In this paper, I develop a theory on which each of a thing’s abundant properties is immanent in that thing. On the version of the theory I will propose, universals are abundant, each instantiated universal is immanent, and each uninstantiated universal is such that it could have been instantiated, in which case it would have been immanent. After setting out the theory, I will defend it from David Lewis’s argument that such a combination of immanence and abundance is absurd. (...) I will then advocate the theory on the grounds that it accomplishes all of Lewis’s “new work” while providing a gain in parsimony and a new account of fine-grained content. I will close with a discussion of how the theory also affords a new reply to two objections to uninstantiated universals: Armstrong’s charge that they are inconsistent with naturalism, and a Benacerraf-Field-style objection about epistemic access. (shrink)

The terms immanence and transcendence have played a significant role in philosophical thought since its inception. Implicit in the notions of immanence and transcendence, as typified within the history of ideas, is often a separation and division between the human and the godly. This division has served to generate ontologies of isolation and set up epistemologies that can be both binary and divided. The terms immanence and transcendence thus sit at the heart of contemporary onto-epistemic accounts of (...) the world. As such, in seeking to examine the nature of what is, this paper traces a line through the history of ideas in an attempt to clarify the connections and dissonances in the notions of immanence and transcendence. This is done for the purpose of demonstrating what philosophical and religious accounts may offer in attempting to create a sound account of the godly and thus the world in a secular age. (shrink)

I defend an expanded reading of immanent causation that includes both inherence and causal efficacy; I argue that the latter is required if God is to remain the immanent cause of finite modes.

This working paper examines the notion of "immanent critique", a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique - a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members - from both external and internal critique and examine three questions that a theory of immanent critique has to answer (a social ontological, an epistemological and a justificatory question). After surveying some of the classic (...) accounts of immanent critique in part two, I then distinguish two varieties of immanent critique, a hermeneutic and a practice-theoretic approach. Drawing on theories in recent analytic philosophy, I finally argue for a practice-theoretic approach to immanent critique that locates the relevant norms in a practice constituted by mutual recognition. (shrink)

This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, (...) the essay engages a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation. (shrink)

The article is focused on Honneth’s teleology of history, presented as a historical process of gradual realization of an immanent normative ‘telos’, and not only as a form of axiological evaluation...

This paper applies Karl Jaspers’ and Martin Heidegger’s accounts of transcendence to their descriptions of Van Gogh’s art. I will contrast Jaspers’ more vertical account of immanent transcendence to Heidegger’s horizontal one. This difference between their separate understandings of transcendence manifests itself in their estimations of the significance of Van Gogh’s art. Using phenomenology to understand Van Gogh’s art in light of immanent transcendence, moreover, illuminates a new understanding of transcendence as the ‘beyond’ that is always already here in the (...) immanent and reveals the ability of an object to point beyond itself. Both of these concepts are at work in Van Gogh’s art as well as modern art in general as the expansion of reality through new sight. Immanent transcendence and Van Gogh’s art are different but interconnected ways of rethinking experience beyond the limits of positivism and the myth of the given. Van Gogh’s art thus embodies a sensible world transformed. In particular, Van Gogh’s landscapes and still life series suggest the inexhaustibility of the things we so often overlook in our everyday experience. (shrink)

This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of (...) what they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that Merleau-Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

Nell'alto medioevo vi erano tre possibilità per il filosofo che volesse difendere l'esistenza degli universali: in primo luogo ante rem, seguendo la linea platonico-agostiniana degli universali trascendenti e questa è la via teologica; in secondo luogo la via post rem, cioè la via del concettualismo, conosciuta oggi come astrattismo, per cui gli universali sono il prodotto dell'astrazione della mente e questa è una via logica; la terza via è quella in re e difende gli universali immanenti che esistono negli universali (...) ed è una risposta ontologica. La seconda via fu difesa da Boezio nel secondo commento a Porfirio. La prima teoria è stata generalmente accettata da tutti i filosofi dell'alto medioevo eccetto Abelardo, mentre la terza via, quella degli universali immanenti, che ha come fonti antiche l'Isagoge di Porfirio e le Categoriae di Aristotele, fu difesa principalmente da quattro autori: Giovanni Scoto Eriugena, Anselmo d'Aosta, Odone di Cambrai e Guglielmo di Champeaux. L'A. prende in esame e confronta le soluzioni di Anselmo di Canterbury e Odone di Cambrai. (shrink)

