Naturalizing Ethics: the Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency

Moral agency is a central feature of both religious and secular conceptions of human beings. In this paper I outline a scientific naturalistic model of moral agency making use of current findings and theories in sociobiology,developmental psychology, and social cognitive theory. The model provides answers to four central questions about moral agency: (1) what it is, (2) how it is acquired, (3) how it is put to work, and (4) how it is justified. I suggest that this model can provide religious and secular moral theories with a basis for a common understanding of moral agency.     

After Heidegger: Transubstantiation

Recent debate over transubstantiation (especially Jean‐Luc Marion's defence of it) has concentrated either on transubstantiation as a kind of embarrassment in consequence of modern physics, or on the extent to which it is both a doctrine elaborated in the light of metaphysics and recoverable in consequence of metaphysics having been overcome. In this sense the tension between Aquinas' apparently metaphysical formulation of the doctrine and the less overtly metaphysical formula adopted by the Council of Trent (in its refusal to speak of ‘accidents’) has indicated a way of ‘rescuing’ or ‘recovering’ the doctrine. This article argues that such a recovery is a false trail. Pope Paul VI was right to be wary of relativising the Eucharistic event to the believing community in any doctrine of transignification. Alternatively, attempts like Chauvet's and Macquarrie's to restate Eucharistic event in terms of Heidegger's Geviert presuppose Heidegger has succeeded in destroying the metaphysics of presence, so that they can use the fruits of his researches. What is actually at issue in thinking through transubstantiation is how the doctrine relates to conceptions of the physical: Aristotelian, what comes to be Newtonian, or postmodern conceptions which appear to eschew physics altogether. Heidegger's contribution to the debate would better point to how knowing anything means being included in and (self‐) disclosed by what I know. A re‐investigation of transubstantiation might therefore take into account the extraordinary reappearance of the term ‘transubstantiation’ in current non‐theological investigations of performativity (especially in the work of Judith Butler). Here transubstantiation would include not the maximal meaning of bread and wine as signs constituted in das Geviert, ‘after’ substance has been critiqued, but their minimality, in enacting a change in (our) substance (self‐realising). This would confirm the divinising meaning of the Eucharistic event, which stresses how we are caught up into the divine. Thus, whereas in transignification the Eucharistic event occurs in consequence of the will of the community of believers, in transubstantiation it is the enactment of the community as community that is at issue, an enactment in consequence of no act of will of its own. In terms of the postmodern and non‐theological appropriation of the word transubstantiation, this means that I who participate in the Eucharistic am re‐ordered, or re‐materialised, or ‘trans‐substantiated’ in the Eucharistic event.     

Theological Pragmatism: A Critical Evaluation

Theological pragmatists like Daly, Kaufman, McFague and Reuther claim that the God we should believe in and the kind of images we should use to express our religious faith should be evaluated primarily on the basis of the consequences they have for the maintenance of certain political or moral values. These views are presented and critically evaluated. One difficulty is that their pragmatism seems to clash with our intuition and experience that there is no automatic fit between our moral aspirations and political visions, on the one hand, and how the world is actually structured, on the other. Their strong emphasis on political and moral considerations is, therefore, questionable and only plausible under certain specific circumstances.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Lester L. Grabbe (ed), Can a History of Israel be Written? Michael Prior (ed), Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament Ben Witherington The Paul Quest: The Renewed Search for the Jew of Tarsus Robert Valantasis, The Gospel of Thomas (New Testament Readings) Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God Raymund Schwager, translated by James G. Williams and Paul Haddon, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Towards a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption Raymund Schwager, translated by James G. Williams, Jesus of Nazareth: How He Understood His Life A. E. McGrath, Historical Theology. An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought C. Markschies, Between Two Worlds: Structures of Earliest Christianity Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought Leonard P. Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery Kent Emery, Jr., and Joseph Wawrykow (eds), Christ among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Studies in Spirituality and Theology 5) Pat Collins, Spirituality for the 21st Century: Christian Living in a Secular Age Timothy O'Connell, Making Disciples Gordon Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology Stratford Caldecott (ed), Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement Michael Hurley, Christian Unity: An Ecumenical Second Spring? John M. Riddle, Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West J. Davies, Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity Simon Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks Karsten Friis Johansen, A History of Ancient Philosophy from the Beginnings to Augustine A. A. Long (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy C. C. W. Taylor, The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus: Fragments Gail Fine (ed), Oxford Readings in Philosophy: Plato. Vol. 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Vol. 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul Noburu Notomi, The Unity of Plato's ‘Sophist’: Between the ‘Sophist’ and the ‘Philosopher’ Helen S. Lang, The Order of Nature in Aristotle's The Order of Nature in Aristotle's ‘Physics’ M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought Giordano Bruno. Edited and translated by Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca, Cause, Principle and Unity – And Essays on Magic     

