After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
John Panteleimon Manoussakis
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0823225321
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Who or what comes after God? In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy has shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger's last God, Levinas's God of Infinity, Derrida's and Caputo's tout autre, Marion's God without Being, Kearney's God who may be. Sharing the common problematic of the otherness of the Other, the essays in this volume represent considered responses to the recent work of Richard Kearney.John Panteleimon Manoussakis holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College. He is the author of Theos Philosophoumenos (in Greek, Athens 2004) and co-editor of Heidegger and the Greeks (with Drew Hyland). He has also translated Heidegger's Aufenthalte.
transcendental reduction is intentionality. It is the intentional movement of consciousness that seeks and constitutes phenomena as objects. In return, the same structure elevates the I of the consciousness to the constituting I; intentionality, in short, holds the phenomenological scheme in place, since it is by means of it that the two poles of phenomenological operation are named and recognized for what they are: the constituting I and the constituted phenomena. In Heidegger’s Being and Time
................. 15720$ $CH5 01-18-06 15:33:13 PS 79 PAGE 79 ratio, causa prima, ultima ratio, and causa sui.6 Second, for ontotheology, ‘‘the deity can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters into it’’ (ID, 56). God talk is in the service of philosophy’s project, which Heidegger articulates in terms of representational and calculative thinking.7 Informally, this project can be
as he leans very close to Levinas’s vision (in defining persona) for his definition of the God-who-may-be, Kearney’s readers may be encouraged to close themselves off too quickly from the possibility of a real (i.e., ontological) ground for thought rather than the aporetic play of fantasy—which is clearly not his intention.15 Second, Kearney’s approach in The God Who May Be does not make altogether clear why human beings in a postmodern world should revive a conception of God at all. ‘‘God’’
also the God of Etty Hillesum in the transit camp at Westerbork: ‘‘If God does not help me go on,’’ she writes, ‘‘then I shall have to help God’’5 (GMB, 107–108; see also GMB, 2). Kearney’s evident sympathy with Hillesum’s conception of God should not surprise. What has been (quasi-)phenomenologically reduced, if not the very God of sacrament and promise that Hillesum and others assumed has died, or perhaps withdrawn, with the rise of the Nazi terror? Indeed, much of Hillesum’s diary and letters
cosmic play is not an absolute novelty for those who have read, in the Bible, the book of Wisdom 176 Stanislas Breton ................. 15720$ CH12 01-18-06 15:33:52 PS PAGE 176 or the writings of the Prophets. The Fathers of the Church did not forget that it is wisdom that, at the beginning of the world, played and danced before the Eternal. The play is not separate from the joy of dancing which is its very essence, of which the generality of philosophers seem ignorant. But the steps of