“Of Miracles and Machines: A Symposium on Derrida and Religion” will take place Thursday, March 22, at Fordham University, New York, NY.
Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’
March 13th, 2012
Cultural models and Rethinking Secularism
posted by Giles Gunn
Rethinking Secularism is the title of a striking new collection of essays, edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen that is rich with shrewd, and often detailed and intricate, discussions of the way the political and the social, the public and the personal, are threaded with, and frequently created out of, the interpretive, the symbolic, and the imaginary. It is also a book with whose central claim I could not be in fuller agreement: the religious and the secular do not designate different ends of a historical timeline, much less a simple binary, so much as different inflections of a process beginning, at least in the West, with the slow disintegration of Latin Christendom in the Late Middle Ages, and that we have come to recognize as the longue durée of the modern.
February 17th, 2012
The karate philosopher
posted by John D. BoyEduardo Mendieta, who has conducted interviews with Cornel West and Jürgen Habermas for The Immanent Frame, was recently interviewed by New APPS.
November 2nd, 2011
Jürgen Habermas on myth and ritual
posted by Wei ZhuThis video is an excerpt of a lecture by Jürgen Habermas, delievered at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs on October 19th.
October 6th, 2011
Focus on the funk: An interview with Cornel West
posted by Eduardo Mendieta
“I would go with Pierre Hadot and say that the love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it’s a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth—and the courage to hope. So, it is a way of life, a set of practices, no doubt, but, at the same time, I call it a kind of focus on the funk.”
September 19th, 2011
A blast from the past: lessons in eastern religion and philosophy
posted by Amanda KaplanFifty years ago, Alan Watts popularized ideas of eastern philosophy and religion. Open Culture shares a relic of the past.
August 26th, 2011
Political theology and political existentialism
posted by Peter E. Gordon
“At stake in our political life,” Paul Kahn observes, “has been not our capacity to be reasonable, but our capacity to realize in and through our own lives an ultimate meaning.” While it would require little effort for me to catalogue the many insights that seized my attention while reading Kahn’s thoughtful and highly provocative new book, it is this basic insight that chiefly arouses my interest, insofar as it serves as the organizing premise for the argument as a whole. It is therefore this claim most of all that deserves close scrutiny.
July 19th, 2011
Religious and secular foundations of human rights
posted by Grace YukichA post at the New York Times philosophy blog “The Stone” reflects on the differences between religious and secular underpinnings of human rights. The author, Anat Biletzki, critiques the argument that human rights are impossible without religion, or, particularly, belief in God. Instead, she asserts that the secular basis for human rights is in fact more faithful to humanity than religious justifications, which she defines as rooted in the authority of a superhuman creator (i.e., God) rather than in the value of the human.
Subscribe to the RSS feed for philosophy
