The Metaphysics of the Sublime: Old Wine, New Wineskin?

John Milbank’s and Phillip Blond’s narratives of modernity’s descent to nihilism identify the “metaphysics of the sublime” as a feature of modernity, assimilated from Kant’s critical project, that is particularly problematic for the robust post-modern Christian theology proposed in Radical Orthodoxy. This essay argues that the sublime is not the concept most fundamental to their account of Kant’s role in modernity. Far more important is the “phenomenon/noumenon” distinction, which Milbank and Blond read as a “two-world” distinction—an understanding that, despite a long history in Kant interpretation, is not Kant’s. It is less important, however, that constructive dialogue between Radical Orthodoxy and Catholic theology correct this misreading of Kant. More important will be efforts to understand the metaphor of the “immense depth of things,” which Radical Orthodox offers in contrast to the “metaphysics of the sublime,” particularly in relation to the concepts of participation and the analogy of attribution that emerge from Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of Aquinas

Was It Science, Not Religion?

Does freedom of conscience, and perhaps freedom of thought generally, have religious roots? Ronald Beiner\u27s Three Versions of the Politics of Conscience: Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke traces the idea of conscience as a factor in Western political thought to ideas that crystallized in the seventeenth century. Beiner examines three leading seventeenth century thinkers - Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke - to explore whether conscience, or rather the idea of freedom of conscience, was specially a religious imperative for these thinkers: whether their religious commitments or their respect for religious integrity underlay and motivated their ideas about freedom of conscience

Human Disease - Unintended Globalization

Before man was exchanging goods and ideas, he was exchanging germs. As such, the spread of infectious disease constitutes the first truly global phenomenon and, therefore, marks the beginnings—primitive though they may have been—of what today we have finally termed ‘globalization.’ The global spread of disease, then, proves that globalization is not new and that its origins were the result of a different narrative than the ones we read from globalization theorists; it further demonstrates that the modern conception of the phenomenon is only now so well recognized because the accelerated and efficient processes that inform its daily activities have heightened our conscious acknowledgement of its existence

Evaluating the Social Sciences and Humanities in Context – a Discussion Paper

The text presents the course and conclusions of the discussion on evaluation of research in social sciences and humanities. The results of social sciences and humanities research can, on the one hand, be of significant local importance, and, on the other, require an appropriate international context. These conflicting trends are difficult to balance. A further difficulty is the attempt to reduce the evaluation of research results in social sciences and humanities to the effects of publication in ranking journals. This trend gives rise to many pathological phenomena (related, for example, to the increase in the cost of publication in journals and other ranked publications). The dominance of the ranking system of journals within the framework of financing scientific disciplines has negative impacts on aspects of academic activity beyond the publication of research results. Teaching activities and university relations with the wider world may suffer. In the course of the discussion an attempt is made to respond to these threats

THE PATHOLOGY OF TRIBAL NATIONALISM ACCORDING TO HANNAH ARENDT: UNCOVERING RELIGIOUS POPULISM MECHANISMS WHICH JEOPARDIZE CULTURAL DIVERSITY

The sustained rise of religious populism across the globe has influenced Indonesian political situation. In Indonesia, the last ten years have witnessed the increasingly widespread emergence of religious populism. Populists express strong moral judgments in decrying corruption, moral decadence and corrupted elite in power. They define society in Manichean terms as divided into a good ‘us’ and an evil ‘them’. In defining both of these categories, they put forward the important role of religious identities in order to classify who fits into the category of ‘us’ and who belongs to ‘them’. Hannah Arendt offers sharp analyses allowing to uncover religious populism mechanism. Her main analysis was based on the pathology of tribal nationalism. The result of her analysis helps us to  explore the similarities of tribal nationalism pathology and religious populism phenomena. The use of comparative and critical approaches helps to conclude that the pathology of tribal nationalism gives lessons on how such a movement cannot accept differences and tends to be totalitarian. Such a comparison opens new perspectives on helping to examine the phenomena of propaganda, slandering, intimidation, mass mobilization, persecution, violence, and formations of paramilitary forces as  instruments for totalitary movements used by religious populism. Such phenomena are loaded with manipulations and lies which have fragmented social groups and weakened political culture so that ideological consensus is impossible. Ordinary citizens, even the intellectual, are not able to oppose well-organized lies and manipulations. The danger is that such religious populism maneuvres risk jeopardizing the foundation of the Indonesian nation, which is formulated under the motto “unity in diversity”