This paper will attempt to assess the primary differences between what I take to be the two primary philosophical "traditions" in contemporary French philosophy, using Derrida (transcendence) and Deleuze (immanence) as exemplary representatives. The body of the paper will examine the use of these terms in three different areas of philosophy on which Derrida and Deleuze have both written: subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. (1) In the field of subjectivity, the notion of the subject has been critiqued in two manners, (...) either by appealing either to the transcendence of the other (Levinas, Derrida) or to the immanent jlux of experience itself, in relation to which the Ego itself is trancendent (Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, James). (2) In the field of ontology, a purely "immanent" ontology would be an ontology in which there is neither a "beyond" or an "otherwise" Being, nor "interruptions" in Being, both of which would require an appeal to a formal element of transcendence (Deleuze). Such a "transcendent" and aporetic structure, which can never appear or be present as such within Being, is what lies at the basis of the project of deconstruction, with its attendant aporias (Derrida). (3) This distinction, finally, finds parallels in Kant's epistemology, for whom the possible experience is conditioned by purely immanent criteria (Deleuze), whereas what goes beyond the limits of possible experience is transcendent (Derrida). Drawing on these three thread of analysis, the paper concludes with an assessment of what is at stake in the ethical differences between the two traditions. The question of "transcendence" is "What mast I do?", which is the question of morality (a duty or obligation that is beyond being, an "ought" beyond the "is"). The question of "immanence" is "What can I do?" (my power or capacity as an existing individual within being). For Levinas and Derrida, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other); for Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (Spinoza). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities for an immanent ethics for business. The paper has three parts. In the first part, I make some general and critical comments about the nature of business ethics. In the second part, I outline the immanent ethics as presented by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Then, I positioning immanent ethics within business, primarily in relation to the terms "best practice" and "best fit." The main claim here is that an immanent (...) ethics encourages a shift from a merely reactive approach toward an active. This shift opens up the field for an affirmative practice that aims at enlarging the discussion within business ethics as such. (shrink)

Although Deleuze’s work on Spinoza is widely known, it remains poorly understood. In particular, Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza’s immanentism has not been treated sufficient care; that is, with an eye to the context of its elaboration and the way in which it gradually takes on different characteristics. With this paper, I offer a synoptic analysis of Deleuze’s views on immanence in Spinoza and examine how these change over the course of Deleuze’s career. There are three ascending stages here: a (...) first one, where Deleuze’s attention is drawn to more recognizable issues in understanding Spinoza’s views on the deep metaphysical structure of reality; a second, more experimental one, where Deleuze questions what it means to be a reader of Spinoza in light of Spinoza’s theory of the body and affects; and a third, particularly iconoclastic stage, where Deleuze develops the theory of “the plane of immanence” as a way of articulating a meta-philosophical story about the place of non-philosophy at the heart of all philosophy. I trace each of these accounts, tie them together to tell a coherent and comprehensive narrative, and show what may be learned from this Spinoza that Deleuze portrays as drunk on immanence. (shrink)

