Author: Douglas R McGaughey

A Post-Factual World? (10 Pages) – Updated July 2019

Updated 13 July 2019

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A Post-Factual World?

The boogey-man is alive and well in our scientifically “enlightened” age:  Knowledge is profoundly under siege by a threatening relativism called the “post-factual” and “post-truth” world.  Even well-intended proponents of cultural relativism have been seduced by a “world view” that at first appears to be a challenge to all “dogmatisms” but in the end undermines the very confidence in understanding that is necessary for humanity to constructively and responsibly play its role in the order of things.  The consistent relativist, like the radical skeptic, is left with no foot on which to stand to question anything, not least the injustices of her/his own society much less injustices in another society.

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Zero Sum or Principles? (11 Pages) 13 November 2016 – Updated July 2019

Updated 13 July 2019

Zero Sum or Principles? by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Zero Sum or Principles?[1]

Abstract:  If we refuse to accept materialistic reductionism that makes our social lives exhaustively the product of capricious genetics, the amygdala, and chemicals in the brain like oxytocin, we are the species that can ask what we should do.  By playing a zero sum game,[2] one knows who “won” whereas acting on principle gives one the satisfaction that one tried to do more than “win.” However, here it is claimed that the alternative of a zero sum game and principles represents not an exclusive dyad as if one can pursue one of the options only by exclusion of the other.  Both are symptomatic of humanity’s “radical” evil and “radical” goodness.  We can pursue one or the other only because we have the capacity to do both. Hence, deeper than decline, progress, or stagnation is an understanding of humanity as the source of a causal efficacy that is not reducible to physical causality and, therefore, this suggests that with humanity we find in degree an “openness” in nature that allows for creative change while demanding assumption of moral responsibility for the exercise of humanity’s creative power.

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What is ‘Radical Evil?:’ A Reading of Ricoeur on Kant and Religion (21 Pages) – Updated July 2019

Updated July 2019

What is ‘Radical’ Evil?: A Reading of Ricoeur on Kant and Religionby Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

 

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What is ‘Radical’ Evil?:

A Reading of Ricoeur on Kant and Religion

Introduction

What follows I can best describe as a “lover’s quarrel” anchored, for my part, in deep gratitude and respect.  On the one hand, I will strenuously critique Ricoeur’s reading of Kant, particularly with respect to 1) the ontological status of “radical” evil, 2) the anchoring of morality in violence, 3) Ricoeur’s “deliberative,” hence, consequentialist ethic, and 4) his limiting of religion to historical religion.  On the other hand, the “ontology” of his theory of metaphor as well as the centrality of the “productive imagination” in his theory of discourse are applauded vigorously and can be viewed as thoroughly in harmony with the “ground” of Kant’s ethical reflections, “autonomous freedom,” which will be proposed as a more comprehensive “ground” for morality, and a more adequate “ground” for understanding of religion.

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Freedom on This and the Other Side of Kant – Unabridged – (15 Pages) September 2015 – Updated August 2019

Updated August 2019

 

Unabridged:  Freedom on This and the Other Side of Kant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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This paper was presented in its abridged form at the 12. International Kant Congress. The abridged version is published in Natur und Freiheit, Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, hrsg. v. Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing und David Wagner (Berlin/Boston, 2018:  1959-1966 – Proceedings of the 12th International Kant Society Meeting at the University of Vienna, Austria (September 21-25, 2015).

For the abridged version published in the conference proceedings, see the second entry under “Category: Freedom on This and the Other Side of Kant” at https://criticalidealism.org

PUBLISHING GUIDELINES FOLLOWED FOR THIS PAPER: See End of Paper

 

Freedom on This and the Other Side of Kant[1]

Axel Honneth[2] and Charles Taylor[3] represent a tendency to trace the “archaeology” of the notion of freedom either to G.W.F. Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts[4]or to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty.[5]”  Without claiming to be an exhaustive investigation of the discussion of freedom since or prior to Immanuel Kant, this paper proposes, however, that the meaning of freedom since Kant has for all intents and purposes overlooked the tradition of autonomous freedom prior to Kant that stems from Pico della Mirandola and influenced Leibniz, Sulzer, and Tetens – all of whom shaped Kant’s understanding of freedom.

