The Prophet’s Letter to al-ʿAlāʾ b. Al-Ḥaḍramī: An Assessment of Its Authenticity in Light of the Covenants and the Correspondence with the People of Yemen

The letter to al-?Alā? b. al-?a?ramī embodies a number of parallels to the covenants and to the Prophet Mu?ammad's correspondence with the people of Yemen. This study examines the different versions of the letter that have come down to us from the Musnad of al-?ārith b. Abī Usāma and from a recension from al-?abarānī's Al-mu?jam al-kabīr to reconstruct a critical edition. Having translated the critical edition and analysed its contents, the study then concludes that the letter is in all likelihood authentic and that it is, generally speaking, textually accurate. The implication of this is that the letter and the covenants represent mutual attestations of one another and that the religion of Islam was well-established, having attained a great level of maturity in the Prophet's lifetime.     

The Scottish Reformation was not Protestant

This article argues that the generally accepted term for the Protestant revolution of 1559–60 in Scotland, ‘The Scottish Reformation’, hides the remnant of a sectarian denominational historiography and should be abandoned. These events should be called ‘The Scottish Protestant Reformation’ while ‘The Scottish Reformation’ should be used for a ‘long reformation’ including Catholic and Protestant reform movements extending from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This terminological change represents a new way of understanding the Scottish Reformation as a long process in the Christian culture of Renaissance Scotland. It brings historical research in line with developments in other disciplines, which have uncovered a flourishing early Scottish Renaissance. Making Christianity the primary category in the religious history of this period, rather than the polemical binary ‘Catholic/Protestant’, enables a more balanced appraisal of the various religious and cultural movements in Scotland.     

George Herbert and the Heroic Tradition: A Consideration of the Third Movement of The Temple

Abstract

For the past two hundred years scholars have repeatedly dismissed ‘The Church Militant', the third movement of George Herbert's The Temple. In fact, this scholarly disavowal has been so severe that many students of Herbert's work are unaware of the poem's very existence. Upon close analysis of ‘The Church Militant', however, we find the poem to be a vital, integral part of The Temple. I contend that not only is this movement integral but that a careful consideration of the poem will serve also to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the structure and arrangement of Herbert's work. Especially instructive is a consideration of the heroic tradition as it informs this third and final movement of The Temple. While using elements of the epic to express a narrative of Christian history and doctrine, Herbert in ‘The Church Militant’ reawakens in his readers an awareness of the significance of the legacy of Christian heroism.     

The Letter and the Witness: Agamben,Heidegger, and Derrida

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben introduces a particular conception of bearing witness to overcome the problems contained in an account of language that depends on the voice or the letter. From his earlier work, it is clear that his critique of the voice and the letter is not only directed to ancient and medieval metaphysics, but also concerns Heidegger's account of the voice and Derrida's account of the letter and writing. Yet, if Agamben is correct in claiming that bearing witness offers an alternative to Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, it is remarkable – a fact unnoticed in the available literature – that Agamben does not discuss how these conceptions of the voice and the letter are intrinsically connected to the problem of testimony for Heidegger as well as Derrida. To show how this lack of attention to bearing witness in Heidegger and Derrida affects Agamben's critique, this article proceeds as follows. First, we interpret Agamben's critique of Heidegger's conception of the voice and Derrida's conception of writing in terms of the presuppositional constitution of metaphysics. Second, we describe Agamben's concept of the witness and indicate how it offers an alternative to this presuppositional constitution of metaphysics. Finally, we show which role bearing witness plays in Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, and how our analysis presents a more precise version of Agamben's critique.     

The ‘Radical’ Revisions of the Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms: Luther and his ‘Enemies’ (1517-1525)

Abstract

The context in which Luther wrote his original commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms (1517) was very different from the later edition at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt (1525). While revising his writing purportedly to update it due to his improved knowledge of Hebrew, Luther himself now read the words of the Psalmist through a new lens. He connected passages about the Psalmist's ‘enemies’ to those whom he himself struggled against during that period, in particular his ‘radical’ contemporaries. Previous studies that have compared the 1517 edition with the 1525 revision have examined only internal factors that may have influenced the revision. By taking account of the external factors as well, this study attempts to account for both what motivated his decision to make the revisions and the manner in which Luther changed the translation and commentary.     

