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Notes
See The Future of Religion / R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, ed. S. Zabala, New York, Columbia University Press 2005, 40.
R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, London/New York 1999, 168 (ch. ‘Religion As Conversation-stopper’).
Ibid., 161 (ch. ‘Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance;’ the emphasis is mine).
The Future of Religion / R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, 40.
R. Rorty, ‘Cultural politics and the question of the existence of God’, in N. Frankenbery (ed.), Radical Interpretation in Religion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, 53.
Kaufman argues: ‘God should today be conceived in terms of the complex of physical, biological and historico-cultural conditions which have made human existence possible, which continue to sustain it and which may draw it out to fuller humanity and humanness.’ See G. Kaufman, Theology for a Nuclear Age, Westminster, Philadelphia 1985, 42.
R. Rorty, ‘Cultural politics and the question of the existence of God,’ 56.
R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 81.
Cf. J. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford 2004, 32–33.
W. Dean, American Religious Empiricism, State University of New York Press, Albany 1986, 30.
W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1976, 19.
S.G. Davaney, ‘Directions in Historicism: Language, Experience, and Pragmatic Adjudication’, in W. Creighton Peden and L.E. Axel, New Essays in Religious Naturalism, Mercer University Press, Macon 1993, 59.
W. Dean, ‘Empirical Theology: A Revisable Tradition’, in Process Studies 19/2 (Summer 1990), 87.
Cf. W. James, ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?, ’ in W. James, Writings 1902–1910, 1144.
R.D. Boisvert, John Dewey: rethinking our time, State University of New York Press, New York 1998, 10.
‘I believe that “consciousness”, when once it has evaporated to this state of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.’ W. James, Essays on Radical Empiricism, 3.
J. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in: The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1991, 26.
W. James, ‘The Chicago School, ’ in W. James, Writings 1902–1910, 1137.
J. Dewey, Experience and Nature, in: The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1988, 205.
W. G. Frisina, ‘Minds, Bodies, Experience Nature: Is Panpsychism Really Dead?,’ in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty, 163 and 166. For the principle of continuity and see also M. Johnson, ‘Mind incarnate: from Dewey to Damasio,’ 49.
According to W. Dean, with the American religious empiricist’s tradition we think of Edwards, James, Dewey, the Chicago School of theology, the empirical wing of process theology and, recently, W. Dean and N. Frankenberry (see W. Dean, American Religious Empiricism, SUNY Press, Albany, NY 1986, Ch. 2, 49).
D. Brown, Boundaries of our Habituations: Tradition and Theological Construction, State University of New York Press, Albany 1994, 101. Brown refers to Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.
On a phenomenological interpretation of radical empiricism see Lenart Skof, ‘Pragmatism and Social Ethics: An Intercultural and Phenomenological Approach,’ Contemporary Pragmatism, Vol 5, No. 1 (June 2008), 121–146.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (tr. A. Lingis), Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1968, 248.
Rorty explicitly draws on Dewey’s A Common Faith in his paper ‘Anticlericalism and Atheism’ (The Future of Religion, 33, n.2)
R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 79, 82 and 83.
R. Rorty, ‘Anticlericalism and Atheism,’ 40.
R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 198281.
R. Roty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, 15.
R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 72.
I refer to Rorty’s ‘Introduction’ to his Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, 5)
Ibid.
R. Rorty, ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty,’ in Richard Rorty: critical dialogues, ed. M. Fastenstein and S. Thompson, Polity, Cambridge, 2001, 235. For Rorty, loyalty ‘springs (...) from sentiment’ (225).
See J.-L. Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, tr. R. Horner and V. Berraud, Ferdham University Press, New York, 2002, p. 83 ff.: ‘(...) that the feeling essence of the ego, which thinks insofar as it feels (itself), appears, more than implicitly, right before its existence is proved’in a flow of argumentation that claims precisely to prove it. (...) The ego gives itself as flesh, even if one wants to hide it.’ (86–87) For the notion of flesh (Leib) in Husserl see n. 13 in Marion’s essay.
Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Introduction,’ in Signs (tr. R. C. McCleary), Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1964, p. 15: ‘... my twins or the flesh of my flesh.’