Terminology

In his Vorschule der Ästhetik[6] of 1804, Jean Paul observes that the dictionary is full of dead metaphors.  However, metaphors never die.  Rather, they leave open the possibility of anachronistic distortions of them by subsequent generations.  We are well advised, therefore, to first provide “concept clarifications” before we begin our discussion of freedom on this and the other side of Kant.[7]

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Enlightenment: Reflections on Michel Foucault’s “Was ist Aufklärung? [“What is Enlightenment”] 7 February 2016

“Enlightenment:
Reflections on Michel Foucault’s ‘Was ist Aufklärung?'”[1]

At least since the French „Encyclopedists,” the notion of enlightenment has been associated with knowledge of the correct facts.  As a consequence, even Kant’s famous aphorism for labelling enlightenment, Sapere Aude! (Dare to know for oneself!), has been frequently taken to mean:  assume responsibility for your own knowledge of the facts (i.e., don’t trust authorities to be providing you with the true facts)!

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On Martha Nussbaum’s Reading of Kant March 31, 2016 (5 Pages) – Updated July 2019

Updated 14 July 2019

On Martha Nussbaum’s Reading of Kant by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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On Martha Nussbaum’s Reading of Kant: Aristotelean Teleology Meets Kantian Archaeology

The following is an email that was sent to Herman Waetjen, Emeritus Professor of the San Francisco Theological Seminary and Berkeley’s GTU.  During a recent visit with him in San Anselmo, Herman shared with me passages from Martha Nussbaum’s , Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,2006) that offer her reading of Kant on reason, morality, and humanity’s responsibilities to nature, other species, and the physically and mentally challenged. Herman had written a paper on “Towards a Theology of Animals” for the Spring 2016 meeting of the Pacific Coast Theological Society meeting. His paper is available on-line at https://www.academia.edu. This email provides my response to what I take to be a serious but, unfortunately, all too frequent “mis-reading” of Kant.  To be sure, every reading of a text is an interpretation, but that fact is no license to generate any whimsical reading that serves one’s purposes in the moment.  As Paul Ricoeur proposed: A good reading is congruent with the text and generates a plenitude of rich meaning. A poor reading is narrow and far-fetched. In my judgment, Martha Nussbaum’s reading of Kant is incredibly narrow and far-fetched, even if there are powerful voices in the academy today who share her reading.

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PhD Dissertation – The University of Chicago Divinity School

The following is Doug’s Dissertation submitted to and accepted by The Divinity School of The University of Chicago in 1983.  The doctoral adviser was Prof. Paul Ricoeur, and the readers were Profs. David Tracy and Langdon Gilkey.

If one’s intellectual life is an odyssey, it would be a shock to look back over thirty-plus years at this dissertation to find myself entirely in agreement with everything in it.  I am by no means shocked.  However, back then I had the “clever” idea that one can establish a parallel between the “metaphor” that functions “at the level of the sentence” and the “symbol” that functions “at the level of the narrative.”  I have since followed Langdon Gilkey’s wise advice to read Ernst Cassirer’s corpus, especially his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, to learn that I was addressing only a segment of symbols, that is, religious symbols.  In most circumstances, I would be now more comfortable were the reader to substitute “religious symbol” wherever “symbol” occurs. I was unable to find a publisher for this early work (I couldn’t even get a publisher to send it out to readers) so that I am posting it here.  Although I have some reservations, I am arrogant enough to believe that there are elements here that justify its being accessible on-line.

Creative Commons License
On the Soteriological Sitnificance of the Symbol of the Kingdom of God in the Language of the Historical Jesus by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Title Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Selected Bibliography

Critical Idealism: A Brief Introduction

Critical Idealism:  A Brief Introduction

Critical Idealism has been out of favor at least since the Vienna Circle imperially proclaimed in the first third of the Twentieth Century that there are no such things as a priori synthetic judgments.  Because that’s what intellectuals in Europe wanted to hear as they turned away both from religious revelation and from Hegel’s spiritual meta-narrative toward the physical world, few (if any) bothered to ask just what an a priori synthetic judgment was – according to Immanuel Kant.  In fact, the Vienna Circle presupposed precisely what it denied. 

