This article discusses the category of ‘apocalyptic violence’, which has been frequently applied in recent studies of terrorism. It shows that the category is not self-explanatory because apocalyptic literature is traditionally determinist and rather dissuades their readers from taking action. A historical overview demonstrates that revolutionary forms of apocalypticism emerge only in early modernity, when mystical and humanist influences undermined the determinist creed. A more differentiated concept of ‘apocalyptic violence’ is then tested using the example of several cases of modern terrorism. The result is that the category is meaningful for understanding certain trends within modern terrorism, especially as it captures the symbolic self-interpretation of terrorist groups more adequately than the categories extremism and fundamentalism. However, the article also shows that the category has clear limits and is not suitable for a comprehensive understanding of the motivational and ideological grounds behind terroristic violence.

This paper discusses the Indian religious current known as bhakti, a cluster of movements and ideas with a long history traced back at least to the Bhagavad Gita, and confronts this case with problems debated in Western cultural hermeneutics. Bhakti is commonly seen as a devotional type of religiosity, opening up new dimensions of religious experience and inventing unconventional, even antinomian forms of expression; more recently, it has also been studied as a vehicle of religious individualization. The hermeneutical questions posed by this historical phenomenon have to do with both sides of the constellation known to social theorists as the double hermeneutic of social life, i.e. the meanings involved in and developed through the initiatives and exchanges of social actors, as well as the interpretive frameworks applied in scholarly analyses. The idea of social imaginaries constitutes a link between these two aspects. On both levels, the case of bhakti raises specific and central problems. It represents a particular pattern of orthodoxy and dissent, unfolding in contact and contest, and very different from the Western-based models of such configurations. For further hermeneutical reflection on this field, Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy—with its emphasis on translation and “oneself as another”—seems better equipped than Gadamer’s work, which in the last instance subordinates understanding of the other to self-understanding.

The paper begins with a brief discussion of French approaches to religion, with particular emphasis on interpretations of and responses to Durkheim’s work. This survey of the French tradition then serves as a background to more detailed analyses of Max Weber’s work on the historical sociology of religions. Specific features of the Weberian project stand out in contrast to French conceptions; but to gain an adequate grasp of his problematic, it is necessary to think beyond his incomplete arguments and spell out the underlying or adumbrated themes. Although Weber’s civilizational studies are at first sight centred on ‘economic ethics’, it can be shown that the perspective shifts towards the question of religion and politics. Closer examination of theocracy, a marginal notion in Weber’s writings, but open to more complex interpretations, and of sacral rulership as a more general category, throws light on the religio-political nexus and its civilizational contexts. A further issue, less explicitly present in Weber’s writings, but relevant to his main concern, is the relationship between religion and philosophy. All these aspects should be discussed in more concrete historical terms than Weber could do a century ago, and the processes that led from archaic civilizations to the axial age are of particular importance.

The author compares the different interpretations by Castoriadis and Lefort of democratic autonomy. For both, autonomy involves questioning all pregiven meaning. Castoriadis, while rejecting any law of historical progress, regards the history of autonomy as the development of a movement which commenced in a limited political domain in ancient Greece and expanded in other domains in Western Europe from the 11th century on. In theory, it has eliminated pregiven meaning, but has remained stuck in a liberal oligarchy, bogged down by a tide of insignificance. It remains to further the project of autonomy to the point where a truly autonomous society will be able to accept as such the “Abyss” (the “Chaos”) it experiences without hiding behind replicas such as those provided by religion. Lefort, on the other hand, while similarly accepting democracy’s desire for autonomy, believes the source of its principles are enigmatic and it will continue to remain open to the authentic human experience of radical transcendence even without God. He believes that the threat of relativism can be avoided as democracy is more just since it allows its members to be more open to this radical transcendence than other forms of society.

Social opposition to instituted policies and practices marks the sites of resistance that populate the contemporary political landscape. Animated by the prospects of a better and more just world, the emancipatory ambitions of social and political movements bring to the fore discrepancies between ideologically congealed power relations and habits of thought and the subversive function of utopian expectations. Paul Ricoeur reminds us that our participation in society is invariably punctuated by our experiences of reality’s noncongruence with imaginative alternatives we can project and upon which we can act. After explaining how literary fictions open spaces for reworking reality, I set out the imagination’s analogous power on the political plane. The struggles with which social and political movements are engaged seek to transform established conventions. Hence, like literary works, these movements aim at refashioning the existing order of reality from within. Protest movements attest to how struggles for recognition combat systemic injustices by holding out the prospect of a different and better future. Consequently, these movements exemplify the power that springs from individuals acting in consort, as evidenced by recent protests against the Trump administration. Conversely, violence destroys power. In view of the way that future expectations animate the force of the present, I therefore argue that dystopic representations of authoritarian regimes in Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 fulfill a critical, social function as apocalyptic harbingers of political corruption and deceit. As such, these dystopian novels intensify the force that the present has as a time of crisis and decision.