J. Dewey, Art as Experience, in: The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1987, 62.
W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 19.
As an example of an intercultural invariance I would like to point to two important Asian concepts. Firstly, in Japan, the notion of qi as wind-body (the wind of breathing) is described as follows: ‘the inspiration and expiration, the wind-body of the person, is nothing but the movement of which the human being is directly aware in his or her body.’ It is a ‘pre-logical logos of world’ (T. Ogawa, ‘Qi and phenomenology of wind,’ 322 and 332). For ki/qi in Japan see S. Nagatomo, ‘Ki-Energy: Underpinning Religion and Ethics,’ Zen Buddhism Today, no. 8 (Oct. 1990), 124–139. Note that Nagatomo’s analogy of ki and spiritus in his paper is not arbitrary: the lat. spiritus (‘a breath’) is etymologically related to the IE root *(s)peis- (‘to blow’), primarily being energy present in all living beings. Secondly, in Indian Vedic (Upanishadic) thought, breath is the primary epistemological phenomenon: it is in breath or ‘prana’ that our life dwells. ‘Prana’ precedes the mind (‘manas’) of consciousness (‘vijnana’). According to early Indian Upanishadic thought, breathing preceedes all other vital functions, including our ability to speak. In an idiosyncratic Vedic plural form, ‘pranah’ (‘breaths’) actually denotes a group of five vital powers/senses − thinking, speech, sight, hearing, and breathing. Breathing is the ‘best’ among them and these vital powers/sense faculties are thus idiosyncratically named after him.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, tr. A. Lingis, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968, 139 (my emphasis).
Merleau-Ponty and enviromental philosophy: dweling on the landscapes of thought, eds. S.L. Cataldi and W.S. Hamrick, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2007, 4.
C. Bigwood, ‘Logos of our eco in the feminine,’ in Merleau-Ponty and enviromental philosophy: dweling on the landscapes of thought, 105.
Ibid., 95. From the perspecitve of ecofeminism, ‘they [i.e., women], see a need to think feelingly, to pay attention to the health of our children and our bodies, and they make the use of intuitions that can occur in our simplest day-to-day experiences.’ (94) Is this not an expression of the Rortyan (as he draws on A. Baier) insistence on things in our lives that ‘come naturally’ and that have to be extended towards (Deweyan/pragmatist, a common faith) vision of the world ‘in which all men and women are brothers and sisters?’ (Philosophy and Social Hope, 78 and 80.)
Cf. C. Bigwood, ‘Logos of our eco in the feminine,’ 111.
Cf. L. Irigaray’s Between East and West, Delhi, New Age Books, 2005, p. 79 f.: a woman shares her vital breath by giving oxygen to the foetus, or she shares her spiritual breath with God and with humanity (this is the meaning of Mary’s virginity for Irigaray). See also her essay ‘The Age of the Breath’, in L. Irigaray, Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), ch. 14.
N. Frankenberry, Religion and Radical Empiricism, 134. The citation is from Dewey’s A Common Faith, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1934, 19 (Frankenberry refers to Meland’s designations of an empirical import of ‘God’).
Or, perhaps, Being: ‘It is “my body applying itself to the rest of the perceived,” and this relationship in turn becomes both possible and comprehensible “because there is Being.”’ (See Merleau-Ponty and enviromental philosophy: dweling on the landscapes of thought, 4; the original citation is from The Visible and the Invisible, 250). See also J.-L. Marion’s final question in his In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena ‘does the taking of flesh (...) open onto, at the very least, a possibility of thinking in reason the theological Incarnation’ (103).
S.G. Davaney, ‘Directions in Historicism: Language, Experience, and Pragmatic Adjudication,’ in W. Creighton Peden and L.E. Axel, New Essays in Religious Naturalism, Mercer University Press, Macon 1993, 59.
R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 79 (the emphasis is mine) and ‘Anticlericalism and Atheism,’ 40.
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Skof, L. Body and Religion: A Phenomenologico-empirical Interpretation of Rorty’s Neopragmatism. SOPHIA 50, 91–99 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0188-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0188-2