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Should Foreign Language Acquisition be Required? 29 December 2016 (5 Pages)

“Should Language Acquisition be Required” by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Should Foreign Language Acquisition be Required?
29 December 2016

According to today’s NY Times (29 December 2016), Princeton University is making the learning of a new language a mandatory requirement of its General Education program — even for those already proficient in a second language.  I’m commenting here because I don’t have a Facebook account, which the NY Times requires for commenting on their blog.

In our day, it is an incredible privilege as a US citizen to know a second language if you are not an immigrant or from a recently immigrated family.  It is a privilege because foreign languages unlike in almost all other industrialized nations are not required in elementary school, and, increasingly, they are not required in high school even for those intending to go on to college because even colleges are rapidly dropping the requirement. After all, all one needs to get ahead in the world these days is English because the whole world has committed to English as the lingua franca of research and business.  I am among the privileged able to afford two summers at Middlebury College’s Summer German School at the ripe age of 31.  I know full well that the costs in time and money make such an experience simply impossible for most Americans. Continue reading “Should Foreign Language Acquisition be Required? 29 December 2016 (5 Pages)”

Waetjen on Romans 17 November 2013 (10 Pages) – Updated July 2019

Updated July 2019

Waetjen on Romans: A Hermeneutics of Disclosure and Justice by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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A Hermeneutics of Disclosure and Justice:
A Reading of Herman Waetjen’s The Letter to the Romans:  Salvation as Justice and the Deconstruction of the Law

 Abstract

Herman Waetjen offers a profound reading of Paul that takes as its clue Romans 1:17:  “For (gar) the justice of God (dikaiosynē theou) is being revealed in it [the gospel] out of trust into trust (ek pisteōs eis pistin) even as it is written, ‘The just will live out of trust (ek pisteōs)’.”  What follows understands Herman’s project to be an example of the hermeneutics of disclosure that calls not only the Christian community but also all humanity to do justice in faith/trust.  This paper applauds enthusiastically Herman’s reading of Paul and places it in the context of the relationship between what Kant calls “historical” and “pure” religion.  In short, although one can neither prove nor disprove whether the Christ event involves an ontological change in the human condition that establishes a New Moral Order as an “historical” religion claims, one can unequivocally affirm that a deconstructed (de-mythologized) Paul challenges humanity “to become what we are” in the sense of trusting in the “law that is above law” to pursue justice “this side of the grave.”  Here we have a concrete example of “pure” religion at the core of a “historical” religion and of a New Testament scholar as vanguard engineer of the locomotive of faith rather than leading a rear guard at the back of the train defending “Reformation heresy.”

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One World, One Reason, One Religion, but Many Faiths: Religious Studies in an Age of Pluralism (12 Pages) – Updated March 2020

Updated March 2020

“One World, One Reason, One Religion, but Many Faiths: Religious Studies in an Age of Pluralism” [With an Excursus: The nihilism of Meaning and Pure Religion] by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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One World, One Reason, One religion, but Many faiths.: Religious Studies in an Age of Pluralism
[With an
“Excursus.: The Nihilism of Meaning and Pure Religion”]

Abstract

Contrary to the popular notion that “all religions are different paths to the same God” this paper proposes that what unites all religion is not God (much less doctrine, ritual, or institutional structure) but the shared physical conditions and creative capacity that constitute humanity’s extraordinary position and responsibilities in the order of things. Just as the conditions for reason are the same for all, yet reason is manifested differently, there is one religion that involves the communal support of the moral improvement of each individual that is manifested differently in multiple faiths.

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On Peace and “Religious” Literacy: A Response to Ulrich Rosenhagen” 14 December 2015 (14 Pages) Updated July 2019

Updated 2019

“On Peace and Religious Literacy” by Douglas R. McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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On Peace and „Religious“ Literacy:
A Response to Ulrich Rosenhagen

Not surprisingly, the popular response to religious violence is a call to peaceful understanding of the “other.”  Given the pressing need in our climate of violence to foster the understanding of religion, Ulrich Rosenhagen at the University of Wisconsin in his commentary piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education of December 2, 2015, entitled “The Value of Teaching Religious Literacy” calls for an “immersion” approach that would establish student “learning communities” of various religious confessions sharing the same living and study space.  The goal is “to learn from one another” not “about” one another.  The principle driving this “immersion” model of religious studies is that direct experience of religious differences fosters the cultivation of our common humanity.

