Author: Heinrich Meier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627585X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Meier's guiding insight here is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of itsmost powerful opponent, revealed religion.
Author: Heinrich Meier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627599X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Heinrich Meier’s guiding insight in Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed religion. Philosophy must rationally justify and politically defend its free and unreserved questioning, and, in doing so, turns decisively to political philosophy. In the first of three chapters, Meier determines four intertwined moments constituting the concept of political philosophy as an articulated and internally dynamic whole. The following two chapters develop the concept through the interpretation of two masterpieces of political philosophy that have occupied Meier’s attention for more than thirty years: Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. Meier provides a detailed investigation of Thoughts on Machiavelli, with an appendix containing Strauss’s original manuscript headings for each of his paragraphs. Linking the problem of Socrates (the origin of political philosophy) with the problem of Machiavelli (the beginning of modern political philosophy), while placing between them the political and theological claims opposed to philosophy, Strauss’s most complex and controversial book proves to be, as Meier shows, the most astonishing treatise on the challenge of revealed religion. The final chapter, which offers a new interpretation of the Social Contract, demonstrates that Rousseau’s most famous work can be adequately understood only as a coherent political-philosophic response to theocracy in all its forms.
Author: Heinrich Meier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618935X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Heinrich Meier’s work on Carl Schmitt has dramatically reoriented the international debate about Schmitt and his significance for twentieth-century political thought. In The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, Meier identifies the core of Schmitt’s thought as political theology—that is, political theorizing that claims to have its ultimate ground in the revelation of a mysterious or suprarational God. This radical, but half-hidden, theological foundation underlies the whole of Schmitt’s often difficult and complex oeuvre, rich in historical turns and political convolutions, intentional deceptions and unintentional obfuscations. In four chapters on morality, politics, revelation, and history, Meier clarifies the difference between political philosophy and Schmitt’s political theology and relates the religious dimension of his thought to his support for National Socialism and his continuing anti-Semitism. New to this edition are two essays that address the recently published correspondences of Schmitt—particularly with Hans Blumberg—and the light it sheds on his conception of political theology.
Author: Heinrich Meier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622175X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 157
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Book Description
Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, The Concept of the Political, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of Concept that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers. Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reasonand ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives. “Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, New YorkReview of Books
Author: Heinrich Meier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607403X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Contents -- Preface -- Preface to the American Edition -- Note on Citations -- Translator's Note and Acknowledgments -- First Book -- I. The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers -- II. Faith -- III. Nature -- IV. Beisichselbstsein -- V. Politics -- VI. Love -- VII. Self-Knowledge -- Second Book -- Rousseau and the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar -- Name Index
Author: Daniel A. Dombrowski
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271073853
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
To probe the underlying premises of a liberal political order, John Rawls felt obliged to use a philosophical method that abstracted from many of the details of ordinary life. But this very abstraction became a point of criticism, as it left unclear the implications of his theory for public policies and life in the real political world. Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy attempts to ferret out those implications, filling the gap between Rawls’s own empyrean heights and the really practical public policy proposals made by government planners, lobbyists, and legislators. Among the topics examined are natural rights, the morality of war, the treatment of mentally deficient humans and nonhuman sentient creatures, the controversies over legacy and affirmative action in college admissions, and the place of religious belief in a democratic society. The final chapter explores how Rawls’s own religious beliefs, as revealed in two works posthumously published in 2009, played into his formulation of his theory of justice.
Author: Heinrich Meier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658156X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
"In this book Heinrich Meier takes on the question of the meaning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which has long proven controversial among readers. Meier closely examines the work to find a coherent structure and uncover the meanings in the figure of Zarathustra. By showing the unity in Zarathustra's life and teaching, Meier argues that the hidden architecture of the work reveals the development of self-knowledge for the philosopher. What Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? A Philosophical Confrontation makes clear in its careful attention to the text that Nietzsche's deepest concern is with understanding himself and the world, rather than with a view of himself as a prophet"--
Author: Michele F. Margolis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655581X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
One of the most substantial divides in American politics is the “God gap.” Religious voters tend to identify with and support the Republican Party, while secular voters generally support the Democratic Party. Conventional wisdom suggests that religious differences between Republicans and Democrats have produced this gap, with voters sorting themselves into the party that best represents their religious views. Michele F. Margolis offers a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom, arguing that the relationship between religion and politics is far from a one-way street that starts in the church and ends at the ballot box. Margolis contends that political identity has a profound effect on social identity, including religion. Whether a person chooses to identify as religious and the extent of their involvement in a religious community are, in part, a response to political surroundings. In today’s climate of political polarization, partisan actors also help reinforce the relationship between religion and politics, as Democratic and Republican elites stake out divergent positions on moral issues and use religious faith to varying degrees when reaching out to voters.
Author: Leo Strauss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226776824
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Leo Strauss’s The Political Philosophy of Hobbes deservedly ranks among his most widely acclaimed works. In it Strauss argues that the basis for Hobbes’s natural and political science is his interest in “self-knowledge of man as he really is.” The writings collected in this book, each written prior to that classic volume, complement that account. Thus at long last, this book allows us to have a complete picture of Strauss’s interpretation of Hobbes, the thinker pivotal to the fundamental theme of his life’s work: the conflicting demands of philosophy and revelation, or as he termed it, “the theologico-political problem.” It is no exaggeration to say that Strauss’s work on Hobbes’s critique of religion is essential to his analysis of Hobbes’s political philosophy, and vice versa. This volume will spark new interest in Hobbes’s explication of the Bible and in his understanding of religion by revealing previously neglected dimensions and motives of Hobbes’s “theology.” At the same time, scholars interested in the intellectual development of Leo Strauss will find in these writings the missing link, as it were, between his two early books,Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. In addition, this volume makes available for the first time in English a letter, a book outline, an extended review, an engagement with legal positivism, and an account of Strauss’s work on Hobbes by Heinrich Meier, all of which shed light on Strauss’s concerns and his approach to Hobbes in particular, as well as to modern political thought and life.
Author: Robert C. Bartlett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639428X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
It was Nietzsche who first identified the similarities between the radical sophistry of antiquity and the contemporary relativism that has come to characterize modern thought. The anti-foundationalism of contemporary thought can be said to have been born with the Sophists, and, of all the Sophists who have come down to us, Protagoras is the most famous and challenging of them. Robert Bartlett s masterful book is the first to examine Plato s Protagoras and Theaetetus together to uncover what lies at the heart of Protagoras teaching, both its moral and political components and its theoretical and epistemological groundings. His superb exegesis of these two dialogues allows one to see more clearly the power of radical relativism: its strengths and its deficiencies. Bartlett notes that political philosophy has been supplanted in the modern era either by the study of the history of political philosophy or by relativism. Although "Understanding Political Philosophy and Sophistry" can certainly be taken as an example of the former, it is much more than that. It seeks to uncover what Socrates, in responding to that teaching, begins to reveal of his own understanding and characteristic activity. It helps us begin to understand, in other words, the phenomenon of philosophy, not just as a system of thought, but as Socrates lived it."
