Daniel Whistler

The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

deems its natural course. The natural progression of society is from a primarily agrarian stage, one in which men will be free, if they are independent holders of sufficient landed property to meet their own needs and produce a surplus. The arts will subsequently flourish in proportion to the accumulation of wealth from below. Diderot being Diderot, he does not forget women. He writes of their status and condition in savage societies, which he depicts as dismal. On this view, European women may not be free, but their lives are incomparably better than those of their ‘savage’ counterparts. Nor, of course, can Diderot resist the lure of the subject of sexuality, and he provides his own fantastic explanations for the alleged ubiquitousness of homosexuality amongst Native American peoples. Such touches of self-indulgence aside, what emerges from these various pieces is Diderot’s strong commitment to individual autonomy and freedom from social and political interference, whether for the individual’s good or ill, and his equally forceful endorsement of the right of private property, with the important proviso as to what can never be legitimately acquired: another human being. Because of his unqualified belief in the inviolability of individual liberty, Diderot asserts that no man can become the property of another, whether the latter be a sovereign, father or master; and nor can a wife become the property of a husband. Through his splendidly annotated edition of Pensées détachées ou Fragments politiques, Goggi underscores the extent to which Diderot set the political tone of Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique, and reminds us of the richness of his thought and its enduring relevance. The edition also abundantly demonstrates the importance of listening to the multitude of conversations that Diderot contributed to, and the significance of the intellectual and other networks within which he thought, wrote and published.

The right to wear religious symbols

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Table of Cases Table of Statutes & Treaties Introduction: Philosophy of Religion goes to Court PART I: TRENDS IN ARTICLE 9(1) 1. The Manifestation Test 2. The Myth of the Necessity Test 3. The Practical Turn PART II: UNDERSTANDING THE PRACTICAL TURN 4. The UK Government and Generally Recognized Practices 5. The Participative Symbol 6. High-level and Low-level Beliefs Conclusion: Why Eweida Won Bibliography Index

Introduction to the Special Issue: Speculative Philosophies and Religious Practices

Abstract This article maps the political and theoretical landscapes that have led to this volume, which represents the first attempt to outline an open, yet strategic and critical, dialogue between certain traditions in philosophy of religion and practical/public theology. It identifies the speculative return of the Real within recent continental philosophy and the interest in the lived materialities and practices of religion as the shared points of connection and overlap between these two disciplines, together with a commitment to make a viable contribution to the current UK debates surrounding the Big Society and the Age of Austerity.

Schelling on Individuation

ABSTRACT This paper traces Schelling’s discussions of individuation from the 1799 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie to the 1802 dialogue, Bruno. It argues that the Erster Entwurf is unable to solve what Schelling there calls “the highest problem of the philosophy of nature,” because nature as pure productivity necessarily tends to annihilate all individuality. It is only in 1801 and 1802, the years that mark Schelling’s construction of an Identitätssystem, that a solution emerges. This solution is based on the rejection of one of the defining orthodoxies of German Idealism, Spinoza’s dictum that omnis determinatio est negatio, and on the subsequent theorization of a form of infinite finitude. Consideration of Schelling’s changing attitude to the problem of individuation is intended as a case study of the more general shift from Naturphilosophie to Identitätssystem.

NATURALISM AND SYMBOLISM

Abstract I argue that Schelling’s construction of symbolic language is to be understood as an application of Naturphilosophie; indeed, more generally, that the concept of the symbol theorised anew in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany was predominantly a naturphilosophische concept, and its transfer into the discourses of aesthetics and ultimately linguistics was one instance of a broader project (represented by Schelling and A.W. Schlegel) to understand aesthetic phenomena through the explanatory framework of naturalism. That is, Schelling is here understood as continuing a project of “aesthetic naturalism,” which consists in the explanation of aesthetic phenomena naturalistically. In their theories of symbolic language, Schlegel and Schelling both extend such naturalistic accounts to the production of linguistic sense, and I go on to trace this Naturphilosophie of meaning through Schlegel’s 1801 Berlin lectures on aesthetics, Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art and into his later essays.