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Ethics and Morality: External Law and Crooked Wood 29 October 2014

Ethics and Morality: External Law and Crooked Wood by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Ethics and Morality:
External Law and Crooked Wood

There is an important difference between socially constructed rules/laws and internally, self-legislated moral principles.[1]  The former, socially constructed rules, govern solely the external affairs of individuals and groups, and we can call that the concern of ethics.  The latter, internally, self-legislated moral principles, however, can trump external rules, and we can call that morality.

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Mere Rules do not Morality Make 21 November 2014

Mere Rules do not Morality Make by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mere Rules Do Not Morality Make

The flourishing field of the role of evolution in the development of humanity’s moral capacity maintains that morality is the consequence of adaptation to a social environment.  Whether or not its orientation is genetics (kin selection from Hawkins, Dawkins, and Dennett[1]  or euociality from Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson[2]) or neuroscience, it takes as its definition of morality to be “right and wrong conduct,” and argues that such a capacity can be seen as emergent across social species in the struggle to survive as a group or, especially in the evolutionary advantage that is humanity, as the evolutionary advantages that emerged with frontal cortex development, the amygdala, as well as the hormones oxytocin, arginine vasopressin, and dopamine.[3]  Frequently, the view of sociobiology contrasts its notion of morality as a natural, emergent characteristic with the notion that morality is a social construct, that is, a product only of culture.  What follows proposes that there are serious grounds for questioning both options:   evolution of morality and the social construction of morality.

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Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, Moral Autonomy, and Grace 12 November 2014

“Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, Moral Autonomy, and Grace” by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, Moral Autonomy, and Grace

It is to the advantage to the interests of those who have power to convince us all that moral principles are relative.  It also serves the interests of those who have power to keep us convinced that we cannot be virtuous without the aid of divine grace.

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Divine Intervention: Undeniable, but What Difference does it Make? (6 Pages) 16 July 2014 – Updated July 2019

Updated July 2019

Divine Intervention: Undeniable, but What Difference does it Make? by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

“Divine Intervention:  Undeniable – But What Difference Does It Make?” at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion Conference at St. Anne’s College Oxford (July 13-17, 2014)

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Divine Intervention:  Undeniable,
But What Difference does it Make?

Abstract

 Denial of divine intervention in the physical order oversteps the limits to human reason as does its affirmation.  Kant’s discussion of miracles acknowledges that it is impossible to prove or disprove a miracle not only, as Hume maintained, because the empirical evidence is too limited and by definition denies duplication but also because the judgment whether or not a miracle has occurred is an a priori synthetic judgment of cause that, as with all causal explanations, the observer must add to the phenomena.  We can determine a cause only in reflecting judgment stimulated by its effects, and the appropriateness of our determination hinges on the consequences for the totality of our experience and understanding.  When it comes to the “domain” of theoretical reason, those consequences have to do with the causal explanation fitting into a coherent totality of physical laws.  Here, a miracle by definition is suspect (even if unprovable) because it claims to be an exception to physical law.  More destructive is the consequence for the “domain” of practical reason.  Miracles would shift humanity’s focus from “doing the right thing because it is right” to “obsequious pursuit of divine favor” out of mere self-interest.

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Persons and Their Minds: Höffe’s Action Theory and Differentiation between Dogmatic and Methodological Determinism (15 Pages) 14 July 2012 – Updated July 2019

Updated July 2019

Persons and Their Minds: Höffe’s Action Theory and Differentiation between Dogmatic and Methodological Determinism by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Presented at St. Anne’s College, Oxford                                                                                         July 14, 2012

 

Persons and Their Minds:
Höffe’s Action Theory and Differentiation between Dogmatic and Methodological Determinism

Abstract

In the early 1980s, Libet’s documentation of the neuro-activity prior to the application of the will (“mind time” based on Deecke and Kornhuber’s notion of Bereitschaftspotential) suggested an exclusively materialistic, neurological cause for “voluntary” action.  Complementing Libet’s reductionism, Churchland sees no connection between non-material values and the brain to propose that there are no universal, moral “principles.”  She argues from Aristotle’s notion of “moral virtue” that morality is the consequence of habitual, pragmatic behavior in particular circumstances (only?) and vilifies moral “system builders” (e.g., Bentham and Kant) for their search for “exceptionless rules”.