Sob o título "Immanent Frames. Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier", o livro editado por John Caruana e Mark Cauchi inclui um conjunto significativo de artigos sobre cinema “pós-secular”, de autores prestigiados, nomeadamente os próprios editores, mas também Robert Sinnerbrink, Catherine Wheatley, Sarah Cooper e William Rotham, entre outros. O livro está estruturado em 13 capítulos, distribuídos por três partes – Parte I: “The Poles of Postsecular Cinema: Malick and Von Trier”; Parte II: “The Spectrum of Postsecular Cinema: Beyond (...) Malick and Von Trier”; e Parte III: “Conversation on Cinema: Luc Dardenne and Jean-Luc Nancy”, esta última constituída por duas entrevistas, respectivamente com o cineasta e o filósofo. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Leibniz’s conception of modality and its application to the issue of natural laws. The core of Leibniz’s investigation of the modality of natural laws lays in the distinction between necessary, geometrical laws on the one hand, and contingent, physical laws of nature on the other. For Leibniz, the contingency of physical laws entailed the assumption of the existence of an additional form of causality beyond mechanical or efficient ones. While geometrical truths, being necessary, do not require (...) the use of the principle of sufficient reason, physical laws are not strictly determined by geometry and therefore are logically distinct from geometrical laws. As a consequence, the set of laws that regulate the physical laws could have been created otherwise by God. However, in addition to this, the contingency of natural laws does not consist only in the fact that God has chosen them over other possible ones. On the contrary, Leibniz understood the status of natural laws as arising from the action internal to physical substances. Hence the actuality of physical laws results from a causal power that is inherent to substances rather than being the mere consequence of the way God arranged the relations between physical objects. Focusing on three instances of Leibniz’s treatment of contingency in physics, this paper argues that, in order to account for the contingency of physical laws, Leibniz maintained that final causes, in addition to efficient and mechanical ones, must operate in physical processes and operations. (shrink)

(a chapter in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, ed. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith) Orthodox reverence of transcendental constructs such as 'dialectical materialism' and the inability to reduce them to chôra - mere transcendental material instead of finished conceptual wholes - is what disables the completion of the project of stepping out of philosophy which Marxism initially set for itself (in the Theses on Feuerbach). In order to radicalise its position, argues Laruelle, and place itself outside philosophy, Marxism has to take (...) a step outside itself by virtue of admitting its own transcendental, i.e., philosophical character. It has to adopt the stance of the 'non-' that is situated in the Real that clones itself through concepts. In order to preserve its grain of 'thinking affected by immanence', 18 Marxism ought to become non-Marxism, argues Laruelle. (shrink)

A Book Encounter (Critical Notice) of Leonard Lawlor's Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy.

This chapter examines Hegel’s conception of philosophical critique in order to shed light on the force and limits of the method that has become known as immanent critique. At least in modern philosophy, it was Kant who first conceived of critique as a form of reflection that draws its criterion from reason itself. As I argue, Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant in this respect. The chapter begins with an analysis of Hegel's seminal essay ‘On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (...) Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular’, published in 1802. After a brief discussion of the Phenomenology, I turn to his Philosophy of Right. These texts make clear, I argue, that the criterion from which immanent critique takes its bearings is necessarily tainted with a particularity that it cannot affirm without losing its force. According to this account, immanent critique comes to refer to a form of reflection that is more complicated and more precarious than Kant and Hegel seem to have assumed. (shrink)

My assertion is that God’s biblical image may not reflect entirely His existence in itself as well as His revealed image. Even if God in Himself is both transcendent and immanent at the same time, and He is revealing accordingly in the history of humankind, still the image of God constructed in the writings of the Old Testament is merely the perspective made upon God by His followers to whom the He has revealed. That could be the reason why for (...) centuries God’s biblical image seems to emphasize more His immanence, starting with Pentateuch, where God cohabites with Adam on Earth, then He reveals Himself to Abraham and Moses and so on. Somewhere, after the Babylonian exile, the image suffers slightly differences tilting towards God’s transcendence. In a path already created and grounded by Israel’s ancestors, even this new color of transcendence bears the nuances of immanence. How can this be possible? Let’s take a look on the revelation received by Abraham from God and see how this can fit the profile. Instead of the transcendence of God regarded by others in the differentness of Yahweh appointed by Abraham in his walking out of Mesopotamia, I will prove otherwise, that Abraham is on the contrary proving God’s immanency in this very differentness of His in relation with other gods by providence and omnipresence, indwelling His creation. (shrink)