The Abandoned Fiancée, or Against Subjection

In this chapter, I argue—in the wake of Michele Le Doeuff—against the valorization of subjection that has taken hold of modern theology. Analysing Graham Ward’s Christ and Culture, I contend that the recent penchant for an ethics of kenosis in religious thought leads ultimately—despite explicit protestations to the contrary—to a conception of subjectivity as constituted in servitude before Christ. However, this criticism is not—pace Ward—to apply secular, Enlightenment values to a distinct post-secular realm; rather, in the second half of the chapter, I enter into dialogue with Le Doeuff’s criticisms of Soren Kierkegaard, in order to suggest that co-existing with Kierkegaard’s misogyny towards his abandoned fiancee, there is also an adherence in his work to a Le Doeuffean ethics of friendship. Thus, I conclude, Christianity is not incompatible with modernity.

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: schellingian experiments in speculation

T he following essays are attempts to take seriously Iain Hamilton Grant’s claim in the above passage that “Schelling is a contemporary philosopher.” Schelling is read in dialogue with key figures in the canon of European philosophy and critical theory (Badiou, Chat̂elet, Deleuze, de Man, Meillassoux, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Žizěk, Malabou), as well as in light of recent trends in analytic philosophy (Brandomian pragmatism, powers-based metaphysics and semantic naturalism) – and such readings are not meant merely to highlight Schellingian influences or resonances in contemporary thinking, but rather to challenge and interrogate current orthodoxies by insisting upon the contemporaneity of Schellingian speculation. To quote Grant once more, “Schellingianism is resurgent every time philosophy reaches beyond the Kant-inspired critique of metaphysics, its subjectivist-epistemological transcendentalism, and its isolation of physics from metaphysics” (5). Speculative philosophy is not dead; it is, in fact, enjoying quite a notorious renaissance – and the rehabilitation of Schellingianism has played a substantive role in this. Two decades ago, F.W.J. Schelling’s name first resurfaced as a resource for contemporary philosophising in Slavoj Žizěk’s The Indivisible Remainder, and Žizěk’s strategy of redeploying Schellingian themes for contemporary ends has continued to play a role, more or less subterranean, in the writings of many since (Gabriel, Laruelle, Nancy). However, it was in 2006 with the publication of Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling that Schelling was most fully revived as a dialogue-partner for contemporary thinking. Grant recapitulates the famous passage from the Freiheitsschrift in which Schelling bemoans the lack of a concept of nature in post-Cartesian philosophies by extending it to all post-Kantian philosophies and even Schelling scholarship itself. Thus, Grant speaks of “all post-Cartesian European

The Critical Project in Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild

Thomas Altizer begins his most recent “call to radical theology” with the following demand for “unthinking”: A genuinely radical theology is a theological thinking that truly rethinks the deepest ground of theology, a rethinking that is initially an unthinking of every established theological ground; only through such an unthinking can a clearing be established for theological thinking, and that is the very clearing which is the first goal of radical theology. Nor can this be accomplished by a simple dissolution of our given theological grounds, for those are the very grounds that must here be ultimately challenged, and challenged in terms of their most intrinsic claims.1

The Practical Turn

We argue that the jurisprudence of the ECtHR has noticeably shifted over the past couple of decades. We call this shift from concentrating on beliefs to concentrating on actions or practices ‘the practical turn’. Before the shift, we contend, the courts tended to view actions, such as the exhibition or wearing of religious symbols, solely in the light of their function of expressing antecedent religious beliefs. The courts then asked themselves whether the actions really manifested the beliefs. Recently, we suggest, the courts have been happier to assume that the actions do manifest the beliefs, and then to weigh up the believer’s right to manifest faith in that way with the competing rights of others.

Introduction: Philosophy of Religion Goes to Court

The introduction attempts to demonstrate that philosophers do have a distinctive contribution to make to the study of the role of religious symbols in the law of human rights. Court judgments often explicitly or implicitly make significant assertions concerning the role of religious symbols, for example that religious symbols exist merely to express antecedent religious beliefs. These assertions are properly philosophical rather than legal, and therefore should be subjected to philosophical scrutiny. Philosophers have the necessary training and knowledge of the discussion of assertions like these in order properly to evaluate them.