This paper presents Höffe’s theory of action that affirms (!) a material condition for action but insists that action involves a more temporally complex process than mere neuro-activity in the present.  Furthermore, by distinguishing between dogmatic determinism (there can be only physical causal explanations) and methodological determinism (the assumption that there are physical causal explanations at the base (!) of all experience), Höffe makes room for creative freedom (differently than the way Searle’s “causal gap” makes room for free will) and self-legislated (not heteronomously imposed), absolute moral principles in the form of a necessary as if that makes all the difference for understanding the human species.

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Morality in Spite of Interest: Absolute Skepticism Grounded in Skepticism’s Necessities or Re-Examining Evolution and Epigenesis (18 Pages) 10 July 2011 – Updated August 2019

Updated August 2019

“Morality in Spite of Interests: Absolute Skepticism Grounded in s Necessities Enables Re-Examining Evolution and Epigenesis” by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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Presented at St. Anne’s College, Oxford                                                                                           July 10, 2011

Morality in Spite of Interests:
Absolute Principles Grounded in Skepticism’s Necessities
Enable Re-examining Evolution and Epigenesis[1]

Abstract

The issue of the relationship between matter and mind (biology and freedom that makes morality possible) did not commence with Darwin’s (mis-titled) Origin of the Species (more accurate: Origin of Species from Other Species).  In the 18th century alone, one only need recall the British/Scottish Rationalist/Moral Sense school, d’Holbach’s and Bonnet’s materialist reductionism, Leibniz’ pre-established harmony between consciousness and matter, or Lessing’s ugly ditch.  Johann Nicolaus Tetens’ (1777) Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung was on Kant’s desk as he wrote the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.[2]  The issues (not the technology, to be sure) of today‘s morality and neurobiological reductionism are at the core of Tetens’ debate with Charles Bonnet.  Tetens’ project on the nature and development of humanity is a defense of the complementarity of “evolution” (preformation) and “epigenesis” (novelty), which is engaged by Kant in his discussion of teleology and morals later in the Critique of Judgment.  At issue is causal explanation.  Are causal explanations analytic (grounded merely in perception) or synthetic (requiring the mind to add imperceptible elements to perception)?  This paper engages Kant’s a priori synthetic argument for understanding causal order in nature (physical necessity) as well as causal order in the novelty of creative freedom (self-legislated moral necessity) when it comes to humanity’s capacity to initiate a sequence of events that nature cannot accomplish on its own.  The significance: Humans are moral beings because they can be, not because they must be – and this makes all the difference.

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Critical Idealism: History, Scripture, and Social Responsibility (9 Pages) 20 April 2014 – Updated July 2019

Critical Idealism: History, Scripture, and Social Responsibility by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Critical Idealism: History, Scripture, and Social Responsibility

The linguistic formulation “transcendental consciousness” appears to privilege the non- or a-historical and metaphysical over any and all historical particularity.  When one adds to such terminology the recognition that sense perception is exclusively of appearances and not of things-in-themselves, one could easily arrive at the conclusion that historical particularity is secondary to transcendental consciousness because whatever is historical is mere appearance.  The final apparent dismissal of the historical seems to be implicit in the Copernican Turn away from external content to internal conditions of possibility and capacities.  Given the shift away from consequences to internal conditions and capacities, the physical world of appearances and the historical apparently have no significant role to play in Critical Idealism.