According to Jürgen Habermas, his Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory. Habermas’ motivating insight is that neither a transcendental nor a metaphysical solution to the problem of normativity, nor a merely hermeneutic reconstruction of historically given norms, is sufficient to clarify the normative foundations of critical theory. In response to this insight, Habermas develops a novel account of normativity, which locates the normative demands of critical theory within the socially instituted practice (...) of communicative understanding. Although Habermas has claimed otherwise, this new foundation for critical theory constitutes a novel and innovative form of “immanent critique.” To argue for and to clarify this claim, I offer, in section 1, a formal account of immanent critique and distinguish between two different ways of carrying out such a critique. (shrink)

Can the persistence of a human being's soul at death and prior to the bodily resurrection be sufficient to guarantee that the resurrected human being is numerically identical to the human being who died? According to Thomas Aquinas, it can. Yet, given that Aquinas holds that the human being is identical to the composite of soul and body and ceases to exist at death, it's difficult to see how he can maintain this view. In this paper, I address Aquinas's response (...) to this objection . After making a crucial clarification concerning the nature of the non-repeatability principle on which the objection relies, I argue that the contemporary notion of immanent causal relations provides us with a way of understanding Aquinas's defence that renders it both highly interesting and philosophically plausible. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Gestalt theory in The Structure of Behavior is central to his entire corpus. Yet commentators exhibit little agreement about what lesson is to be learned from his critique, and provide little exegesis of how his argument proceeds. I fill this exegetical gap. I show that the Gestaltist’s fundamental error is to reify forms as transcendent realities, rather than treating them as phenomena of perceptual consciousness. From this, reductivist errors follow. The essay serves not only as a helpful (...) guide through parts of The Structure of Behavior for newcomers, but also offers a corrective to recent trends in philosophy of mind. Such influential commentators as Hubert Dreyfus, Taylor Carmen, and Evan Thompson have, I argue, risked serious misunderstanding of Merleau-Ponty’s view, by mistakenly treating “circular causality” as central to Merleau-Ponty’s own acausal view of forms. -/- [The version archived at Philpapers is closer to the author's preferred format. Formatting requirements in the published version make the section/subsection hierarchy needlessly difficult to follow. There are some changes to content in the published version. Please cite only the published version.]. (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of the neo-Confucian concept of 'li'. From early on, it has the sense of a pattern designating how things are and ought to be. But it takes on the appearance of something transcendent to the world only at a certain point in history, when it becomes juxtaposed to 'qi'. Zhu Xi has been criticized for this 'li-qi' dichotomization and the transcendentalization of 'li'. The paper re-examines this putative dualism and transcendentalism, looking into both Zhu's discussions (...) and pre- and post-Zhu discussions of 'li', and concludes it to be an inter-connective threading immanent to the world. (shrink)

When it comes to social criticism of the economy, Critical Theory has thus far failed to discover specific immanent norms in that sphere of activity. In response, we propose that what is needed is to double down on the idealism of Critical Theory by taking seriously the sophisticated structure of agency developed in Hegel’s own account of freedom as self-determination. When we do so, we will see that the anti-metaphysical gestures of recent Critical Theory work in opposition to its attempts (...) to develop immanent critique. In this paper we first briefly reconsider Axel Honneth’s project as it concerns economic institutions and then respond by returning to the problem of freedom and articulating a view according to which the problem of individual self-determination and the problem of social production are the same problem seen from different angles. Then we present briefly Hegel’s own social theory from this perspective before moving on to trace the outlines of such a critical theory of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

By what authority does morality make its demands? In this essay I argue that we find that authority within ourselves, immanent to - not necessarily the character - but the very fact of our own self-concern.

