Hitler's theology: A cautionary tale for today's peril

In this article the author updates and renews his thesis from 2013 about the Weimarization of American political culture. He argues that fascism is an endemic modern possibility that has a theological dimension that becomes visible when the left‐right ideological binary descending from the French Revolution is set aside. Reviewing the evidence from Hitler's Table Talks, he shows how Hitler both understood himself as a progressive change agent and envisioned writing a new theology for triumphant Nazism in retirement. The article concludes by drawing upon Giorgio Agamben's analysis of Nazi biopolitics in Homo Sacer to point towards a messianic alternative.     

Theologian of sin and grace. The process of radicalization in the theology of Matthias Flacius Illyricus

Abstract

The execution in 1540 of the notable English evangelical, Robert Barnes, sparked a flurry of martyrological propaganda. Although much of this literature is well known to scholars of the Henrician reformation, at least one contribution remains obscure: a poem (1542) by the Pomeranian Humanist, Johannes Sastrow. If in line with Protestant portrayals of Barnes as a martyr, Sastrow’s poem, produced at safe remove from England, is unique in attempting primarily to cast Henry VIII as a despot comparable to the tyrants of classical antiquity. Both its context and content, crowded with classical allusions, reveal a young Humanist concerned not only to memorialize a friend and to condemn the ruler responsible for his death, but also to advertise his own skills as a budding Humanist. The poem is here contextualized, translated, and annotated for the light it sheds on the multiple uses to which early-modern martyrological propaganda could be put.     

Enfleshing semiotics: The indexical and symbolic sign-functions

This essay engages the work of Robert Yelle in his text Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History. The author examines in particular his theorizing of the indexical sign function and its capacity to ‘enflesh’ the symbol. In the Peircean and Saussurean frames the symbol is an abstraction, a concept, and removed from the experiential. However, with the deployment of the indexical sign, as Yelle argues, the symbol is enfleshed and made experiential. Yelle's development of Peircean semiotics should prove to be very productive in the study of systems of belief and practice.     

Volenti goes to Market*

If free markets consist in nothing more than “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” and if in the old legal maxim “volenti non fit injuria,” then it seems to follow that free markets do no wrongs. But that defense of free markets wrenches the “volenti” maxim out of context. In common law adjudication of disputes between two parties, it is perfectly appropriate to cast standards of “volenti” narrowly, and largely ignore “duress via third parties” (wrongs done to or by others who are not themselves party to the action). In economic markets, of course, those third-party effects are rife. But we want them to be rectified systematically, not piecemeal through particular cases between particular parties that happen to come to court. That is the proper province of political philosophers and system-designers, in critiquing and constraining the operation of the market. * I thank Peter Cane for much good advice, and exonerate him from any blame for the use I have made of it.     

The League

About painting, cybernetics, and shared purpose, this article is partly a story, in part a memoir, an adventure in cybernetics, happening 30 years ago, in snow, in the small Swiss city of St. Gallen. A conference of the American Society for Cybernetics meets there. It is 1987. The author, a painter, searching for a new understanding of painting, encounters a convergence of the art of painting and the art of cybernetics through principles of second-order cybernetics in Pask, von Foerster and Maturana, dissolved in Kathleen Forsythe’s poetry. The form, as well as the content of this article, reflects cybernetics.     

Base property exemplification and mixed worlds: remarks on the Shafer-Landau/Mabrito exchange

In this essay I distinguish between a synchronic view of base property exemplification and a diachronic one. I argue that only a diachronic view of base property exemplification can substantiate a ban on morally mixed worlds. I then argue that one of Robert Mabrito’s recent criticisms of Russ Shafer-Landau’s moral realism fails on either a synchronic or a diachronic view.

The Necessity for a Theology of Disease: Reflections on Totalities and Fragments

Abstract. Our ideas of disease try to explain it, and they aim at facilitating cures. In the process, they become entwined in sociocultural networks that have totalizing effects. Disease, however, counters this totalizing effect by revealing to us that our lives are fragments. Unless we engage this fragment character of disease and of our lives, we cannot properly understand disease or deal with it. HIV/AIDS clarifies these issues in an extraordinarily powerful fashion. Medical, legal, commercial, political, and institutional approaches to disease overlook the fragment character of disease in favor of totalizing world‐ views. A theology of disease is necessary in order to maintain the focus on fragments. Unless we recognize this fragment character, we do not really understand our lives, and we do not really understand either disease or healing.     

Evolution and Free Will: A Defense of Darwinian Non–naturalism

In his recent book The Natural Selection of Autonomy , Bruce Waller defends a view that he calls "natural autonomy." This view holds that human beings possess a kind of autonomy that we share with nonhuman animals, a capacity to explore alternative courses of action, but an autonomy that cannot support moral responsibility. He also argues that this natural autonomy can provide support for the ethical principle of noninterference. I argue that to support the ethical principle of noninterference Waller needs either a libertarian or a compatibilist theory of autonomy. I then go on to argue that, contra Waller, the libertarian view is both compatible with Darwinism and able to make sense of how autonomous acts belong to the agents who perform them. Thus, I conclude that the libertarian position is a live option for Darwinians. If however, naturalism is taken to include a deterministic view of the universe (at least at the nonquantum level), as is often the case, then my article takes some strides in defending "Darwinian non–naturalism."