The Erotic and the Mystical in Postmodernity

Abstract

There has always been a close connection between divine and erotic love in the Western mystical tradition, from the Pseudo-Dionysius to St John of the Cross, and it is found also in poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. It is a tradition returned to in Ron Hansen's novel Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) in which Mariette, though banished from her convent, remains a stigmatic and Christ's ‘lover’. The essay concludes with a brief review of the postmodernity that entertains both the erotic—dangerous sex—and the love of God in true hospitality.     

John Knox: Gynaecocracy, ‘The Monstrous Empire of Women’

Abstract

This paper aims at providing a critical reading of John Knox's views on female monarchs, based on his writings, correspondence and interviews with contemporary queens, namely Mary of Guise and her daughter, Mary Stewart, of Scotland, and Elizabeth I, of England, highlighting Knox's religious thought and the political implications of his antigynaecocratic doctrines. From Knox's reasonings with the British queens, one can to some extent perceive his putting into practice the theories of resistance to political authority he formulated during his exile in Geneva, as expressed in the tracts and correspondence addressed to his British friends and proselytes. By the analysis of Knox's antagonistic views on the regiment of women, solidly grounded on the Holy Scriptures, namely the Old Testament, and on long-established tradition—classical, canonical and patristic—, one is made aware of his unwavering faith and indefatigable struggle for the Reformation of the Church, both in Scotland and in England.     

An Essay In The Aid Of Writing History: Fictions Of Historiography

In what follows I explore the question of fictionality in history writing. First, I venture into the unfamiliar genre of ego-histoire and make my own professional training in the tenets of positivist or realist historiography an object of theoretical reflection and critical analysis. Then as a way of dealing with the literary dimension of written history, I make a canonical work in history of education an object of rhetorical analysis. Finally, as another way of coming to terms with the fictions of historiography, I revisit one of my own productions and make it an object of metacritical consideration. My central theme is that historiographical realism alone will not suffice , that historians are as dependant upon literary invention as upon documents, that history cannot be written without the aid of the fictions of historiography, and that the difference between the historian and the novelist is narrower than we may have been accustomed to think. I further argue that attention to the literary or rhetorical dimension of history is long overdue in history of education, where it flourishes unacknowledged. I conclude that historical writing is not just a literary pastime and the issue remains: how to come to grips with fictionalizing and the truth claims of historiography.     

'The Haemorrhage of Faith?' Opinion Polls as Sources for Religious Practices,Beliefs and Attitudes in Scotland since the 1970s

Scotland has traditionally been seen as a religious country which, according to Callum Brown, has latterly succumbed to the same secularising tendencies which have affected many Western civilisations. Brown has described the Scottish process as so severe as to be tantamount to 'the haemorrhage of faith'. Commercial opinion poll data for representative samples of the Scottish population, a source not greatly used by Brown, are reviewed here for evidence of religious practices, beliefs and attitudes in contemporary Scotland. Considering these data in isolation, and more briefly in relation to equivalent British and world poll data, it is concluded that there has undoubtedly been religious decline since the 1970s, especially during the 1990s. While Scotland is far from being a post-Christian nation, according to the polls, it is no longer-outwardly or inwardly-significantly more religious than Britain as a whole and much of Western Europe.     

“All history is the history of thought”: competing British idealist historiographies

ABSTRACT

Along with utilitarianism, British idealism was the most important philosophical and practical movement in Britain and its Empire during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Even though the British idealists have regained some of their standing in the history of philosophy, their own historical theories still fail to receive the deserved scholarly attention. This article helps to fill that major gap in the literature. Understanding historiography as concerning the appropriate modes of enquiring into the recorded past, this article analyses the key historiographical commitments that underpin the writings of the early T.H. Green (section two), Edward Caird (section three), and F.H. Bradley (sections four and five). Section six explores the influence of Bradley's historiography. These approaches are linked by the belief that all thought can be properly understood only by critical historians who possess the appropriate tools with which to distinguish permanently valid truths from the transient imperfections with which those truths are mixed. A crucial division between them is the invocation of a neo-Hegelian Geist by the early Green and Caird, and Bradley's reliance on a progressive human nature. Moreover, the article establishes that R.G. Collingwood's highly influential theories of “absolute presuppositions” and “re-enactment” were taken largely from Bradley's historiography.     