My assertion is that God’s biblical image may not reflect entirely His existence in itself as well as His revealed image. Even if God in Himself is both transcendent and immanent at the same time, and He is revealing accordingly in the history of humankind, still the image of God constructed in the writings of the Old Testament is merely the perspective made upon God by His followers to whom the He has revealed. That could be the reason why for (...) centuries God’s biblical image seems to emphasize more His immanence, starting with Pentateuch, where God cohabites with Adam on Earth, then He reveals Himself to Abraham and Moses and so on. Somewhere, after the Babylonian exile, the image suffers slightly differences tilting towards God’s transcendence. In a path already created and grounded by Israel’s ancestors, even this new color of transcendence bears the nuances of immanence. How can this be possible? Let’s take a look on the revelation received by Abraham from God and see how this can fit the profile. Instead of the transcendence of God regarded by others in the differentness of Yahweh appointed by Abraham in his walking out of Mesopotamia, I will prove otherwise, that Abraham is on the contrary proving God’s immanency in this very differentness of His in relation with other gods by providence and omnipresence, indwelling His creation. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between the conspicuous and complicated terms of transcendence and immanence, which may equally be defined as essentially connected, or diametrically opposed. Recent developments in two largely unrelated sets of scholarship— the re-evaluation of secularisation, and the relationship between medieval and modern philosophy—provide a helpful means to arrive at a clearer understanding of this challenging problem. Charles Taylor and Jan Aertesn act as foci for these developments, particularly through their respective concerns with epistemic framing in (...) relation to transcendence and immanence, and the role of transcendentals in medieval philosophy. This examination brings these two concepts together, examining the idea of transcendentals offered by both Aquinas, a thinker of the transcendent frame, and Kant, a thinker of the immanent frame. From this juxtaposition we can offer two contrasting understandings of the relationship between transcendence and immanence from within both the transcendent and immanent frames. Finally, two brief literary examples demonstrate how these two ways of reading transcendence and immanence may be employed in the contextual understanding of religious writing. To understand the unity and division between transcendence and immanence is to better comprehend two primary terms in the study of religion, and to appreciate a fundamental development in the history of religion in the West. (shrink)

This intervention aims to question the opposition between a ‘politics of immanence’ and a ‘politics of transcendence’ through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Tronti’s account of the autonomy of the political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice.

In philosophy of religion the term of Immanence is mostly applied to GOD in contrast to the divine Transcendence. This relation, as we will see here, it is not far from the truth since one cannot be without the other, however they are not to be put in contrast, but in conjunction. The one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His transcendence, leads to Pantheism, just as the one-sided insistence upon His transcendence, to the (...) exclusion of His immanence, leads to Deism. These two can be separated, but the consequences are great for human knowledge and society; it is the two taken together that result in, and are necessary to Theism. But from the least complicated idea that even the name of God is a manifestation of His immanence contrasting with Deus absconditus, whose existence and name cannot be known or thought, theology and religion in general need to regard immanence of God as crucial for the acts of worship. What are the philosophical background for Christian theology to imply the immanence characteristic for God’s existence related to His creation? – This is the main question the present work tries to answer as an overview. (shrink)