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On Normative Religion: An Ethos not a Fact (5 Pages) 7 March 2014 – Updated July 2019

On Normative Religion:  An Ethos not a Fact by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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On Normative Religion:
An ethos not A fact

Christianity has been, is, and will be no one single, universal teaching of salvation.  Since its origins in Palestine in the first decades of our Common Era, Christianity has been a plethora of schools of thought (αἱρέσαι; haireseis) that arrived at their individual self-understandings of the faith in the smithery of conflict.  Paul in I Corinthians 11:19 expressed the relationship among alternative positions in the church: “… there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized”, a passage referred to by Origen of Alexander in Contra Celsius Book III, chapter 13:

“… why should we not defend … the existence of heresies in Christianity? And respecting these, Paul appears to me to speak in a very striking manner when he says, ‘For there must be heresies among you, that they who are approved may be made manifest among you.’ For as that man is ‘approved’ in medicine who, on account of his experience in various (medical) heresies, and his honest examination of the majority of them, has selected the preferable system,-and as the great proficient in philosophy is he who, after acquainting himself experimentally with the various views, has given in his adhesion to the best,-so I would say that the wisest Christian was he who had carefully studied the heresies both of Judaism and Christianity. Whereas he who finds fault with Christianity because of its heresies would find fault also with the teaching of Socrates, from whose school have issued many others of discordant views.” [Indebted to Gérard Vallée, The Shaping of Christianity, 95, for reference to this text in Origen.]

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Critical Idealism and Religion (17 pages) 19 April 2011 – Updated July 2019

Updated July 2019

Critical Idealism and Religion by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at criticalidealism.com.

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Critical Idealism and Religion

A virtue of Critical Idealism is that its starting point is the assertion of reason’s limits.  Karl Barth’s assertion that Kant elevated human reason above God is absurd.  On the contrary, both theoretical and practical reason necessarily presuppose God, and it is no accident that Kant referred to his work as philosophical theology.

Although reason is limited, religion is at the core of Critical Idealism not because of what we can’t do, which would require divine assistance in order for us to overcome our limits.  Rather, religion is at the core of Critical Idealism because of what we can do.  In other words, religion is not an answer to a problem.  Religion consists of the conditions that constitute the extraordinary capacities of humanity to see things that are not there in phenomena and to initiate a sequence of events that nature could never accomplish on its own.  In short, our very ability to understand the world (our theoretical reason) as well as our very ability to be autonomous, creative beings above, yet never separate from, nature (our practical reason) depend upon the givenness of a universe and of capacities that are inscrutable to us, yet absolutely necessary for us to experience, act, and create as we do.  Such faith with respect to our not-knowing (that is, with respect to the limits upon which we depend) is constitutive of the human condition, and it is a far more profound faith than any faith with claims to know beyond reason.  Critical Idealism is anchored in non-epistemic, but not epistemic faith.

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Religion and Morality: A Static fait accompli or a Dynamic Possibility? 13 January 2015

Religion and Morality: A Static fait accompli or a Dynamic Possibility? by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Religion and Morality:
A Static fait accompli or a Dynamic Possibility?

Religion is a conundrum. We all recognize religion when we see it, but we can’t define it. Rather than waste ink on a new attempt to define religion, these reflections examine the religious conundrum with respect to what it says about humanity. Without denying the importance of the empirical examination of the human species biologically and psychologically, these reflections engage the empirical phenomena of religion as a product of humanity, the only species as far as we know that generates these phenomena that we readily identify as religion. In other words, the religious conundrum will be approached not by an empirical analysis of particular religious traditions. Such an investigation primarily establishes differences among religions. In contrast, our question is: What do religious phenomena suggest about humanity’s capacities and role in the order of things? By shifting from the empirical phenomena themselves to focus on the capacities that humanity must possess in order to generate religion, we can learn something profoundly significant about religion as well as identify what is universal in religion.

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A Non-Secular “Critique” of Things Secular and Sacred 8 October 2015

“A Non-Secular ‘Critique” of Things Secular and Sacred by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

A Non-Secular „Critique“ of Things Secular and Sacred

In one respect, John Lennon was right in 1966 when he observed that “The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.”  That he was very wrong in another respect illustrates the shallowness of social criticism, generally, and the depth of a corresponding social disorientation, as well.  The following proposes that more than ever our contemporary international situation calls for a new form of critique that profiles the necessity of religion, but not doctrinal or dogmatic religion, for the human species, universally.

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