ABSTRACT The paper undertakes a critical analysis of the so-called Presupposition of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, which prescribes the benevolent interpretation of the other’s words. We aim to identify the anthropological and epistemological background of the pedagogical guidelines contained therein and to explicate the intellectual and moral virtues needed to put them into practice

ABSTRACT In this paper, I offer an analysis of evil in Friedrich W. J. Schelling’s Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809). Schelling develops an account of the sui-genesis of God out of the two principles. These principles are 1) the dark ground (dunkler Grund) that belongs to God and 2) the self-revelation of God, who actualizes the dark ground, which grounds

ABSTRACT According to Roger Poole, theological interpreters of Søren Kierkegaard’s indirect communication privilege content over form, whereas deconstructive interpreters privilege form over content. Here, I offer a reading of Johannes Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments to illustrate how, in this case, the theology/deconstruction and form/content binaries both break down. The form of Fragments is as

ABSTRACT The debate about secularization in recent decades has challenged long-held assumptions about Western modernity and the purported decline of religion in modern societies. However, the impact of this criticism on the idea of history has so far not received as much attention as it deserves. Jayne Svenungsson’s analysis of the influence of biblical motives on contemporary political theology illustrates

ABSTRACT In order to explore what it means to pursue philosophical investigations for theological reasons, this paper argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein continues and corrects Pseudo-Denys’ project in The Divine Names. I first argue that The Divine Names should be interpreted as attempting to render human thought transparent to the divine by relativizing our concepts. The success of this project is compromised

ABSTRACT Johannes van Oort claims that Augustine has an irreconcilable ‘two-fold ecclesiology,’ which separates the inwardness of unseen individual grace from the external empirical community. Efforts to unify Augustine’s ‘two-fold ecclesiology’ have hitherto focused on emphasizing the continuity between the invisible and the visible, the locus for which is often the manifestation of individual (invisible)

ABSTRACT Kant’s late essay ‘The End of All Things’ (1794) establishes a distinctly modern field of inquiry that has fittingly been called ‘philosophical eschatology’ by asking, ‘why do human beings expect an end of the world at all?’ (AA 8:330) Interpretation of the essay’s purpose and argument have usually taken one of two routes: Kant is either understood as writing an esoteric political critique

ABSTRACT This article offers a comparative reading of the ontologies of David Bentley Hart and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as their respective appeals to phenomenology as a philosophical method. While it may seem odd to compare one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated atheists with one of contemporary Christianity’s most highly-acclaimed critics of atheism, this article shows that there are many

ABSTRACT This essay’s aim is to demonstrate how recent defenses of divine simplicity have failed to address the prevailing challenge of analogical language, and thereby render much of their argumentation for simplicity’s appropriateness in Christian theology null-and-void. For this task, three book-length works published within the last few years are examined: Steven Duby’s Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic

ABSTRACT The central thesis of this essay is that, in addressing the many disruptive experiences people have in current times, Tillich’s notion of ‘the courage to be’ should be complemented by the notion of the ‘courage to be vulnerable’. In adding this idea, it is argued that courage should focus less on the anxieties of emptiness, guilt and death of the individual, but rather to being carried, becoming

ABSTRACT When read alongside the great command of Deuteronomy, ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength,’ the Judeo-Christian directive to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is perhaps one of the most theologically and ethically charged phrases in the Bible. In these two mutually reliant commandments lies a meeting point between the divine and the human that has important implications

(2021). A Companion to Ricœur’s The Symbolism of Evil. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 95-96.

ABSTRACT I illustrate the subject of conditional theology through discussing John Webster’s theology. This is a form of philosophical theology, with interesting links to natural theology, but not subject to Barthian strictures about natural theology. Webster started out with a Barthian emphasis, but later increasingly drew on Aquinas, emphasising God’s aseity. Webster, though, continued to emphasise

ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine Anselm’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’ as rhetorical prayers. I consider the basic structure of prayer as address to the Divine. For Anselm, this address is rhetorically structured towards persuading God to reveal himself by the three Aristotelian means of persuasion: character, affect, and argument. Compassion is the phenomenological showing of God as the transcending

ABSTRACT The practice of icon veneration is often either dismissed either as a superstitious ‘magical’ rite or relegated to the exclusive arena of theological metaphysics. Such reductive approaches discount the importance of embodied human expression both inside religion and outside of it. This article proposes instead a way of philosophically understanding icon veneration as a meaningful human practice

