Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theology

This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5–6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse’s becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological.     

生命的核、质与根——性的哲学、伦理学与神学

性是人类生命的道德伤口。性是生命的核、质与根。人类掩藏性的信息,给生命以最大的神学、美学和伦理学的空间;也同时用潜伏的原理忧挂生命发生的神秘和戏剧性;性爱和情爱的形式改变了忏悔的精神说教,与科学实践、生活实践相结合,面临如何延续生命又如何避免蒙受尊严丧失的屈辱。     

生命的核、质与根 --性的哲学、伦理学与神学

性是人类生命的道德伤口.性是生命的核、质与根.人类掩藏性的信息,给生命以最大的神学、美学和伦理学的空间;也同时用潜伏的原理忧挂生命发生的神秘和戏剧性;性爱和情爱的形式改变了忏悔的精神说教,与科学实践、生活实践相结合,面临如何延续生命又如何避免蒙受尊严丧失的屈辱.     

Stephen T. Davis (ed.), Philosophy and Theological Discourse [Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion]

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Archie Mafeje and the question of African philosophy: A liberatory discourse

Philosophy and the social sciences, at least in modern times, are largely a by-product of the West – Europe and the Americas. This is to say that the West has a monopoly over these disciplines. This may be largely attributed to the colonial conquest of many territories by European powers and the resultant subjugation of the peoples concerned. Africans, by and large, are victims of such atrocities on the part of the West. Hence the question of an “African philosophy” arises, or gains momentum, in the (post) colonial era, or at independence. This is because the impulse to philosophise is inextricably linked to the impulse to gain freedom among the bonded. This paper attempts to show how the present subject, Archie Mafeje, dealt with the question of whether or not there exists an “African philosophy”. In responding to the question, it will also be shown what philosophy really is (indeed, must have to be) and occasion will be had to remark as to its distinctive practices within the African context. This is to be understood as a broader philosophy of liberation which liberates philosophy from the received Euro-American contours and consequently liberates the colonised and oppressed, the African in particular, with its engagement with the (post) colonial, neo-colonial condition and remedies for the (dis)order thereof.     

Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt on the Jewish question: political theology as a critique

The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and implicit in Arendt, but both develop the Hegelian criticism of liberal state which shows its reliance on the abstract law, on the one hand, and on the egotistic abstract individual, on the other. The theological undercurrent of the argument is both sign of its limitations, and of the subsisting relevance of the politico-theological framework, even in the similarly novel circumstances of the twentieth century. It is only within and through the theological critique and critique of theology that these issues would stand a chance of resolution.     

Belief in life after death: psychological origins and influences

Belief in some form of life after death is widespread, and the question is raised what psychological processes give rise to it. The sample in the present study consisted of 85 first-year undergraduate psychology students at the University of Adelaide. General belief in life after death was found to be high, and was related to a desire for there to be an afterlife, to adherence to a dualistic philosophy, and to low death anxiety. Subdivision of subjects into the different forms of afterlife believed in showed that reincarnationists exhibited the strongest adherence to a dualistic philosophy and the highest level of belief in, and alleged experience of, ESP and psychokinesis.     

Psychosomatic medicine and the philosophy of life

Basing ourselves on the writings of Hans Jonas, we offer to psychosomatic medicine a philosophy of life that surmounts the mind-body dualism which has plagued Western thought since the origins of modern science in seventeenth century Europe. Any present-day account of reality must draw upon everything we know about the living and the non-living. Since we are living beings ourselves, we know what it means to be alive from our own first-hand experience. Therefore, our philosophy of life, in addition to starting with what empirical science tells us about inorganic and organic reality, must also begin from our own direct experience of life in ourselves and in others; it can then show how the two meet in the living being. Since life is ultimately one reality, our theory must reintegrate psyche with soma such that no component of the whole is short-changed, neither the objective nor the subjective. In this essay, we lay out the foundational components of such a theory by clarifying the defining features of living beings as polarities. We describe three such polarities:

Fear and uncertainty in the face of death: The role of life after death in group identification

Terror management theory argues that mortality‐induced terror motivates group identification. Uncertainty–identity theory argues that uncertainty about what happens after death motivates group identification. Two experiments were conducted to test the latter reasoning. In Experiment 1 (n = 187), mortality salience was manipulated, and uncertainty about the afterlife was measured to predict national identification. As hypothesized, mortality salience strengthened identification only among those who were uncertain about the afterlife. In Experiment 2 (n = 177), mortality salience was manipulated as before, but belief in an afterlife was also manipulated—participants were primed to believe that there was an afterlife, there was not an afterlife, or the existence of an afterlife was uncertain. As in Experiment 1, mortality salience strengthened identification only among those who were existentially uncertain. These experiments show that uncertainty plays a significant role in reactions to mortality salience, and support uncertainty–identity theory's analysis of the role of self‐uncertainty in ideological conviction and group behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Dream of the Red Chamber and Christian theology: Seeking a new philosophy of love from the Christian perspective

The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng or The Story of the Stone), composed by Cao Xueqin in the middle of the eighteenth century during the Qing dynasty, is celebrated as the greatest of all classical Chinese novels. However, little effort has been made to explore its theological dimension, as well as the theological interaction with Chinese classical philosophy in the field of Redology (the name for research around this text). This article aims to fill this gap to explore the theological influences upon the thematic ideas of this novel. Attending to the newly discovered theological materials in recent studies, I argue that the author of Honglou meng is not ignorant of Christianity, and in fact, used a triadic image to refer to the trinitarian persons.