engelhardt’s After God sets out in fine detail a “j’accuse” of the Western project from the medieval Scholastic doctors, through the Enlightenment, to Kant and Hegel, and finally to its telos in postmodernity, which in fact was the logical outcome of what Professor Engelhardt sees as the abuse of reason, for reason could never endure the demands made of it. I propose that Professor Engelhardt is correct in his description of our present epoch, though partially but critically misguided in (...) his diagnosis of why, and thus falls short in a prescription for the restoration of salus. (shrink)

When the elite of German culture discovered that they no longer understood what the belief in God had been about, they earnestly set to work seeking an answer to this puzzle: what had once animated religious belief? What had been the point of it all? What had been its true meaning? The first answer came from Kant, who sought to show that religion, or at least what he considered the legitimate exercise of religion, had all along been about morality. A (...) second answer came from Schleiermacher, who addressed the “cultured despisers” of religion to demonstrate that the true content of the Christian religion had been not propositions of morality, but certain kinds of intuition or feeling. And, yet a third answer came from Hegel, who concluded that revealed religion had been one of three cultural manifestations of absolute knowledge. In one form or another, these three reductions continue in various permutations to be the principal ways that religion is understood today, even by self-identified believers. With ongoing reference to bioethics as a sort of Rosetta Stone for deciphering secular culture, Engelhardt shows at length how the Enlightenment project—the attempt to lay a new foundation for morality and politics drawing upon a universal, secular, discursive rationality rather than the Experience of God—has failed so miserably that there can be no hope for its fulfillment. The secular project—the attempt to live “after God,” to find secular substitutes to which Christianity can be reduced—has failed miserably, even if the darkness from this failed star has yet to reach the enthusiasts of secular society: “Morality has been utterly deflated. Culture is cheap. Feelings are quarantined as matters of personal taste to be overridden by secular obligations. The only solution is to return to the ascetical disciplines of the Church of the Apostles and the Fathers, which aid in turning one from self-love to the transcendent God and to a noetic experience of his will”. (shrink)

This article examines Engelhardt’s thesis from the standpoint of liturgical theology. Fagerberg’s previous work has claimed that liturgy gives birth to theology in such a way that liturgy is the ontological condition for theology, as Schmemann said. If we apply this approach to the question at hand, we will understand liturgy to be the source and foundation also for Christian morality. This is no particular surprise, since the Christian tradition has always integrated liturgy, theology, and asceticism, that last named treating (...) morality as a pathway to deification. Liturgical theology views liturgy as a pneumatic exercise that makes theologian souls, and liturgical asceticism understands such theologian souls to be molded by the doings of the body, and this delivers us to the threshold of liturgical morality, for in liturgy the God’s-eye perspective shares its light with us. (shrink)

It is true that Hegelian historicism has indeed led to a dominant ethos of moral relativism bound up with the belief that individual self-actualization is the highest value, thus creating a society that is, in the phrase of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. “after God.” Nevertheless, this egocentric and nihilistic relativism exists alongside a robust and militant moral totalitarianism enforced by the modern clerisy of the media, multi-national corporations, and government bureaucrats, that is, a “managerial elite.” This article argues that the (...) transcendental idealism of Kant and the subsequent historicization of Kant’s dialectic by Hegel has served to reconceptualize the older, Baconian view of science, creating the idea that scientific progress is moving toward the goal of a future perfection of absolute rational unity. The a priori rational structure of reality that makes science possible is not a Platonic Ideal, but something that unfolds within history. This is what allowed Marx to conceive of dialectical materialism as a science, and this is what allows the managerial elite of the present to claim a scientific and objective basis for their programs while at the same time using the tools of historical and cultural criticism to relativize and historicize the claims of all competing moral and social “constructs.”. (shrink)

What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as the (...) foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium -- an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion -- and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion. (shrink)