Religion after Metaphysics

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this ‘end of metaphysics’ should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall.

• Essays by leading philosophers on a timely question – the place of religion in modern life • Chapters include arguments from both religious and anti-religious philosophers • Studies of quite different ways of reconceptualizing religion (e.g. papers discussing Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, and Strauss)

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: Metaphysics and onto-theology Mark A. Wrathall; 2. Love and death in Nietzsche Robert Pippin; 3. After onto-theology: philosophy between science and religion Gianni Vattimo; 4. Anti-clericism and atheism Richard Rorty; 5. Closed world structures Charles Taylor; 6. Between the earth and the sky: Heidegger on life after the death of God Mark A. Wrathall; 7. Christianity without onto-theology: Kierkegaard’s account of the self’s movement from despair to bliss Hubert L. Dreyfus; 8. Religion after onto-theology? Adriaan Peperzak; 9. The experience of God and the axiology of the impossible John Caputo; 10. Jewish philosophy after metaphysics Leora Batnitzky; 11. The end of metaphysics as a possibility Jean-Luc Marion; Index.