Abstract
In the introductory chapter I accounted for what Jürgen Habermas has depicted as the paradoxical return of both naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. The dilemma at hand concerned the mediation of “uncritical faith in science” and religious traditions critical of “the liberal assumptions of the Enlightenment.”1 Habermas has, in an essay titled The Boundary Between Faith and Knowledge (2008), described the inability of pure reason to generate values which can sustain a liberal democracy, by claiming that “pure practical reason can no longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a modernization spinning out of control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice.”2 Habermas’ “solution” to this dilemma involves the idea of context-transcendent validity claims, accessible through a discursive and postmetaphysical procedure.3 It is on this discursive account of reason that Habermas bases his strict distinction between faith and reason — a distinction central to his account of the post-secular. Thus, Habermas does not actively engage with metaphysical questions since he chooses to draw a strict distinction between religion and the secular, faith and reason, and between the transcendent and the immanent.
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Notes
Jonathan Z. Smith “Connections” in Jonathan Z. Smith, On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith (Oxford University Press, 2013), 54.
Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump, The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2012), 391.
Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6, 262.
Lawrence R. Pasternack, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Routledge, 2013), 18.
Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 69.
Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 356.
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays On A Life (Zone Books, 2005), 27.
William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Duke University Press, 2011), 70.
For an interesting critique of Milbank’s account of sociology, see: Hans Joas “Social Theory and the Sacred: A Response to John Milbank,” Ethical Perspectives 7, no. 4 (2000): 233–243.
William E Connolly “A Critique of Pure Politics,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 23, no. 5 (September 1, 1997): 13.
Charles Taylor “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture” in Taylor Carman, Mark B.N. Hansen, and Mark Boris Nicola Hansen, The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
John. Milbank “The Soul of Reciprocity Part Two: Reciprocity Granted,” Modern Theology 17, no. 4 (2001): 490.
Glen Lehman “Perspectives on Charles Taylor’s Reconciled Society Community, Difference and Nature,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 32, no. 3 (May 1, 2006): 348.
Mark Redhead “Charles Taylor’s Nietzschean Predicament A Dilemma More Self-Revealing than Foreboding,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 27, no. 6 (November 1, 2001): 81–106.
Charles Taylor “Why we need a radical redefinition of secularism” in Jürgen Habermas et al., The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), 50.
John Milbank “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions,” Modern Theology 7, no. 3 (1991): 229.
John Milbank “Liberality versus Liberalism,” in Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward, Religion and Political Thought, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 253.
Charles Taylor “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, Liberalism and the Moral Life (Harvard University Press, 1989), 165.
William E. Connolly “Catholicism and Philosophy — A Nontheistic Appreciation” in Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 183.
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© 2015 Josef Bengtson
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Bengtson, J. (2015). Post-Secular Visions. In: Explorations in Post-Secular Metaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137553362_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137553362_6
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