ABSTRACT In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Great Britain, a group of scientists decided to challenge the intellectual authority of theologians and clergymen. Because of the recently discovered law of conservation of energy, they considered any so-called ‘divine’ intervention on Nature as scientifically impossible and thus as being pure storytelling. In this context of a global tension

ABSTRACT Reformed epistemology (RE) involves a view of knowledge of God which Kelly James Clark and Justin Barrett have brought cognitive science to bear on. They argue that the cognitive science of religion (CSR) indicates that we have a ‘god-faculty’, a notion employed by Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga contends that if there is a God, then we have a specialized god-faculty. Clark and Barrett, by contrast

ABSTRACT In this article I argue that the kind of scientific naturalism that tends to underwrite projects of naturalizing religion operates with a tacit conception of nature which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be untenable. I first distinguish an uninteresting modest naturalism from the more ambitious and relevant scientific naturalism. Secondly I survey three different kinds of attempting

ABSTRACT The cognitive science of religion sets out a naturalistic account of religion, in which religious phenomena are grounded in evolved cognitive and moral intuitions. This has important implications for understanding religious systems and the practice of theology. Religions, it is argued, are moral worldviews; theology, rather than a rational justification/explication of the truth of a religion

ABSTRACT Why is religion such a widespread human experience? In enlightenment Scotland, philosophers had already attempted to answer this question turning to natural histories of mankind, and to a careful analysis of the human mind and of those cognitive capacities responsible for religious-type beliefs and attitudes. This early approach is also echoed today, as scholars from the cognitive sciences

ABSTRACT Naturalistic explanations for religious beliefs, in the form of the cognitive science of religion (CSR), have become increasingly popular in the contemporary sphere of philosophy and theology. Some claim to provide proof that theism, or religion more generally, is falsified, whilst others suggest that their theories are compatible with holding religious beliefs. In the following, I focus on

ABSTRACT In almost all cultures, intriguingly, care has both positive and negative connotations as in taking care of something or somebody and, at the same time, carrying the burden of something or somebody. This article claims that this contradictory use of care is a result of the historical development of the meaning of care and that this is a hindrance to understand the meaning of care in our lives

ABSTRACT The paper studies two fundamentally different forms in which the concept of care makes its comeback in twentieth-century thought. We make use of a distinction made by Peter Sloterdijk, who argues that the ancient and medieval ‘ascetic’ ideal of self-enhancement through practice has re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the form of a rehabilitation of the Hellenistic

ABSTRACT This article discusses the Idea of Europe as it is developed within the phenomenological tradition by Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida and Jan Patočka. It shows how Derrida and Patočka try to preserve the main elements of European culture, mainly rationality and openness – in Patočka’s terms ‘the care for the soul’ – while at the same time avoiding Eurocentrism. According to Patočka, the care

ABSTRACT In this short introduction, the guest editors present the main themes of the special issue.

ABSTRACT It has often been argued that Foucault’s turn to antique and early Christian care of the self, spiritual self-.practices and truth-telling (parrhesia) results from inquiries into the confession practices and pastoral power structures in the context of a genealogy of the desiring subject. This line of reasoning is in itself not incorrect, but – this article claims – needs to be complemented

ABSTRACT The notion of care is a fundamental and constitutive element of any conception of therapy. It is present throughout history in diverse therapeutic practices, from the philosophical schools of antiquity, to Christian ascetic rituals and exercises, to modern psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic and psychiatric discourses. These practices are in turn based on certain technologies of the self, which

ABSTRACT The theory of use with which Giorgio Agamben concludes his Homo Sacer-series is introduced as an alternative to the concept of care. This article critically examines the ontological status of use and care as developed by Agamben through the lens of Agamben’s discussions with Martin Heidegger’s thought on the notion of use. In particular, it is shown that this discussion includes at least three

ABSTRACT Can rational arguments convince a person to change from a commitment to living an unvirtuous life into striving after virtue? Or can rationality, even in the best cases, only help preserve an already existing commitment to virtue? Our paper throws light on this question through a discussion of the form of care for the self that Plato thinks is practiced through the engagement in Socratic philosophy

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the relation between care for the soul and the political thought of Jan Patočka. Patočka often sketches a connection between care for the soul and a theory of the state, but he rarely elaborates this. The biographical fact of Patočka’s own political dissidence and his interpretation of care for the soul as a distancing from traditional structures of society have

ABSTRACT Taking Jean-Yves Lacoste’s account of liturgy as a point of departure, this essay examines Lacoste’s view of care. Lacoste thinks that care is bracketed or suspended in liturgy. To make this point, Lacoste discusses Martin Heidegger’s notions of world and care. However, Lacoste fails to make adequate distinctions between Heidegger’s notions of care (Sorge) and concern (Besorgen). The crux

