James M. McLachlan

Preview: In Jane Campion’s recent film version of Thomas Savage’s Power of the Dog, young Peter comes across his, and his mother’s tormentor, Phil’s secret hiding place. There he discovers in a lean-to the cowboy homophobic Phil’s copies of Physical Culture. As he leafs through the magazines, he sees the famous pictures of Eugen Sandow and his fig leaf posed as the Farnese Hercules. The scene does not appear in Savage’s novel. Flash backward or forwards a few years depending on whether you place Peter and Phil in 1925 or 2021 and you have Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-n-Furter belting out the invitation to guests to “take in an old Steve Reeves movie” in the introductory musical number “Sweet Transvestite” in the musical extravaganza The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In 1971 the French publishing house Aubier-Montaigne published Gabriel Marcel’s previously unpublished 1909 study “The Metaphysical Ideas of Coleridge and their Connection with the Philosophy of Schelling” under the title, Coleridge et Schelling. Marcel’s interest in Schelling is a neglected but very important part of Marcel’s philosophical development. There are several striking similarities between Marcel and Schelling, but I will confine the major thrust of this paper to one issue: the unique way that Marcel and Schelling deal with the relation of freedom and human suffering. This essay focuses on Schelling’s writings that are closestto Marcel’s thought on freedom and suffering, these cover the period from 1809 to around 1815 and include, most importantly for Marcel, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, and two works Schelling left unpublished the “Stuttgart Seminars,” and first draft of The Ages of the World.

The papers presented in this volume honor Thomas O. Buford. Buford is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Furman University where he taught for over 40 years. Many of the papers in this volume are from former students. But Professor Buford is also a pre-eminent voice of forth generation Personalism, and Boston Personalism in particular. Personalism is a school of philosophical and theological thought which holds that the ideas of “person” and “personality” are indispensable both to an adequate understanding of all metaphysical and epistemological problems, and the key to an adequate theory of ethical and political human interaction. Most personalists assert that personality is an irreducible fact found in all existence, as well as in all interpretation of the meaning of existence and the truth about experience. Anything that seems to exist impersonally, such as inanimate matter, nevertheless can exist and have meaning only as related to some personal being, according to personalists. The Boston Personalist tradition was innaugurated by Borden Parker Bowne and continued by Edgar S. Brightman, Peter Bertocci, John Lavely, Carol Robb and Martin Luther King.

The radical reformulation of Western philosophy proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas is the move beyond knowledge and being to ethics as metaphysics. For Lévinas this is accomplished as an escape, an evasion of being. Lévinas saw the story of Western philosophy as a tale that Being emanated, created, etc. an illusory pluralism that it will eventually overcome in total unity. “The adventure of the world,” to borrow a phrase from Whitehead, is an accident that does not affect the perfection of Being. Being is and multiplicity is a fall from perfection. The standard eschatological story in the West has been how the separated person makes his way back to harmony with being. Lévinas seeks to tell a different story. He offers an “ethical metaphysics” that is an alternative to ontology. Lévinas’s attempt at an escape from ontology is anticipated by Russian émigré philosophers in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, Lev Shestov and Nicolas Berdyaev. In particular, Berdyaev sought an eschatological escape from the perfection of Being.

In 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle in the journal Revue des Études Juives. This essay includes a translation of his review as well as an introductory essay that contextualizes it. In her Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (1972), Edith Wyschogrod contended that Levinas’ short review contains what “might well be taken as the program of his own future work.” Both seek a way out of ontology, but Shestov seeks his escape through a violent wrenching out of the tradition of Western ontology. Levinas would later dub this attempt “the wound that bleeds throughout Shestov’s work.” Unlike Shestov, Levinas does not seek a lost primordial freedom that existed before being and has been lost ever since. Because Levinas’ ethics takes its rise in the relation to the other person, he does not suffer from Shestov’s continual wound that cannot be escaped.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Nicholas Berdyaev were contemporaries in the Paris of the thirties and forties. Sartre became the most famous existentialist author and was also a politically active Marxist. Berdyaev had been a Marxist and political activist but converted to Christianity and became one of the inspirations of the French personalist movement and a key exponent of religious existentialism. This study focuses on the central concern of both philosophers: the question of freedom. Sartre argued in "Being and Nothingness" that God is incompatible with human freedom. Berdyaev argues that God is not only compatible but necessary to freedom. This study reveals two ironies: Berdyaev's God is a more radical departure from traditional Western theism than Sartre's atheism. And Berdyaev's idea of freedom presents the more radical alternative to that tradition.

Kevin Schilbrack’s manifesto Philosophy and the Study of Religions is an important foundational work for two fields: philosophy of religion and religious studies. The philosophers of religion sometimes appear to better fit Donald Wiebe’s characterization of religionists as crypto-theologians. They seem only really concerned with Christian theology or at the most theism, despite the fact that Christianity only accounts for about a third of what we could call religious people on the planet and theism only about half. They seem to have taken the part of Mr. Thwackum, the Divine, at least in part against Mr. Square, the Philosopher, in that wonderful dispute in Henry Fielding’s The Adventures of Tom Jones:Thwackum replied, this was arguing with the usual malice of all the enemies to the true Church. He said, he doubted not but that all the infidels and hereticks in the world would, if they could, confine honour to their own absurd errors and damnable deceptions; ‘but honour,’ he says, ‘is ..

Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology. Translated with a Preface by David Ratmoko; Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009, xxiii + 215 pp., $60.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper)Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. Translated by Keith Tribe with an introduction by Mike Grimshaw; Columbia University Press, New York, 2013, $18.50 (cloth)Since 2004, there has been a minor publishing explosion of works by Jacob Taubes translated into English. Taubes did not leave a large body of work. The only work he published in his lifetime was Occidental Eschatology, his dissertation, published in 1947 and translated into English in 2009. Since 1987 with the publication of a small collection on Carl Schmitt (translated into English in 2013), several of Taubes’ works have appeared in German and then received an English translation. In 1993, his seminar on the political theology of St. Paul was published and then translated in 2003. Finally in 1996, a collection of essays appeared under the ..