New challenges in education

Book description: Dialogue is a privileged method in Luce Irigaray’s work. Covering all the key topics that have been central to her work in the last thirty years, this book offers an essential insight into Irigaray’s career as one of the world’s most important contemporary thinkers. Topics and theorists approached include: philosophy, in particular Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze; language as information, communication-between and artistic expression; universality and difference; natural and cultural identities; motherhood and gendered subjectivities; cultivation of desire and love; building houses and sharing lives; being two and being in community; the other and others; relational identity and education; globalisation and ethics; politics and human rights; spirituality and religion; practice and culture of Yoga; and, of course, being and becoming woman. Ideal for students seeking an overview of Irigaray’s thought, as well as those already familiar with her work, this collection brings together for the first time Irigaray’s conversations over the years with the people who have been involved in studying and researching her enormous contribution to Continental Philosophy, Spirituality, Cultural Theory and Feminism

Derrida after the End of Writing

This book explores some of the implications of interpreting Derrida through the new materialist lens of technicity or plasticity, attending to the significance of ethics, religion and politics in his later work. Here the intersection of religion and politics becomes the site for Derrida to develop a “political theology without sovereignty.” By reading Derrida from a new materialist perspective, fresh readings are offered of his ideas of sovereignty, religion, responsibility, and mourning, including engagements with Malabou, Timothy Morton, John D. Caputo, and Karen Barad...Derrida’s philosophy is relevant not just for human ethical language and animality, but to profound developments in the physical and natural sciences, as well as ecology. Here is a new reading of Derrida beyond the conventional understandings of poststructuralism and deconstruction, that is responsive to and critical of some of the newer trends in Continental philosophy

Building Bridges and Crossing Boundaries: Philosophy, Theology, and the Interruptions of Transcendence

Discussions about theological realism within analytic philosophy of religion, and the larger conversation between analytic and continental styles in philosophy of religion have generated relatively little interest among Catholic philosophers and theologians; conversely, the work of major figures in recent Catholic theology seems to evoke little interest from analytic philosophers of religion. Using the 1998 papal encyclical on faith and reason, Fides et ratio, as a major point of reference, this essay offers a preliminary account of the bases for such seeming mutual indifference and offers some suggestions for future dialogue

Living as if God exists: Looking for Common Ground in Times of Radical Pluralism

This paper offers some comments on some metaphysical and epistemological claims of theological realism from the perspective of continental philosophy of religion, thereby taking the work of Soskice and Hick as paradigmatic for this kind of philosophical theology. The first comment regards the fact that theological realism considers religious and theological propositions as ways to depict or represent reality, and hence aims to bring them as much as possible in line with scientific ones. Some contemporary French philosophers criticize such a representing, depicting knowledge of God, because it encapsulates the divine reality in mundane, specifically scientific categories. eventually, theological realism runs the risk of annihilating God’s radical transcendence and reducing religion to an alternative scientific theory. The second comment tries to explore whether one can affirm God’s reality from a practical perspective, as a postulate of reason, and whether such an approach could serve as a common ground for religious and secular ways of life in times of radical pluralism. This comment begins by investigating the regulative character of Kant’s idea of God as the highest idea of reason, which not only orientates our theoretical enquiries, but also our moral actions. Although this idea is only a heuristic fiction for theoretical reason, God’s existence has to be affirmed on practical grounds, as a symbolic reality that gives orientation to people’s lives

Value and selfhood: pragmatism, Confucianism, and phenomenology

This article articulates a dialogue between Edward Casey, Cheng Chung‐ying, and me that began at the Eastern Division annual meeting in Philadelphia of the American Philosophical Association, in a session sponsored by the International Society for Chinese Philosophy. There, we read brief versions of the papers presented in this issue and commented on one another. Casey represented Continental phenomenology, Cheng the Chinese tradition as he has developed it into onto‐generative hermeneutics, and I the melding of American pragmatic and Confucian traditions that I have been developing

An Attempt to Update Edward Dembowski’s Philosophy of Creation

The article mainly discusses Edward Dembowski's philosophy of creation in connection with his Hegelian influences, leftist associations and the ongoing discussion in nineteenth century romantic polish philosophy. The nineteenth century, with its German Idealism and French tendency to act in the name of social rights, had introduced new ideas to work with during harsh historical times. Dembowski, amongst other Poles, was the closest to constructing a coherent metaphysical system for the philosophy of creation (filozofia twórczości). In the paper, I try to show a part of his intellectual evolution, stretching from defining philosophy as knowledge itself in the form of a Hegelian system, through his critique of Hegel's and Cieszkowski's systems, up to his own established system – the philosophy of creation and its social connections. I also speculate about which of his philosophical ideas can remain relevant today