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The idea of Continental Philosophy has never been properly explained in philosophical terms. This book attempts finally to succeed where others have failed, although not by giving an account of its internal unity but by showing instead why no such account can be given. Providing a clear picture of the current state of the contemporary philosophical culture, it traces the origins and development of the idea of a distinctive Continental tradition, critiquing current attempts to survey the field of contemporary philosophy. The main argument of the book is that the very idea of a fruitfully distinguishable philosophical tradition of Continental philosophy is part of the mythological history of the movement that came to call itself analytic philosophy: the very idea of such a tradition is best thought of as an item that has its original home in the conceptual armoury of analytic philosophy. In this respect, “Continental philosophy” is less the name for another kind of philosophy than analytic philosophy, but a term that functions within analytic philosophy as the name of its own other, that part of its lexicon which represents what is not part of it: it is “the Other” of analytic philosophy.

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God’s goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God’s sovereignty with God’s love.

Since the publication of her first book, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, in 1974 — the first book about Levinas published in English — Edith Wyschogrod has been at the forefront of the fields of Continental philosophy and philosophy of religion. Her work has crossed many disciplinary boundaries, making peregrinations from phenomenology and moral philosophy to historiography, the history of religions (both Western and non-Western), aesthetics, and the philosophy of biology. In all of these discourses, she has sought to cultivate an awareness of how the self is situated and influenced, as well as the ways in which a self can influence others. In this book, twelve scholars examine and display the influence of Wyschogrod's work in essays that take up the thematics of influence in a variety of contexts: Christian theology, the saintly behavior of the villagers of Le Chambon sur Lignon, the texts of the medieval Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia, the philosophies of Levinas, Derrida, and Benjamin, the practice of intellectual history, the cultural memory of the New Testament, and pedagogy. In response, Wyschogrod shows how her interlocutors have brought to light her multiple authorial personae and have thus marked the ambiguity of selfhood, its position at the nexus of being influenced by and influencing others.

Beginning where the great masters of suspicion ended, this book aims for a renewal of theological thinking not by way of an argument against the death of God or on behalf of the postmodern turn of religion, but instead by extending and radicalizing an iconoclastic and existentialist mode of thought. A theological thinking whose point of departure assumes and accepts the critiques of religion launched by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Feuerbach can make no metaphysical or ontological claims: theology is a strictly secular discourse, like any other discourse, but it is aware of its limitations and wary of great promises-its own included. It is a thinking that takes theological desire seriously as a rebellious force working within, but against an anthropomorphic, phallogocentric worldview. Its faith is that secular theological desire can be a force against the constitutive indifference of thought, the myopic fundamentalism of any literalism, the rule of nobody, or even the biopower that produces docile subjectivities in an age of capitalism. Theological thinking thus becomes a meditative act of rebellion and a way not to forget not to say nothing. Meditative and aphoristic instead of argumentative, this book offers an original and constructive engagement with issues such as indifference, belief, madness, and love.

Within the humanities, specifically in the past decade, trauma theory has become a robust site of interdisciplinary work. Trauma resonates with scholars in and across disciplines and has become a trope with a distinctive significance. The scope of scholarship on trauma has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, yet it has recently been rendered all the more complex by theoretical and methodological issues that have emerged for these disciplines in their attempts to think trauma. This volume gathers scholars in a variety of disciplines to meet the challenge of how to think trauma in light of its burgeoning interdisciplinarity, and often its theoretical splintering. From distinctive disciplinary vectors, the work of philosophers, social theorists, philosophical psychologists and theologians consider the limits and prospects of theory when thinking trauma and transcendence. By bringing together scholars at the intersections of trauma, social theory, and especially the continental philosophy of religion, this volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s transcendent, evental, or unassimilable quality is being wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it is promulgated as a form of obscurantism.

This book provides an introduction to the emerging field of Continental philosophy of religion by treating the philosophical thought of its most important representatives, including its appropriations by several thinkers in the US. Part I provides a context to the field by looking at the religious aspects of the thought of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jacques Derrida. It contends that although the work of these thinkers is not apologetic in nature (does not provide an argument for religion, whether Christianity or Judaism), it prepares the ground for the more religiously motivated work of more recent thinkers by giving religious language and ideas some legitimacy in philosophical discussions. Part II devotes a chapter to each of the contemporary French thinkers who articulate a phenomenology of religious experience: Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Yves Lacoste and Emmanuel Falque. This part argues that their respective philosophies can be read as an apologetics of sort, namely as making arguments for the coherence of thought about God and the viability of religious experience, though each does so in a different fashion and to a different degree. Part III considers the three major thinkers who have popularized and extended this phenomenology in the US context: Merold Westphal, John D. Caputo, and Richard Kearney. The book thus both provides an introduction to important contemporary thinkers many of whom have not yet received much treatment in English and also argues that their philosophies can be read as providing an argument for Christian faith.

Many of the most controversial moral decisions we face hinge upon competing descriptions of life, and never is this truer than at the beginning of life. This book draws upon the branch of Continental philosophy, which is phenomenology, to question the descriptive adequacy, the essential ‘purchase upon reality’, of many of the approaches, attitudes, and arguments which make up beginning of life ethics today. It argues that many of the most prevalent positions and practices in our late modern culture have simply failed to take into account the reality of human emergence, the particular way that new members of our species first appear in the world. Historically, phenomenologists have been far more interested in death than in birth. And therefore this book has first to develop its own phenomenological investigation of human emergence, taking leads and developing approaches from phenomenologists both French and German, both living and dead. When in the second half of the book the phenomenology is finally applied to ethics, acute moral questions are divided into two kinds: first those concerning ‘what’ it is with which we are dealing; and, second, the more contextual ‘where’ questions relating to the situation in which the subject is found. Finally, though this book primarily constitutes a philosophical rather than a religious critique of contemporary ethics—with the findings from Continental philosophy being brought to bear upon core convictions of English speaking ‘liberal’, moral, and political philosophers—it does conclude by exploring an alternative theological basis for human rights which might fill the vacuum created.