scholarly journals Consensus, Convergence, Restraint, and Religion

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-361
Author(s):  
Paul Billingham
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Public Reason Liberalism ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Do So

This essay critically assesses the central claim of Kevin Vallier’s Liberal Politics and Public Faith: that public religious faith and public reason liberalism can be reconciled, because the values underlying public reason liberalism should lead us to endorse the ‘convergence view,’ rather than the mainstream consensus view. The convergence view is friendlier to religious faith, because it jettisons the consensus view’s much-criticised ‘duty of restraint’. I present several challenges to Vallier’s claim. First, if Vallier is right to reject the duty of restraint then consensus theorists can also do so, and on the same grounds. Second, the independent force of the objections to the duty of restraint is unclear. Third, Vallier has not successfully identified desiderata that unite all public reason liberals and favour convergence over consensus. Finally, even if convergence is in some ways friendlier to religious faith, this does not show that it will be attractive to religious citizens.

Thank you to our contributors

1991 ◽  
Vol 29 (26) ◽  
pp. 104.1-104
Keyword(s):  
Pharmaceutical Industry ◽  
General Practitioners ◽  
Advisory Council ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

Articles in the Bulletin have been unsigned since it began. This is because they aim to present a consensus view which incorporates contributions from many people, including specialists, general practitioners and members of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the Bulletin’s Advisory Council. We are very grateful to them all, but although we have often been asked who they are, we cannot name the many hundreds who have helped us in any one year. However, we can at least name those not listed in our tailpiece who have taken a major share in the production of articles published in the last year, and do so now.

Tracing the Rift: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and “The Origin of the Work of Art”

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Will McNeill ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Concept ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
To Come ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Do So

Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is notoriously dense and difficult. In part this is because it appears to come almost from nowhere, given that Heidegger has relatively little to say about art in his earlier work. Yet the essay can only be adequately understood, I would argue, in concert with Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin from the same year, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing.” Without the Hölderlin essay, for instance, the central claim of “The Origin of the Work of Art” to the effect that all art is in essence poetizing, Dichtung, can hardly be appreciated in its philosophical significance without the discussions of both essence and poetizing that appear in the Hölderlin essay. This is true of other concepts also. The central concept of the rift (Riß)—the fissure or tear—that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” might readily be assumed to be adopted from Albrecht Dürer, whose use of the term Heidegger cites at a key point in the 1936 essay. Here, however, I argue that the real source of the concept for Heidegger is Hölderlin, and that the Riß is, moreover—quite literally—an inscription of originary, ekstatic temporality; that is, of temporality as the “origin” of Being and as the poetic or poetizing essence of art. I do so, first, by briefly considering Heidegger’s references to Dürer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and other texts from the period, as well as his understanding of the Riß and of the tearing of the Riß in that essay and in its two earlier versions. I then turn to Heidegger’s 1936 Rome lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing,” in order to show the Hölderlinian origins of this concept for Heidegger.

Does Public Reason Liberalism Rest on a Mistake? Democracy’s Doxastic and Epistemic Problems

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Public Justification ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Public Reason Liberalism ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes ◽  
Voter Knowledge

Public reason liberalism is a normative theory meant to adjudicate citizens’ conflicting beliefs about the right and the good. However, it rests upon controversial and likely mistaken empirical claims about voter psychology and voter knowledge. In political science, there are two major paradigms—populism and realism—about the relationship between voters’ beliefs and political outcomes. Realism holds that most citizens lack the kinds of beliefs and attitudes which public reason liberals believe are normatively significant. If so, then most citizens lack the kinds of ideological disputes which public reason liberalism is supposed to adjudicate. Worse, most citizens lack the kinds of normatively significantly beliefs upon which public justification must rest.

scholarly journals In Defense of Moderate Inclusivism: Revisiting Rawls and Habermas on Religion in the Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
pp. 143-157
Author(s):  
Jonas Jakobsen ◽  
Kjersti Fjørtoft
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Reasons ◽  
Do So

