Since the establishment of Christianity in the West as a major religious tradition, Augustine (354&–430 CE) has been considered a principal architect of the ways philosophy can be used for reasoning about faith. In particular, Augustine effected the joining of Platonism with Christian belief for the Middle Ages and beyond. The results of his enterprise continue to be felt, especially with regard to the contested topics of human embodiment, sexuality, and the nature and roles of women. As a result, few thinkers have been as problematic for feminists as he has been. He is the thinker that a number of feminists love to hate. What do feminist thinkers make of this problematic legacy? These lively essays address that question and provide thoughtful arguments for the value of engaging Augustine&’s ideas and texts anew by using the well-established methodologies that feminists have developed over the last thirty years. Augustine and his legacy have much to answer for, but these essays show that the body of his work also has much to offer as feminists explore, challenge, and reframe his thinking while forging new paradigms for construing gender, power, and notions of divinity.
Judith Butler follows Edward Said’s late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel’s claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said’s late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler’s startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.
Heidegger's Eschatology is a ground-breaking account of Heidegger's early engagement with theology, from his beginnings as an anti-Modernist Catholic to his turn towards an undogmatic Protestantism and finally to a resolutely a-theistic philosophical method. The book centres on Heidegger's developing commitment to an eschatological vision, derived from theological sources but reshaped into a central resource for the development of an atheistic phenomenological account of human existence. This vision originated in Heidegger's attempt, in the late 1910s, to formulate a phenomenology of religious life that would take seriously the inherent temporality of human existence. In this endeavour, Heidegger turned to two trends in Protestant scholarship: the discovery of eschatology as a central preoccupation of the Early Church by A. Schweitzer and the 'History of Doctrine' School, and the 'existential' eschatology of Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, indebted to Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Franz Overbeck. His synthesis of such trends within a phenomenological framework (elaborated primarily via readings of Paul and Augustine in his lecture courses of 1921-2) led Heidegger to postulate an existential sense of eschatological unrest as the central characteristic of authentic Christian existence. His description of this expectant restlessness, however, was now inescapably at odds with its Christian sources, since Heidegger's commitment to a phenomenological description of the human situation led him to abstract the 'existential' experience of expectation from its traditional object: the 'blessed hope' for the Kingdom of God. Christian hope thus for Heidegger no longer constitutes, but rather negates 'eschatological' unrest, because such hope projects an end to that unrest, and thus to authentic existence itself. Against the Christian vision, Heidegger therefore develops a systematic 'eschatology without eschaton', paradigmatically expressed as 'being-unto-death'. Judith Wolfe tells the story of his re-conception of eschatology, using a wealth of primary and newly available original-language sources, and offering in-depth analysis of Heidegger's relationship to theological tradition and the theology of his time.
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