Generations of Catholics in Eastern Africa: A Practice‐Centered Analysis of Religious Change

This article considers how well Martin Riesebrodt's practice‐centered theory of religion addresses religious change among Catholics in eastern Africa. Two arguments are advanced using a generational change scheme. First, Riesebrodt's focus on religious practices assists in understanding many changes that African Catholics and their communities have experienced over time. It acknowledges believers’ perspectives and the impact of missionaries, and it generates comparative insights across different cases. However, Riesebrodt's approach has limitations when developing a comparative perspective on historical transformation in these communities. Therefore, his focus on the objective meaning of interventionist religious practices needs supplementing: (1) capturing religious change within a given religion requires attention both to practices and their subjective appropriation by believers, and (2) in the forging of collective identities, theological reflection by elites helped connect Catholic practices to preexisting worldviews and Catholic practices marked generational change by distinguishing Catholics from other African Christians.     

Relationality and Commitment: Ethics and Ontology in Heidegger's Aristotle

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger's ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger's early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication.     

Embodiment and Animality

The aim of this article is to examine the problematic frontier that separates the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of animality. The main difficulty is to differentiate phenomenologically not only between embodiment and animality, but also between specifically human embodied experience and what is accessible to us through empathy in relation to the corporeality of the animal. I will tackle these questions by considering relevant textual material from the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. On the one hand, I will show that although embodiment and animality are convergent on the level of the naturalistic attitude in Husserl’s Ideas II, they are divergent as soon as we place ourselves in the personalistic attitude, where the body enters into a different conjunction—namely, with the idea of person and of the spiritual world. On the other hand, Heidegger claims that, in spite of the abysmal bodily kinship with the animal, there is an essential difference between the human body and the animal organism, thus opposing the tendencies to humanize the animal and to animalize the human.     

From body to body: A post‐gender politics for the cosmic homo1

This article engages in establishing some common ground, some human and humane politics for the global Luther, in contradistinction to the focus in much recent scholarship on difference/s as an almost hegemonic way of understanding human life. The aim is to move beyond feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories to a post‐gender politics by employing Judith Butler's concepts of performativity and “abject” bodies. Homo, the human being, will be the hermeneutical key for examining Luther's understanding of God's creation and incarnation as well as of baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the church. The aim is that of searching out Luther's differing performances of body, from the carnal body of the incarnate Christ and the human body to the spiritual body of church and community, and how these matter, materialize and intersect in the body of Christ as one body/homo.     

GARRETT ON THE THEOLOGICAL OBJECTION TO HUME'S COMPATIBILISM

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger's 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger's reading of Kant, one must resolve two questions. First, how does Heidegger's Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger's reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam's model of a self-directed transcendental argument (‘The role of the transcendental within Heidegger's Kant’), and the second by examining the relationship between Kant's doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume's attack on metaphysics (‘The role of the horizon within Heidegger's Kant’). I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger's own thought (‘From Heidegger's Kant to Sein und Zeit’). Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger's commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality.     

Heidegger,Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgement: On the Roots and Significance of ‘The Theoretical Attitude’

The article examines Heidegger's lectures on St Paul and provides, in particular, a reading of their discussion of the remarks on the parousia in the letters to the Thessalonians. This reading serves a number of purposes. First, it makes clear how Heidegger's appropriation of a certain ‘anti-theological’ tradition helped first give a sense to his notion of ‘the theoretical attitude’, a problematic notion that plays a central role in his mature early philosophy. Second, it illustrates, and thus helps to refine the identity of, a particular kind of recognizably ‘phenomenological’ reflection that attempts to distance itself precisely from that ‘attitude’; and third, it points to a new perspective on some central and problematic themes in Heidegger's better known early writings and, in particular, their discussion of assertions. An identification of some remarkable similarities between Heidegger's remarks on the Last Judgement and remarks of Wittgenstein's help identify this perspective.