Natural Society and Natural Religion, 1750–1756

Author(s):  
Richard Bourke

Prior to developing his conception of the limits of natural reason, Burke had come to privilege the achievements of artificial reason. He acquired this preference during the course of his legal studies. This chapter describes how within five years of his arrival in London, Burke was extending his ideas about the limits of pure reason to contemporary debates about the mysteries of the creation and revelation. He first ventured along this path in a series of essays that he wrote in the early 1750s. His first major publication, A Vindication of Natural Society is less an exercise in political philosophy than a literary polemic concerned to expose the limits of deism. Together with his early essays, it reveals the scale and depth of his suspicion of religious skepticism as publicised by men like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, and Bolingbroke. It provides a glimpse his early debts to Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Berkeley, as well as his enduring sympathy with the epistemologies of Locke and Butler.

Author(s):  
Kevin Thompson

This chapter examines systematicity as a form of normative justification. Thompson’s contention is that the Hegelian commitment to fundamental presuppositionlessness and hence to methodological immanence, from which his distinctive conception of systematicity flows, is at the core of the unique form of normative justification that he employs in his political philosophy and that this is the only form of such justification that can successfully meet the skeptic’s challenge. Central to Thompson’s account is the distinction between systematicity and representation and the way in which this frames Hegel’s relationship to the traditional forms of justification and the creation of his own distinctive kind of normative argumentation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 161-176

La potencia de la ficción en el pensamiento nietzscheano Resumen analítico.-El presente trabajo analiza las implicancias de la ficción sobre la posibilidad del conocimiento y la razón. Partiendo desde la obra de Nietzsche, se recorrerá las diferentes valencias de la ficción tanto en sus obras tempranas como tardías. En tanto el conocimiento, se partirá de la propedéutica realizada por Kant en La crítica de la razón pura haciendo al distinguir entre el mundo fenoménico y el mundo nouménico. Clarificando la metodología kantiana en la obra citada se puede observar cómo las ideas de la razón poseen una faceta ficcional. En el eje de la Razón como nuevo Dios, emerge la propuesta arkhica de un ordenamiento que es la raíz de la metafísica occidental. La mitologización de la razón, tal como lo menciona Adorno, es la creación de una nueva ficción que da sentido a la existencia. Por ello, la logicización del lenguaje, como lo detecta Cacciari, es la respuesta encontrada por Nietzsche en la propia razón para la formulación de un sentido aprehensible de mundo. Palabras claves: Ficción -Razón -Conocimiento -Mitologización –Arkhé The power of fiction in the nietzschean thought Abstract.-This paper analyzes the implications of fiction on the possibility of knowledge and reason. Starting from Nietzsche's work, the different valences of fiction will be traversed in both his early and late works. Concerning knowledge, it will be based on the propaedeutic realized by Kant in Critique of pure reason, distinguishing between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Clarifying the Kantian methodology in the cited work, one can see how the ideas of reason have a fictional facet. Being Reason the new God, the arkhica proposal of an order that is the root of western metaphysics emerges. The mythologization of reason, as Adorno mentions it, is the creation of a new fiction that gives meaning to existence. Therefore, the logicization of language, as Cacciari mentions, is the answer found by Nietzsche in his own reason for the formulation of an apprehensive sense of the world. Keywords: Fiction -Reason -Knowledge -Mythologization -Arkhé


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (01) ◽  
Author(s):  
Günter ZÖLLER

The essay focuses Kant’s engagement with Plato at the beginning of the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, which presents a crucial but often overlooked feature of Kant’s magnum opus. In particular, the essay examines Kant’s positive pronouncements on the “Platonic republic” (Platonische Republik) in Book One of the Transcendental Dialectic by placing them in the twofold context of the first Critique’s affirmative retake on Plato’s Forms (Ideen) and its original views on juridico-political matters. More specifically, the essay aims to show that Kant’s prime position in legal and political philosophy, as contained in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), involves a normative conception of civic life that places the societal exercise of individual freedom under universal laws. Section 1 explores the extent of affinity between Plato and Kant as arch-representatives of ancient and modern idealism. Section 2 traces the transition from Platonic dogmatism to Kantian criticism in the theory of ideas. Section 3 presents Kant’s appropriation of the idea of the “Platonic republic” for purposes of a specifically modern republican account of the rule of law under conditions of freedom.