A moral vision for the presidential election

The essay celebrates the “Mirror of Princes” writing of political philosophy that appeared in Augustine's City of God, the history of Western political philosophy and in the political thought of ancient China. It upholds the tradition of the good ruler while noting the ambiguities of morality in politics. It notes the political power of the American president in the current global context. While emphasizing the need for the good ruler to love the people he serves it focuses on the need for reform in health care, education, and race relations.     

How I Become a Psychoanalyst

In this essay, I focus on how my personal history contributed to my choosing to become a psychoanalyst, what I then encountered and the choices I made professionally, and the issue of being “inside” versus “outside” the classical tradition. In this context, I describe some of the political conditions that prevented Ph.D.'s from being able to be trained as analysts within the classical tradition during those years. I also describe how the training I received outside the classical tradition actually was much broader than what would have been offered within it and how it allowed for a level of intellectual freedom and critical thinking about traditional ways of working that would not have been possible in the classical institutes. I also describe briefly how I began developing the concept of working at the “intimate edge” in the analytic relationship, which I first began writing about in 1974 and which is detailed most fully in my 1992 book, The Intimate Edge: Extending the Reach of Psychoanalytic Interaction, and in several subsequent publications (Ehrenberg, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2003).     

Heidegger and the question of animality 1

Abstract

It is widely recognized that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein outlines a novel dissolution of the epistemological problems of modern philosophy. However it has not been fully appreciated that this analysis presupposes a conception of human beings which radically separates them from all natural, animal life. Focusing on Heidegger's analysis of Mitsein it is argued that this separation prevents Heidegger from achieving a conception of human existence which avoids the distortions of the humanist tradition against which it recoils. Against Heidegger, it is argued that a philosophically satisfactory conception of human existence must be more smoothly naturalistic.     

Advaita Vedanta and the Repositioning of Subjectivity in the Life-writing of Christopher Isherwood, "Homosexualist"

Abstract

For British critics, Christopher Isherwood went off the literary radar when he declared himself a pacifist and de-camped to California on the eve of WWII. Nothing he wrote after the Berlin Stories (1939), when his life was barely half over, until Christopher and his Kind, in 1976, when he emerged as a kind of gay literary icon, was accorded much serious attention from Britain's literary establishment. Furthermore, what he published during his long relationship with a guru in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition—which culminated in the classic My Guru and his Disciple (1980)—has scarcely been taken seriously, and only a few of the more astute literary critics have detected the influence of Vedanta philosophy in his later work (e.g. Nagarajan, 1972). Yet there have been calls for Isherwood to be re-evaluated as a serious religious writer (Wade, 2001).

If such calls are to be taken seriously there are several issues that need to be addressed, not the least of which would be the dominant cultural expectations surrounding the (im)possibility of a spirituality not predicated on the denial of sexuality. "My personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him," he wrote in 1970 (Bucknell, 2000: ix).

There is also the problem of an unreconstructed colonialist prejudice towards religious practices associated with a subject people. Here, I review important aspects of the non-dualist philosophy of his Advaita training that allowed Isherwood to integrate his sexuality and his writing with his religious practice.

Isherwood was inclined less to approach ideas as abstract principles and more as they were embodied in particular people. With this particular Swami, an exponent of the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition, Isherwood found his lifelong guide, and the narrative of his spiritual journey is the history of a relationship that deepened over 40 years. That relationship is the other focus of this article.     

IRIS MURDOCH AND THE BORDERS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

Iris Murdoch's philosophical texts depart significantly from familiar analytic discursive norms. (Such as the norms concerning argument structure and the minimization of rhetoric.) This may lead us to adopt one of two strategies. On the one hand an assimilation strategy that involves translation of Murdoch's claims into the more familiar terms of property‐realism (the terminology of ethical naturalism and non‐naturalism). On the other hand, there is the option of adopting a crossover strategy and reading Murdoch as (in some sense) a philosopher who belongs more properly to the continental tradition. The following article argues that if familiar Quinean claims about ontological commitment and Murdoch's account of metaphor are both broadly correct then the assimilation strategy must fail to produce a faithful translation. Nonetheless, Murdoch's connection to the analytic tradition is more than genealogical, it is more than a matter of her writing (initially) in response to analytic contemporaries before branching off in a more continental direction. While she departs from familiar analytic discursive norms, she continues to accept most of the epistemic values (such as clarity and simplicity) that the norms embody.     