ABSTRACT In this essay Schleiermacher’s recasting of sin is taken as a key to his phenomenological analysis of self-consciousness. The notion of sin is grossly misunderstood if read solely in the light of Christian self-consciousness; it is rather a phenomenological descriptor. Schleiermacher’s phenomenology is not focused on or confined to that shape of self-consciousness whereas it is much more elementary

ABSTRACT At the heart of this essay lies the problem of Christian universals. Sin-talk is arguably Christian theology’s primary contribution to any account of the human condition. Fashionable or unfashionable, welcome or unwelcome, it attempts to say something about who we all are. With sin being conceived as a universal, metaphysical dialectic was key to classical sin-talk’s explanatory power. In

ABSTRACT In his 1927 lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, Heidegger claims that philosophy is the formally indicative ontological co-direction [Mitleitung] of basic theological concepts. For this claim, he proposes the example of his ontological concept of guilt (i.e. ‘being-guilty’ [Schuldigsein]) as a formal indication [formale Anzeige] which functions as a co-direction for the theological concept

ABSTRACT This article situates Roger Scruton in the tradition of Christian Platonism. It begins by revisiting Scruton’s reluctance to pursue theological speculation as it has been traditionally practised in the Platonising tradition of Christian metaphysics, and identifies potential misunderstandings of this tradition as Scruton represents it, as well as points of common ground. Drawing on the scholarship

ABSTRACT While Latour criticises the tautologies of the ‘sociologists of the social’ as an intellectual shortcut, here sociology in the broadest sense is reconsidered as informed by unrecognised theological ideas, inter alia. Durkheim’s classic account of religion, wherein ‘society is God’ is taken as a starting point to explore the intersection of sociology and theology. Thereafter the article examines

ABSTRACT This paper examines Tomáš Halík’s Patience With God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us in light of Kierkegaard’s insistence upon conversion. Against forms of Christianity which would understand conversion as issuing, of necessity, from a rigorous thinking-through of objective proofs or of the ends of human desire, Kierkegaard insists upon a conversion that passes through offense at

ABSTRACT In this short introductory contribution the guest editors of this special issue sketch its aim and context.

ABSTRACT Spiritual trial is indeed ‘spiritual’ – it is possible only in someone who is not utterly spiritless as Kierkegaard means the word – but it is not true, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms occasionally maintain, that it makes sense only as a religious category, unless religious is redefined in radically general terms, as Kierkegaard in fact does, along with the ideas of offense, anxiety, inwardness

ABSTRACT Although scholars increasingly recognize the debts of twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologians to Søren Kierkegaard, no one has yet traced this influence to Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI). As is frequently observed, Ratzinger’s most famous book, Introduction to Christianity, opens with a meditation on a Kierkegaardian parable from Either/Or. We argue that Ratzinger’s use

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to discern the Kierkegaardian echoes present in the writings of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. While these thinkers share a number of commonalities such as their resistance to categorisation and their imaginative and complex writing styles, Lyotard’s engagement with Kierkegaard has been largely dismissed as inconsequential. However, a modest yet consistent device

ABSTRACT This article meditates on the Christian command to love the neighbor as yourself by focusing on how both Jacques Derrida and Søren Kierkegaard have read this command. I argue that Derrida, failing in his faithfulness to Kierkegaard, makes a mistake when he includes this command in the Greek model of the politics of friendship in his Politics of Friendship. Such a mistake is illumined by Kierkegaard’s

ABSTRACT This article explores the influence and reception of the Kierkegaardian self in modern theology, focusing on the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the theologian Eberhard Jüngel. In an attempt to transcend the atheistic philosophy of modernity, Eberhard Jüngel responded to the active, choosing self of modernity, as propounded Heidegger, by proposing an account of existence that is instead passive

ABSTRACT Theodor Haecker’s translation and reception of Kierkegaard exerted a strong influence on interwar German readings of Kierkegaard. Recent scholarship has drawn renewed attention to Haecker’s World War I Kierkegaardian polemics and the dampening of his enthusiasm for Kierkegaard after his conversion to Catholicism in 1921. This article offers a twofold refinement of current accounts of Haecker’s

ABSTRACT The role of the image in the third part of Practice in Christianity suggests that Kierkegaard was inspired by Meister Eckhart’s and Johann Tauler’s account of detachment (Entbildung). I argue that Kierkegaard was not only indirectly influenced by Tauler through the works of the Pietistic writers, but also directly inspired by Tauler’s sermons. Particularly striking are similarities to a sermon