1984 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 195-208
Author(s):  
Renford Bambrough

‘Does the planetary impact of Western thought allow for a real dialogue among civilizations?’ This arresting question was set to the lecturers at the first international symposium of the Iranian Centre for the Study of Civilizations, which took place in Tehran in October 1977. Plans were made for a second symposium to be held in January 1979 under the title ‘The Limits of Knowledge According to Different World-views’. The Director's letter of invitation amplified the theme in a series of questions:For instance, is the agnosticism which has now extended to a world-wide level the consequence of the destruction of objective reason, namely the universal logos, as conceived earlier in the great metaphysical doctrines of the East and the West? Is there any organic link among these: the creation of modern political myths, the individual's fragmentation and the reduction of thought to its mere instrumentality? Is knowledge limited solely to our calculating reason or can it lead to spheres raising us above the limits determined by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason?


Author(s):  
Jean-Loup Seban

Matthew Tindal was one of the last and most learned exponents of English deism. His most famous work is Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), a comprehensive apology for natural religion. In it, he argued that God’s law is imprinted on the nature of all things, including the human soul, and is accessible to reason. Revealed religion merely restates this universal law – the will of God – in a different form. Religion enables us to act in accordance with this natural order, and its end is happiness. However, Tindal was scathingly critical of the clergy, and cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible. Although Tindal’s work was severely criticized by William Law, it exerted a considerable influence on the English and Continental Enlightenment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-265
Author(s):  
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the Third World is not only a geographical term, but also one that denotes the linguistic zones, another term of the minority. The essay argues that the concept of the Third World is related to minor literature, the minor or intense use of language. This ‘transcendental exercise’ of writing is an opposition to the initial purpose of language, namely representation. Language must escape from its normative usage, and then be liberated to a new spatio-temporality, in other words, the linguistic Third World zones. My conclusion is that the creation of Third World linguistic zones is the repetition of differences against the generalisation of representation, such as becoming non-human and non-European, not in imitation of the molar form of the animal or a non-continent extending terrestrial power into the ocean, but as the right way to invent the people missing in the Third World. Inventing the people of the Third World is the right condition in which alternative political subjects can be produced through desubjectification, not domestication, by capitalist axiomatics. In this way, Deleuze's political philosophy aims to use the virtual politics of the Third World to radicalise the actual representation of the existing Left.


2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Führding

Abstract This article discusses the role of the category Religion in the modern state formation. The liberal private/public religion/state rhetoric plays a central part in the “rise” of the modern state. The binary oppositions of this rhetoric are crucial to the creation of a very unique type of society, which serves as the basis for the formation of the modern state. With reference to Russell McCutcheon, this essay examines this process, drawing on examples from early modern political philosophy (e.g., Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau), before explicitly tackling the question of the role of religion by addressing two German (Fischer and Böckenförde) authors in particular.


1998 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Cavallar ◽  
August Reinisch

Nowadays Kant's practical philosophy (including his political philosophy) is as highly regarded as his theoretical philosophy. This is an important development since the more constructive side of Kant's philosophy is to be found in his moral and political works. The main task of the Critique of Pure Reason is to clarify its concepts and to get rid of basic errors, and thus only ‘negative’. The moral and political writings, on the other hand, try to expand the scope of reason ‘for practical purposes’ (‘in praktischer Absicht’). Establishing principles of moral and political conduct, their main objective is not negative, but constructive.


2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Burns

AbstractWhen discussing the preconditions of liberal Islamic politics, liberal theorists often advocate the reinterpretation of traditional religious texts in light of liberal political theory. Such an interpretive project is worth comparing to a similar project conceived by the medieval Islamic philosopher Alfarabi, whose effort to introduce Greek political philosophy into his political-religious community parallels these efforts to introduce liberal theory into Islamic communities. Alfarabi argued that traditional texts should be reinterpreted in light of a new political science, one based on Greek sources but adapted to the unique needs of a community like his. This article shows how Alfarabi conceived of these adaptations, emphasizing the flexibility that he thought students of Greek political philosophy should adopt in accommodating even Islamic doctrines that they could not fully accept.


2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 513-514
Author(s):  
Eldon J. Eisenach

The Biblical Politics of John Locke, Kim Ian Parker, Editions SR, Volume 29; Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004, pp. ix, 211.Parker's study is on the foundational role played by the creation story of Genesis in Locke's moral and political philosophy. Locke's First Treatise against patriarchalism was not only a refutation of Filmer's reading of Adam and original sin, it was a positive rereading of that story suggesting “an emancipation of humanity almost unprecedented in theological writings” (38). Locke's distinction between paternal and political power, then, is not merely a way of “scoring polemical points against Filmer” but becomes a way “to form the basis of his political theory” (120). What can too easily be read as “merely” exegetical polemic in the First Treatise is translated into philosophical argument in the Second Treatise.


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