The paper discusses Rawls’ and Habermas’ theories of deliberative democracy, focusing on the question of religious reasons in political discourse. Whereas Rawls as well as Habermas defend a fully inclusivist position on the use of religious reasons in the ‘background culture’ (Rawls) or ‘informal public sphere’ (Habermas), we defend a moderately inclusivist position. Moderate inclusivism welcomes religiously inspired contributions to public debate, but it also makes normative demands on public argumentation beyond the ‘public forum’ (Rawls) or ‘formal public sphere’ (Habermas). In particular, moderate inclusivism implies what we call a ‘conversational translation proviso’ according to which citizens have a duty to supplement religious with proper political arguments if – but only if – they are asked to do so by their co-discussants. This position, we argue, is more in line with the deeper intuitions behind Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative model than is the fully inclusivist alternative. Keywords: conversational translation proviso, deliberative democracy, ethics of citizenship, Habermas, moderate inclusivism, public reason, Rawls

Making Faith One's Own: Kevin Hector's Defense of Modern Theology

2016 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles E. Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Paul Tillich ◽  
Divinity School ◽  
Ernst Troeltsch ◽  
The University ◽  
Central Claim

In The Theological Project of Modernism, Kevin Hector of the University of Chicago Divinity School offers a nuanced and timely defense of what he sees as an unjustifiably maligned tradition in modern Christian theology. He focuses on what is commonly labeled the liberal or revisionist tradition, centered in its early stages on figures such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch, and, more recently, Paul Tillich. By carefully reconstructing key arguments from these thinkers, Hector shows not only how this trajectory hangs together as a tradition, but also how its animating impulse differs from what many critics have assumed. Hector's central claim is that this tradition is fundamentally concerned with a distinctive problem, namely, how to relate religious faith to a sense of one's life as one's own—or, put differently, how one's faith can be self-expressive. Hector labels this the problem of “mineness,” or the problem of “how persons could identify with their lives or experience them as ‘mine,’ especially given their vulnerability to tragedy, injustice, luck, guilt, and other ‘oppositions’” (viii). Hector argues that for his chosen thinkers in this tradition, faith—more specifically, faith in a God who is able to reconcile such oppositions—plays a crucial role in resolving this problem.

scholarly journals A Window on the Soul: Four Politicians on Religion and Public Life

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Graham
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Political Values ◽  
Tony Blair ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Western Democracies

AbstractIn this article I examine public statements about the relationship between private faith and public reason through the pronouncements of four leading politicians: Tony Blair (United Kingdom), Helen Clark (New Zealand), Barack Obama (United States of America) and Kevin Rudd (Australia). Of the four, Blair and Rudd have been most articulate about the way in which their own personal faith-commitments have informed their political motivations, but in doing so both men have had to negotiate a broader cultural suspicion of 'doing God' in public. Whilst religion may be regarded as representing a strong 'moral compass' for a politician, those espousing a religious faith in public also have to contend with public anxieties about religious extremism. Of the other two, I argue that Obama speaks into a more receptive public arena, and that part of his skill has been to tap into a long-standing tradition in American public life which, despite separation of church and state, is more attuned to the casting of political values in religious language. Helen Clark is the only one of the four to identify herself as 'agnostic', yet her support for the 2007 Statement on Religious Diversity signals a new willingness on the part of a political culture that has tended to be 'functionally secular' to embrace the notion of religious faith as a part of healthy civil society. All four examples, therefore, furnish us with insights into different dimensions of the relationship between a politician's personal faith and their public accountability in contemporary western democracies.

Thank you to our contributors

1987 ◽  
Vol 25 (26) ◽  
pp. 104-104
Keyword(s):  
Pharmaceutical Industry ◽  
General Practitioners ◽  
Advisory Council ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

Articles in the Bulletin have been unsigned since it began. This is because they aim to present a consensus view which incorporates contributions from many people, including specialists, general practitioners and members of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the Bulletin’s Advisory Council. We are very grateful to them all, but although we have often been asked who they are, we cannot name the many hundreds who have helped us in any one year. However, we can at least name those not listed in our tailpiece who have taken a major share in the production of articles published in the last three years, and do so now. We also warmly thank Airlie Ogilvy, our production editor who retired recently after keeping the Bulletin going for 24 years.

A thankyou to our contributors

1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (26) ◽  
pp. 104.2-104
Keyword(s):  
Pharmaceutical Industry ◽  
General Practitioners ◽  
Advisory Council ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

Articles in the Bulletin have been unsigned since it began. This is because they aim to present a consensus view which incorporates contributions from many people, including specialists, general practitioners and members of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the Bulletin’s Advisory Council. We are very grateful to them all, but although we have often been asked who they are we cannot name the many hundreds who have helped us in any one year. However we can at least name those not listed in our tailpiece who have taken a major share in the production of articles published in 1983 and 1984, and do so now.

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