François Laruelle's system of non-standard philosophy and its univocal radical immanence is highly indebted to Henry's non-representationalism. Admittedly, in contrast to Laruelle's "heretical" Christology, Henry's theological-realist determination is astricted by the idealist paralogisms of a cogitativist Ego, which transpires most markedly in Henry's account of Faith-after all, Henry is a Jesuit phenomenologist following in the tradition of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chretien. Nonetheless, Henry's work on immanence, deanthropocentrized and universalized as generic, takes us much further than both Spinoza's (...) speculative immanence, which is diluted by the necessitarian world of negative determination, and Deleuzian immanence, which is characterized by multiplicitous difference. In The Michel Henry Reader, editors Scott Davidson and Frédéric Seyler weave together a comprehensive anthology of essays that survey Henry's phenomenology of life, stitching together an oeuvre than spans Marxist political philosophy, phenomenology of language, subjectivity and aesthetics, and ethics qua religion. Rather than analyzing specific objects and phenomena, phenomenology is tasked with disclosing the structural manifestation and conditioned appearance of objects. Drawing primarily from Husserl and, consequently, Heidegger, Henry examines a kind of "pure phenomenology" that, contra intentionality and the inert world of visible objects, examines affectivity's "radical invisibility". Whereas Husserl and Heidegger's analyses emphasize the self-transcending nature of appearances, for Henry appearance is never independent or self-reliant but, instead, genitive and denotative. (shrink)

Bryant’s paper, "A Logic of Multiplicities: Deleuze, Immanence, and Onticology," is useful for showing how the historical legacy of hierarchy in its many philosophical forms is still present, important, and, in fact, required even by those such as Bryant who would seek to deconstruct or ignore it. The following response will discuss Bryant’s presentation of his alternative position and throughout point out: a) the straw-man versions of hierarchy that Bryant employs; b) why what Bryant claims to be inherent negatively (...) in hierarchy is not the case; c) how Bryant’s position actually relies upon hierarchy for its own explication, and finally; d) the various principles of hierarchical metaphysics that are required in order to make sense of experience and reality. These latter include the notions that i) there are many kinds of hierarchy; ii) Being and Unity are prior to Multiplicity; iii) relation without substance is incoherent; iv) hierarchy is not inherently tyrannical; v) the distinction between essentially and accidentally ordered causal series is a real and useful one; and vi) the existence of hierarchy is more self evident than is flat ontology. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical examination at selected works by 20th century philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I argue that, far from arcane, distant, inaccessible concepts, the selected Marxist ideas presented in their immanent critiques provide priceless insight into how fascism, in all forms, permeates every stretch of society. Understanding how these events occur, called micro- and macro-fascism, and how they are mediated through our beliefs and desires, can allow for us to resist transcendent theories of desire and modes (...) and politics, and towards a mode of immanence, one that is always critiquing itself, and always resisting fascism. (shrink)

The high-profile debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ comprises an immensely important work in the contemporary intersection of Church dogmatics and ontology. This study consists of an indirect commentary on this debate, using Milbank and Žižek’s dispute as a foil for mobilizing an ontology favorable to Eastern Orthodox dogmatics. The starting point here is that Orthodoxy simply bypasses Neo-Platonism as the definitive philosophical expression of its dogmatic theology, and, on this score, Žižek’s powerful criticisms (...) of theurgic Neo-Platonism can be embraced and redirected in support of an ontology of the Orthodox dogma of synergy. It will be shown that Milbank’s position that there is a “Catholic Žižek” who embraces theurgy—that is, analogical, Neo-Platonist ontology—is mistaken; the dismantling of the “suspended middle” is necessary for the Žižekian and that, therefore, a Catholic version of this figure does not exist. But it will be suggested that, instead, there is a latent Orthodox Žižek whose criticism of analogical ontology can pave the way for a more profitable dialogue between Žižek and Orthodoxy. The conclusion will provide a playful reading of an Orthodox Žižek—an entirely fictional but ontologically serviceable character—who can begin new conversations between ontology and dogmatic theology. The upshot of the study is the extension of Terry Eagleton’s claim that the historical materialist, but not the dialectical materialist, can legitimately venerate the Virgin Mary—to the surprising suggestion that even the dialectical materialist can justifiably venerate her, too. (shrink)

Negotiating the relation between divine transcendence and divine immanence lies at the heart of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and of Kierkegaard's philosophical works. The purpose of the paper is to explore the manners in which they do so. I argue that despite various differences between them, both engage with the tension between divine transcendence and immanence by turning away from objectivity to subjectivity and, moreover, by placing paradox, riddle and secret at the heart of their philosophical works. (...) In other words, I argue that they do not attempt to solve or dissolve the great paradox of God's immanent transcendence but to present it in its most acute forms as the paradox within which the religious life is lived. (shrink)

