scholarly journals J.H. le Roux�s philosophy of religion

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaco W. Gericke

J.H. le Roux had a passion for philosophy. His writings contain recourse to the history of philosophy in a way that bespeaks a deep underlying interest in the subject. This much is relatively well-known. This contribution, by contrast, aims at reconstructing something hitherto mostly covert: Le Roux�s philosophy of religion. Of interest is what his writings presuppose about the nature of religion, religious language, the nature of God, the existence of God, religious epistemology, the relation between religion and morality and the problem of religious pluralism.

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacobus W. Gericke

This article discusses the concept of deity in the book of Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) from the perspective of issues of interest in analytic philosophy of religion. Of concern are assumptions in the text about religion, the nature of religious language, religious epistemology, the concept of revelation, the attributes of the divine, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the relation between religion and morality and religious pluralism. A comparative philosophical clarification is offered with the aim of discerning similarities and differences between popular views in Christian philosophical theology and what, if anything, Qohelet took for granted on the same issues.


Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 404
Author(s):  
William Large

Kant marks a fundamental break in the history of philosophy of religion and the concept of God. God is no longer interpreted as a being necessary to understand the existence of a rational universe, but as an idea that makes sense of our morality. Cohen supplements this idea with the concept of personality, which he argues is the unique contribution of Judaism. For Rosenzweig and Levinas, the monotheistic God is neither a being nor an idea, but the living reality of speech. What would the atheism be that responds to this theism? Linguistics makes a distinction between direct, indirect, and free indirect speech. In the latter form, the origin of speech is not a subject, but narrated language. It is this difference between direct and indirect speech that is missing in Rosenzweig and Levinas’s description of God. It would mean that God is produced by language rather than the subject of language. What menaces the reality of God is not whether God exists, or is intelligible, but the externality of language without a subject.


Author(s):  
Leon Roth

This chapter briefly explores the question of whether or not there is a Jewish philosophy. It first attempts to define what is meant by the phrase specifically and reviews extant scholarship on the subject. The chapter reveals a variety of possibilities as to the nature of the subject. At the one extreme there is David Neumark with his History of Philosophy among the Jews, then Salomon Munk and the generality of students with their histories of Jewish philosophy. The intermediate position is occupied by the histories of the Jewish philosophy of religion. After exploring this wealth of literature in some detail, the chapter goes on to explore the role of Judaism within the context of this question and presents reasons as to why the question of a Jewish philosophy is important in the first place.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Vanja Radakovic

In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist. However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it highlights the facts from the author?s life. This paper relies on a biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.


Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump ◽  
Norman Kretzmann

The distinctive, philosophically interesting concept of eternity arose very early in the history of philosophy as the concept of a mode of existence that was not only beginningless and endless but also essentially different from time. It was introduced into early Greek philosophy as the mode of existence required for fundamental reality (being) contrasted with ordinary appearance (becoming). But the concept was given its classic formulation by Boethius, who thought of eternity as God’s mode of existence and defined God’s eternality as ‘the complete possession all at once of illimitable life’. As defined by Boethius the concept was important in medieval philosophy. The elements of the Boethian definition are life, illimitability (and hence duration), and absence of succession (or timelessness). Defined in this way, eternality is proper to an entity identifiable as a mind or a person (and in just that sense living) but existing beginninglessly, endlessly and timelessly. Such a concept raises obvious difficulties. Some philosophers think the difficulties can be resolved, but others think that in the light of such difficulties the concept must be modified or simply rejected as incoherent. The most obvious difficulty has to do with the combination of atemporality and duration. Special objections have arisen in connection with ascribing eternality to God. Some people have thought that an eternal being could not do anything at all, especially not in the temporal world. But the notion of an atemporal person’s acting is not incoherent. Such acts as knowing necessary truths or willing that a world exist for a certain length of time are acts that themselves take no time and require no temporal location. An eternal God could engage in acts of cognition and of volition and could even do things that might seem to require a temporal location, such as answering a prayer. The concept of God’s eternality is relevant to several issues in philosophy of religion, including the apparent irreconcilability of divine omniscience with divine immutability and with human freedom.


Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Timpe

Free will is a perennial issue in philosophy, both in terms of the history of philosophy and in contemporary discussions. Aspects of free will relate to a wide range of philosophical issues, but especially to metaphysics and ethics. For roughly the past three decades, the literatures on free will and moral responsibility have overlapped to such a degree that it is impossible to separate them. This entry focuses on contemporary discussions about the nature and existence of free will, as well as its relationship to work in the sciences and philosophy of religion.


Dialogue ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Thomas Mathien

Some writers about the history of philosophy in Canada have wondered why it should be studied. That is a worthy question, but it is not the one I want to discuss here. I am going to assume there are good reasons for doing so because I want to consider some general features of the subject of such studies and to determine what has to be done to establish certain descriptive claims about it. I will also point out some concerns I have about the proper explanation of certain interesting features of Canadian philosophic activity, and I will present a brief evaluation of one major study. I will do this with the aid of a contention that the study of the history of an intellectual discipline is a little like an evolutionary study of a biological species, but I will close by pointing out one reason for doing history which goes beyond description, and even explanation, of the past.


Author(s):  
Dušan Travar

The author begins by first presenting Freud’s critique of religion and then Jung’s supplement encapsulated in his teachings concerning depth psychology. He explains the psychological approach to religious contents and the complementary rational attitude. He goes on to give a dynamic elaboration of the afore-mentioned supplementary attitude and to give a short perusal of Hegel’s motivation for a philosophy of religion. Religious reason is supplemented by creativity and love while querying and the method of questioning are given precedence over the mere giveness of facts as answers. The author concludes his articles with a brief review of trust as it is thematized through the history of philosophy and as it is acccepted in religion with all the ambiguity and wavering of the concept and die attendant behaviour.


2006 ◽  
pp. 38-42
Author(s):  
Georgii D. Pankov

An important place in the creative work of thinkers of the Orthodox tradition in the broad occupied the philosophical understanding of religion. However, the national religious and philosophical heritage of Orthodoxy of the past is mainly studied in the history of philosophy, but not in religious studies. Therefore, according to the author, for modern academic religious studies one of the urgent tasks is to study the philosophy of religion in its theological paradigm, which is expressed in its various confessional variants. While there are still no fundamental works in this field, but to create them it is necessary to take into account the experience of theological-philosophical thought and to critically revise it


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filip Spagnoli

The subject of the thesis - the universal value of human rights and democracy - is highly topical in view of the 'democratic imperialism' of the current (dd 2002) US-government. While leaving aside the problem of the acceptability of war as a means to promote democracy (e.g. the second Gulf War), the thesis focusses on a philosophical, moral and pragmatical defence of the universal application of democracy and human rights. Only if this defence is successful can the discussion on the means and tactics of democratic imperialism begin.The originality of the thesis is its defence of the universal value of both democracy and human rights. Whereas the defence of the universality of human rights has a long tradition, there is as yet almost no literature on the universal desirability of democracy. The defence is partly philosophical, ethical, political, legal and practical. It draws on the history of philosophy and ethics, as well as on political science.


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