Now that we possess the Nachlass version, we can finally state it: Cassirer’s The Myth of the State has been massacred, large parts have been omitted; entire sections moved around, the fundamental thesis deeply altered. Instead of the neo-Enlightenment intellectual who, when faced with the Nazi’s recourse to myth, had started to question the very idea of a Western road from mythos to logos, the 1946 edition transmitted to us the text of a self-confident intellectual carrying the torch of the Enlightenment even in front of an event that could have potentially extinguished it forever. Why has the text been massacred? When? And by whom? The main suspect cannot but be Charles Hendel, who published it posthumously in 1946 by stating: ‘I hope I have not altered anything that would have mattered to him.’ By perhaps it was not a murder, but rather a suicide: perhaps Cassirer’s himself has killed his own self-criticism. In both cases, the motive could have been the desire to preserve Cassirer’s intellectual coherence, and thus reiterate that opposition of mythical versus rational consciousness upon which both Cassirer’s philosophy and philosophical self-narrative of the West ultimately rests. But if that is the case, then it does not matter who actually assassinated the text, because we are all, in a way or another, accomplices.

The crucial distinction for ethics is between the good and the apparent good, between being and seeming. Tradition is useful for developing our ability to make this distinction and to live ethically or in self-responsibility, but it is also threatening to this ability. The phenomenology of Husserl and of others in the Husserlian tradition, especially Robert Sokolowski, are helpful in spelling out how tradition works; how the difference between the apparent good and the good is bridged in the experience of moral truth but also a permanent, challenging feature of human life; what ethics requires regarding self-responsibility or authenticity; and what the proper voice of tradition is in the ethical or moral life.

In this article I examine the relation between the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze by looking at the way in which they refer to Henri Bergson’s time theory. Although Merleau-Ponty develops some fundamental Bergsonian insights on the nature of time, he presents himself as a critical reader of the latter. I will show that although Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Bergson differs fundamentally from Deleuze’s interpretation, Merleau-Ponty’s “corrections” of Bergson’s theory fit Deleuze’s reading of Bergson very well. This indicates a similarity with respect to what is at stake in the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Hence the critical reference that Deleuze makes to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of cinema and thus of movement is not justified, but is the result of a selective and prototypical reading of the early Merleau-Ponty.

The article aims at bringing to light the internal necessity that shapes Husserl’s concern with the issues of history and tradition. After discussing the role played by the teleology of reason and by genetic constitution in preparing the ground for Husserl’s reflection on the historical dimension, we specifically dwell on the idea of tradition. Tradition appears both as a hindrance in our pursuit of truth, and as an indispensable sense-bestowing factor. Against this ambivalent background, history emerges as an interpretive activity charged with the task of defusing the threats implicit in the incontrollable efficaciousness of tradition, while preserving the sense-bestowing character of the formations of sense (Sinngebilde).

Individual traditions are prior to social or intersubjective traditions, but all tradition involves carrying over of doxic, axiotic, and volitional sense from the past to the present and future. Social tradition involves empathy and communication, while individual tradition is based chiefly on forms of experiencing.

This paper 1) examines Husserl’s critique of presuppositions, a critique that realizes a desideratum of the Western philosophical tradition precisely by clarifying and grounding the latter’s own tacit presuppositions; 2) surveys Husserl’s descriptions of the apperceptions whose operative efficacy make tradition itself effective, holding good at both the individual and the generative levels; 3) identifies the need for a further critique of the psychophysical apperception in particular; and 4) offers a phenomenologically grounded alternative to the latter way of understanding and experiencing embodiment.

The question addressed in this article is to what extent a destructed concept of religion can be said to characterize the philosophical method of Martin Heidegger. In order to approach this question, we first characterize his method as “Vollzug der Fraglichkeit”: philosophy in its deepest sense does not mean to give answers to questions but to ask questions. According to Heidegger, the execution of questioning consists in the “transforming repetition” of the leading question (Leitfrage) of philosophy in order to ask the basic question of philosophy (Grundfrage). In the second part of the article, we reflect on the “religious” character of Heidegger’s method of questioning. The reflection makes use of different etymological derivations of the word ‘Religion’: relegere (to observe carefully), re-eligere (to choose again), religare (to bind back), relinquere (to leave behind). In the third part of the article, we discuss what Heidegger’s “religious” method of philosophy means for present questions concerning religion. To that end, we finish with a confrontation between Heidegger and Derrida with respect to the “religious” method of philosophy.

Paul Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of tradition centered on a threefold conception of tradition which involves the notions of traditionality, traditions, and Tradition. These refer to form, content, and truth-claims within the framework of the hermeneutics of historical consciousness. This hermeneutics of tradition is treated in a panchronic and ternary way. Both methods operate at the levels of past, future and present, while the ternary method also consists in the rhetoric of truth-claims, the dialectic of remoteness vs. de-distanciation and that of question vs. answer. This article attempts to study three aspects of the panchronic and ternary approach: (1) a living and ternary tradition with an ongoing dialectic interweaving the ecstases of time; (2) tradition in relation to historical consciousness and the spatialization of historicity; (3) temporalizing history and historicizing schematism in threefold mimesis.