This paper investigates the degree to which information theory, and the derived uses that make it work as a metaphor of our age, can be helpful in thinking about God’s immanence and transcendance. We ask when it is possible to say that a consciousness has to be behind the information we encounter. If God is to be thought about as a communicator of information, we need to ask whether a communication system has to pre-exist to the divine and impose (...) itself to God. If we want God to be Creator, and not someone who would work like a human being, ‘creating’ will mean sustaining in being as much the channel, the material system, as the message. Is information control? It seems that God’s actions are not going to be informational control of everything. To clarify the issue, we attempt to distinguish two kinds of ‘genialities’ in nature, as a way to evaluate the likelihood of God from nature. We investigate concepts and images of God, in terms of the history of ideas but also in terms of philosophical theology, metaphysics, and religious ontology. (shrink)

There is a perplexing transition in Dr. Reza Davari's thought, when he problematizes the relation between Iranian and Western history/cultures, on which this paper is focusing. The interperative objective is to clarify this transition on the basis of the implicit relation between the two most fundamental concepts in his earlier and later thought respectively westernization and underdevelopment. Although, by this transition, the level of discussion transits from an ontologico-philosophical to an intellectualist one. So, there are two different levels of problematization (...) in his thought which differ deeply. Therefore, we are not just dealing with the substitution of fundamental concepts, but with different problematizations and different levels of discussion. Obviously, there will be new problems arising which are not just concerning with the justification of the transition but with the problematization of westernization itself. Finally, it's been concluded that in order to clarify these new problems, we should step back to the level of philosophical discussion, and first of all to the clarification of the I-not-I relation which has been neglected thoroughly in the whole project. (shrink)

The article seeks to elucidate the status of transcendence in the historiography of secularization through the perspective of collective memory. It discusses two typological models dealing with the basic metaphysical problem concerned with the presence and meaning of transcendence in real human existence. According to the first, the historical reality of secularization causes a break from the collective memory whose roots are in religion. In contrast, the second model considers that despite the deep transformations in the status of religion in (...) a reality of secularization, an experience of historical continuity may also occur there. These models denote the two poles in the argument about the meaning and value of history for modern people. The article suggests a phenomenological analysis of the two models and criticizes their deficiencies. Finally, the “tension model” is outlined as a third alternative that aims at overcoming the binary situation created by the first two in favor of a perspective that necessitates and contains both immanence and transcendence. (shrink)

This paper speculatively reconstructs the unique intervention that Pyotr Chaadaev, the early nineteenth-century Russian thinker, made into the political-theological debate. Instead of positioning sovereignty and exception against each other, Chaadaev seeks to think the (Russian) exception immanently, affirming its nonrelation to, and even nullity or nothingness vis-à-vis, the (European, Christian-modern) world-historical regime—and to theorize the logic of sovereignty that could arise from within this nullity. As a result, we argue, nothingness itself becomes, in Chaadaev, operative through and as the sovereign (...) act and the figure of the sovereign, exemplified for him by the Russian emperor Peter the Great (1672–1725). (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's concept of the highest good and the postulate of the existence of God arising from it. Kant has two concepts of the highest good standing in tension with one another, an immanent and a transcendent one. I provide a systematic exposition of the constituents of both variants and show how Kant’s arguments are prone to confusion through a conflation of both concepts. I argue that once these confusions are sorted out Kant’s claim regarding the need to (...) postulate God’s existence from a moral point of view makes much more sense. (shrink)

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss assumes central importance throughout Schelling’s oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810–11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here and (...) to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling’s best efforts to theorize it as ‘love’; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity’s foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling’s conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present, and the eschatological—as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity —not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves. (shrink)