Since early modernity, thinkers have rejected much of the Christian metaphysical inheritance. Aristotelian substance, for example, was judged to be an empty concept serving little purpose; Locke believed it was empty and unknowable, that which “we know not what, … which we take to be the
substratum
, or support, of those
Ideas
we do know.” This rejection was summarized and finalized by Heidegger's sweeping dismissal of metaphysical subjectivity, and post‐modern philosophers unpacked the implications in their proposals of a passive and fractured non‐subject. Yet the substitutes given by modern and postmodern thinkers replace being with doing, in which human beings are marked by consciousness (Locke), autonomous self‐legislating (Kant), or authenticity (Rousseau, and a racially‐coded version with Heidegger). Yet many of these thinkers also wish to retain distinctively Christian and humanistic convictions, such as dignity and political agency. I will argue that the Christian ontology of the person that was developed in the service of Trinitarian theology and Christology is necessary to safeguard an authentic humanism and personal identity.
What does it mean to live freely, authentically, and responsibly in the twenty-first century?What use do we have for existentialism today? Is it just a tangle of irrational and individualist pessimism, or does it speak to our contemporary minds?
Stereotypically ascribed to the cliques of Bohemia, pretentious café dwel...
Many in continental philosophy of religion aver that we are in a new moment, one where the intellectually marginalized and religiously bastardized traditions of mystical, intuitive, and esoteric apprehensions must be re-articulated and appreciated anew. In an era marked by catastrophic events and atrophied cultural ins...
Joseph P. Fell proposes that the solution to the problem of nihilism is found in the common experience of persons and the everyday commitments that one makes to people, practices, and institutions. In his landmark 1979 book Heidegger and Sartre, and in his subsequent essays, Fell describes a quiet but radical reform in...
The histories of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century art have been deeply shaped by structuralist and poststructuralist critical theories that have often been rigorously antihumanist. These theories have been adept at diagnosing malformations in the ways humanist discourse operates in the arts, and they have been hig...
Jonathan A. Anderson· Modern Theology· 0 citations
Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated wit...
Milan Fujda· Method & Theory in the S...· 0 citations
Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive analysis of his complete œuvre, however, reveals something else entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a conservativ...
D. Moreno· 1 citation
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