In pursuit of a historical tradition: N. A. Rozhkov’s scientific laws of history

Despite all that has been written about Russian historiography and how it profoundly changed after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, very little is known about the historical tradition immediately before the Soviet era. This article attempts to begin to address this issue by examining the major forces that shaped the historical and sociological thought of Nikolai Alesandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927). It argues that as Kliuchevskii’s successor and as the first professional historian to eventually present a Marxist analysis of Russian history, Rozhkov was not only the most important historian at that time but one whose work best represented the most significant transition in Russia’s historical tradition. The article concludes that an examination of Rozhkov’s historical methodology offers a new interpretation of the origins of Soviet historiography.

The freud-jones letters

Abstract

Despite over a hundred years of writings about the history of psychoanalysis, from the point of view of professional intellectual historians this field remains amateurish in terms of solid scholarship. This edition of the Freud-Jones letters illustrates many of the long-standing problems. Although Jones was never one of Freud's personal favorites, it takes a subtle reading of the evidence to see the full nature of the tensions between the two. It is surprising, given the length of this text, how much additional surviving material might profitably been added.

Aside from serious shortcomings to this edition of Freud's correspondence, for example the longstanding orthodox tilt against Sandor Ferenczi, nothing like the tendentiousness associated with other editions of Freud's letters has taken place here. Future generations who get to see the full volumes of Freud's letters are going to have trouble recreating the human circumstances under which he was working. The Freud-Jones letters will remain of key interest to specialists. By now most know certain key historiographical failings on Jones's part, and it may be time now to underline how much he succeeded in accomplishing.     

Secularism's threat to tradition: A reading of Europe,India and the Limits of Secularism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a reading of Jakob De Roover's important book, Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). It invokes the way in which the English courts have re-described Sikh tradition as religion in order to illustrate the relevance of Jakob De Roover's hypothesis about secularism, explaining its dependence on Christian theology and its inbuilt normative dynamic, which reframes tradition and poses a lethal threat to it.     

‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva's Negative Theology

Abstract

This article examines Julia Kristeva's paradoxical concept of a ‘mystic atheism’. It falls into three parts. First, it briefly surveys Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of Christian theology in Au commencement était l'amour (1985). Secondly, it assesses Kristeva's analysis of the Christian mystical tradition from Teresa of Avila to Angela of Foligno in such works as Le féminin et le sacré (1999) and the three volumes on Le génie féminin (1999-2002). For Kristeva, Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the transition from theology to psychoanalysis: what she locates within the work of the female mystics is a so-called ‘mystic atheism’, that is to say, an affirmation of an other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it. Finally, the article offers some critical comments upon Kristeva's own ‘mystic atheism’: I argue that—like much negative theology—Kristeva's psychoanalysis remains ontotheological in form and that this dimension expresses itself in a problematic tendency to anthropomorphize the other within. In conclusion, I will suggest that Kristeva's ‘mystic atheism’ ultimately remains within the theological tradition it seeks to call into question.     

Actualité de l'addiction et nécessaire retour au travail de mémoire

Our thesis is that the international psychiatric classifications (DSM-IV, CIM-10) have simply neglected the topical issue of the addiction concept. Indeed, because they are merely based on statistics, they organised the treatments on a political basis while obliterating the true therapeutic approach of the patient's deep suffering. On the other hand, the Humanist tradition issued from Pinel's work two centuries ago and continued by Freud, has questioned this social angst and promoted an interdisciplinary approach where medical, social and psychological realities converge. Relying on psychoanalytic data, we claim that only a work on memory based on a clinical approach which is tailored to suit the patient's particular requirements while taking into account his (past) experience can help him overcome his own tendencies and actions. Finally, we propose some therapeutic directions toward a “necessity to build history”.