Oliver J. Wiertz

Die gemeinsame Behandlung von Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump und Marilyn McCord Adams rechtfertigt sich nicht allein durch das Lehrer-Schülerinnen-Verhältnis von Kretzmann zu Stump und McCord Adams und durch die gemeinsam verfassten bzw. edierten Texte von Kretzmann mit Stump bzw. McCord Adams, sondern vor allem durch ihre gemeinsame Überzeugung, dass die Beschäftigung mit der Geschichte der Philosophie, vor allem der mittelalterlichen Philosophie, eine Weise des Philosophierens ist, welche die systematische Behandlung philosophischer Probleme in den Vordergrund stellt, aber bedeutende Figuren der Philosophiegeschichte als wichtige Diskussionspartner behandelt.

This book deals with the intellectual aspects of having diverse religious expressions in proximity and the socio-political consequences. It provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on this complex subject, cross-fertilizing work on religious plurality with truth-claims from theologians as well as philosophers from the continental and analytic traditions. It includes three major parts. Part 1 explores the ideas around religious diversity and truth; Part 2 draws out the epistemic import of religious diversity; and Part 3 concludes the volume by examining the practical and social aspects of religious diversity. Bringing a transdisciplinary perspective to a topic that remains at the forefront of conversation around the religious life of the world, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theology and the Philosophy of Religion.

Under an ‘antitheodicy’, I understand any attempt to show the principal impossibility of a morally respectable and rationally convincing theoretical answer to the theoretical problem of evil which is understood as a problem of consistency and rational coherence between propositions. In this paper, I will analyse the concept of rationality which is presupposed at least in some strands of antitheodicy. A. Gleeson’s ‘A frightening love. Recasting the Problem of Evil’ presupposes a dichotomy between an engaged-existential and a detached-impersonal kind of philosophical thinking which are respectively characterized by a stress on authenticity and the acknowledgement of particularity and contingency in the first case and by precision, logic, provability and an instrumental understanding of rationality in the second case. The second kind of reasoning which underlies all theodicies is inapt for dealing adequately with the real problem of evil. I try to show that the dichotomy of impersonal objective and existentially subjective kinds of philosophy is not a contradictory one but leaves out a broad field in-between which can be characterized as ‘informal reasoning’ and which allows a morally sensitive answer to the theoretical problem of evil which is not isolated from the ‘real’ problem of evil.