ABSTRACT This paper draws out from Kierkegaard’s work a distinctive critical perspective on an influential contemporary approach in moral philosophy: namely, Christine Korsgaard’s transcendental argument for the value of humanity. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, we argue, Korsgaard argument goes too far, in attributing absolute value to humanity – but also that she is required to make this claim if

ABSTRACT Throughout his published work, Michel Henry expresses a deep appreciation for the writings of Kierkegaard, using them as an inspirational foundation for much of his own thought. However, Henry claims to be far more Kierkegaardian than he really is. Henry’s peers have identified several philosophical and theological deficiencies in Henry’s thought. These places of weakness also happen to be

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to analyze those passages of the Black Notebooks where Heidegger mentions Søren Kierkegaard and to see how Heidegger interprets Kierkegaard’s impact on his own philosophical thought. The paper intends to clarify whether, and to what extent, Heidegger’s rejection of an existentialist reading of his early thought is plausible and justified. The conclusions reached will

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates’ daimonion in The Concept of Irony should be read in light of his notion of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety, and vice versa. Whereas the first should primarily be seen as an exemplification of philosophical transcendental consciousness, the second assumes a more strictly ‘moral’ connotation (‘anxiety about the good’)

ABSTRACT The doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist presents a particular challenge to its defenders: how is it so much as intelligible? This paper explores Dummett’s response to this question, centred on the notion of deeming. Whilst instructive, Dummett’s position is unsustainable as it stands, since it fails to secure the meaningfulness of the doctrine. Once deeming is brought

ABSTRACT This article is a consideration of Feuerbach’s appropriation of Luther’s theology towards constructive ends. Special attention is given to the way in which Luther’s emphasis on divine promeity furnishes Feuerbach with philosophical resources to advance his claim that discourse about ‘God’ (theology) is ultimately discourse about ‘man’ (anthropology). Following a consideration of Feuerbach’s

The title and subtitle of Raphael Lataster’s book is provocative, indeed. The phrase ‘the case against theism’ suggests that the book presents a defence of some of the arguments against theism. Furthermore, philosophers and logicians tend to reserve the terms ‘prove/proof’ and ‘disprove’ for formal logical proofs. To all appearances, then, the title of the book suggests that, in the book, Lataster

ABSTRACT From the beginning of his philosophical career Schelling, a former student of theology at Tübingen, influenced Protestant theologians in Germany. He contributed to biblical studies as well as to dogmatics. A controversial point was his conviction that religion needs a foundation in speculative reason. This was a position criticised by Schleiermacher but shared by Carl Daub and Philipp Marheineke

ABSTRACT The following essay aims not only to answer whether Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy lived on in Catholic Tübingen, but also to clarify what aspects of Schelling’s corpus were received and which were set aside. Below it is my claim that Tübingen theologians incorporated insights from Schelling’s early, Idealist philosophy, as well as his late, post-Idealist philosophy. The two theologians

ABSTRACT This essay examines the reception of F.W.J. Schelling’s philosophy in nineteenth-century New England principally through a consideration of three exemplary figures: the Congregationalist James Marsh (1794–1842), the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and the Pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). It shows that although Schelling’s influence on these figures was undeniable

ABSTRACT This article gauges the significance of Schelling’s thought for the emergence of nineteenth century German, Protestant historical theology. The article first considers Schelling’s relevant texts, mostly the System of Transcendental Idealism and the Lectures on University Studies. A second part looks at their theological readers considering in depth the early Philipp Marheineke and F.C. Baur

ABSTRACT This is an article about the persistence of a certain image of F.W.J. Schelling, an image that came to prominence not for the first time, but in a particularly decisive manner during the 1950s and has lingered on as an ideological template into which a number of contemporary Schelling-interpretations are still fitted. It is an image, I will argue, that crystallised in the Schelling-interpretations

ABSTRACT The main purpose of the author is to provide an accurate analysis, new considerations and debates on the most important texts published by Card. Walter Kasper on Schelling and on the Tübingen School. The intention is to offer a new approach to Kasper’s opus. The paper comprises two parts: (1) a section about Walter Kasper and his interpretation of Schelling’s philosophy and (2) a shorter section

ABSTRACT In my essay, I analyze Schelling’s and Rosenzweig’s commitment to the narrative philosophy as a unique method of telling a philosophical story. I want to understand what such “philosophical story” means and how it differs from the conceptual approach, here represented by Hegel. I also want to see how it connects with Schelling’s another project continued by Rosenzweig, of doing “positive philosophy”: