The riddle of Baron von Hugel has always been how to reconcile his deep piety and attractiveness as a spiritual writer with his austere use of historical criticism on biblical texts. By interpreting Roman Catholic Modernism as basically a development in the history of piety, validating the turn to the subject of modern philosophy and science, one sees that von Hugel’s life is all of a piece, with his criticism and theology rooted in what he called “the mystical element.” Thus investigation of von Hugel’s spiritual theology leads to a new interpretation of the Modernist movement as a whole.

This is the second of a series of two articles examining Kant’s attitude toward mystical experiences and the relation between his interest in these and his interest in constructing a Critical System of metaphysics.“The Critical Mysticism” explores the extent to which Kant’s writings prior to his Opus Postumum (and not including [DREAMS]) contain a more developed theory of mystical experience. Traditionally Kant has been regarded as against all brands of mysticism. This arises partly from his narrow use of “mystical,” but primarily from a misunderstanding by commentators of his statements concerning the possibility of supersensible experience. The latter misunderstanding can be easily corrected by clearly distinguishing between “immediate experience” and experience in Kant’s technical sense of “empirical knowledge.” Kant never denies the possibility of an immediate ex-perience of supersensible reality, but only the supposition that such experiences can establish empirical knowledge. The character of his Critical mysticism can be discerned, even without examining Kant’s Opus Postumum (which was to describe fully his Critical mysticism). For on numerous occasions he explains the two respects in which an immediate supersensible experience is not only acceptable, but supports and is supported by his Critical System. The mysteries of nature and the moral law provide the two sides of Kant’s mystical coin, both in theory and in the discipline of his own life.

I argue that Spinoza’s ethical theory may be viewed as a transformation of Aristotle’s teleological account which has been corrected of several fundamental flaws which Spinoza found in Aristotle. The result of Spinoza’s redefinition of ethical activity is a developmental account of ethics which has close kinship with the views of process theoreticians.

Emmanuel Levinas argued for the priority of the ethical - over the theoretical-Other, vis à vis the prevailing modern, ideatistic philosophies of totality. This essay argues that too facile a turn from epistemology to ethics, however, risks eviscerating the very role that theory - as “critical” - plays in the sustenance of the valuation of the Other. An altemative understanding of theory, the essay proposes, hinges on the negative dialectics of Adorno.

The subject is under siege. In many disciplines the self that modem thought established and fortified has fallen to critique. But while many explore the implications for epistemology, for literary theory, for psychology, or for history and social thought, few writers have pondered the question in terms of ethics. After all, ethics must rest on a subject, a person who makes choices and decides for various reasons to commit acts in one’s own name. l suggest that ethics can survive the fracturing, de-centering, deconstructing of the self? A selection of passages from Marcel and Levinas is offered, with commentary.

I aim here to confront texts of Levinas and Sartre in an attempt to rethink the relation of the poIitical to the ethical in the early eighties in France. The method is essentially to try to think a passage from one domain into the other without privileging poIitics over ethics or vice versa while uncovering their organic and dialectical interaction, a subject that an only be touched upon via the bridging metaphor of a Visage that can liberate oneself from the totalization of egoity. My purpose, thus, is not to confront Levinas and Sartre but to allow them to embark on a dialogue constructed around the paradigm of the question of the Other.

The paper seeks to establish a kinship between the philosophy of Levinas and the theology of liberation. In their separate domains, these two enterprises reveal to us a portrait of late, twentieth-century intellectual work which refuses to abandon eschatological urgency. Philosophy and theology may meet, outside of both of their own homes, on a journey toward the other, in ethics.

This paper highlights Max Scheler’s contribution to developing a ‘phenomenological’ account of religious transcendence in a way which remains unique among other proponents of that tradition of continental thought. It is argued that even in formulating his own concept of ‘world-openness’ (as precursory to Hussurl’s and Heidegger’s view of the self’s ‘worldliness’) Scheler continues to foster a vision of the human person’s eternality and kinship with the Divine.

This essay suggests the possible form of an orthodox historicism. The essay begins by examining the historicism of Heidegger and Gadamer. It then proposes how a theology might appear which places the faith in conversation with this historicism.

This paper examines the phenomena of falling in love and of love using Baudelaire’s poem, “Which is the Real One,” as impetus. The author asks why love is often focused toward an individual and why an individual often makes such a monumental difference when love should be a more universal experience. The focus of the Romantic poets on the individual is criticized, and Taoist and anti-romantic conceptions of love are considered.

I provide a narrative analysis of the Apostles’ Creed as a suggested alternative to the traditional referential reading. The focus of temporal intentionality offers an analysis of the Creed which is radically dirferent from the apocalypticism of the traditional interpretations.

Traditionally it has been presumed that the knowledge of God’s triune nature could be derived only from positive Biblical revelation. However, the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the universal possibility of true salvific faith implies that supernatural revelation also occurs outside Christianity. Karl Rahner’s explanation of the meaning of the Trinity as “concrete monotheism” raises the possibility of an implicit knowledge of God’s self-revelation as “Word” and “Spirit” in the experience of grace and its formulation in the categories of the other world religions.

I offer an analysis of the notion of violence one of whose consequences may be that violence might be moral under some circumstances.

My initial task in this essay is to identify precisely the original philosophical import of philosophical renections about religion. Next I outline their changing natures and interrelations in the works of exemplary figures from the history of Western religious thought. Finally I argue that the relative desuetude of the traditional forms of apology and speculalion is emblemalic of the present faring of philosophy as a form of cultural discourse.

According to Alfred Schutz’s theory of signification, based as it is on Husserl’s theory of appresentation, through marks and indications we overcome the small transcendences of space and time, through signs the medium transcendences of the Other’s difference from us, and through symbols the great transcendences of other finite provinces of meaning. This paper examines the implicat ions of the correlations between these transcendences and significations, and argues that Schutz’s order of significations reveals the profound irony that the more signifier-users seek to tame and subdue transcendences through significations, the more they discover how transcendences escape their dominion.