Recollecting the Religious: Augustine in Answer to Meno’s Paradox

Philosophers of education often view the role of religion in education with suspicion, claiming it to be impossible, indoctrinatory or controversial unless reduced to secular premises and aims. The ‘post-secular’ and ‘decolonial’ turns of the new millennium have, however, afforded opportunities to revaluate this predilection. In a social and intellectual context where the arguments of previous generations of philosophers may be challenged on account of positivist assumptions, there may be an opening for the reconsideration of alternative but traditional religious epistemologies. In this article, we pursue one such line of thought by revisiting a classic question in the philosophy of education, Meno’s Paradox of inquiry. We do this to revitalise understanding and justification for religious education. Our argument is not altogether new, but in our view, is in need of restatement: liturgy is at the heart of education and it is so because it is a locus of knowledge. We make this argument by exploring St Augustine’s response to Meno’s Paradox, and his radical claim that only Christ can be called ‘teacher’. Though ancient, this view of the relationship of the teacher and student to knowledge may seem surprisingly contemporary because of its emphasis on the independence of the learner. Although our argument is grounded in classic texts of the Western tradition, we suggest that arguments could be made by drawing on similar resources in other religious traditions, such as Islam, that also draw upon the Platonic tradition and similarly emphasise the importance of communal and personal acts of worship.

Epistemic Norms, the False Belief Requirement, and Love

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other.

The (Critical) Edge of Tradition: Understanding Ġhālib as Valī in Contemporary Delhi

In this essay, I explore an emergent trend within both authoritative Islamic discourse and Urdu public culture in north India, in which the poet Mirzā Asadullāh Ḳhān “Ġhālib” (1797-1869) is portrayed as a saintly and prophetic figure. I aim to show that claiming Ġhālib as an authoritatively Islamic figure—and hence his life and poetry as Islamically authoritative and legible—at this historical moment of unprecedented Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bias in India is a profoundly radical claim. It gestures towards a Muslim—and crucially, also non-Muslim—reclamation of precolonial lifeways and intellectual, literary, and spiritual traditions as an antidote to the poisonous discourses of modern religious nationalism and sectarianism.

Idealism ex Nihilo

This chapter makes a radical claim: theism entails a robust form of idealism. The chapter then goes on to use that claim to make sense of a central tradition of Jewish mysticism—tzimtzum, or divine contraction. The tradition in question is an idealistic solution to a problem concerning belief in creation; a problem that, this chapter ends with claiming, Gersonides may have been sensitive to.

Socrates, Thrasymachus, and Competition among the Unjust: Republic 1.349b–350c

In Republic 1, Thrasymachus makes the radical claim that being just is ‘high-minded simplicity’ and being unjust is ‘good judgment’ (348c–e). Because injustice involves benefiting oneself, while justice involves benefiting others, the unjust are wise and good and the just are foolish and bad (348d–e). The “greedy craftsperson” argument (1.349b–350c) attempts to show that the unjust person's desire to outdo or have more than ( pleon echein) everyone is a symptom of her ignorance. Many commentaries have found the argument problematic and unclear. However, this paper argues that the greedy craftsperson argument defends plausible constraints on the nature of justice and wisdom.

Hermeneutical Injustice, (Self-)Recognition, and Academia

Miranda Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recognition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker's theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a name to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recognition” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems.

Preliminary Directions

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how philosophers have understood the concept and practice of the gift. For philosophers, the only true gift is the unreciprocated gift. According to them, to expect that Others return a gift, to call on reciprocity, amounts to pulling back the movement of giving toward oneself, thus canceling the disinterested intent that alone gives meaning to the gesture of offering. This view, however, is not shared by all philosophers; neither does it inform all of their actions. Stated in those terms, this very demanding requirement of generosity might remain out of the reach of the very thinkers who express it. This radical claim, however, is not pure bravado. Its primary purpose is to activate critical awareness. By denying the donor any expectation of a return, it aims to proclaim that the gift as a gesture can never be identified with a commercial transaction. This requirement thus amounts to resisting giving in to self-interested considerations and to reject the domination of an economy directed almost exclusively toward maximum profit and return on investment—in other words, everything philosophers tend to call exchange, without realizing that this word also carries a wealth of noneconomic meanings. The chapter then shows how philosophers tend to understand reciprocity exclusively as self-interested exchange, as opposed to the requirement of unconditional giving that entails—at least implicitly—a rejection of self-interest.

Romantic Art

On Hegel’s view, Christianity’s radical claim that God has appeared in a human body and in historical time revolutionizes humans’ attitude toward the divine. This development has serious consequences for art. Since myths are no longer the source of religion, art becomes superfluous. But it continues in ways that confirm humans’ growing sense of subjectivity. In early Christian paintings, we see intensely interior gazes, signaling a new depth of self within each human. In chivalric poetry, knights fight for increasingly secular goals. In Shakespeare’s plays, characters act on their own subjective aims rather than divine commands. In Hegel’s own generation, romantic novels celebrate everyday humans pursuing domestic quests, a development that Hegel warns will lead art to end in prose.

The “Right to Wage War” against Empire: Anticolonialism and the Challenge to International Law in the Indian National Army Trial of 1945

This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. In this trial, the defense made the radical claim that anticolonial wars fought in Asia against European powers were legitimate and just and should be recognized as such under international law. The aim of this Article is to draw attention to the understudied role of anticolonial movements in challenging the premises of international law in the aftermath of World War II.

Barth and the divine perfections

Colin Gunton advanced the radical claim that Christians have univocal knowledge of God. Just this, he said in Act and Being, was the fruit of Christ's ministry and passion. Now, was Gunton right to find this teaching in Karl Barth – or at least, as an implication of Barth's celebrated rejection of ‘hellenist metaphysics’? This article aims to answer this question by examining Gunton's own claim in Act and Being, followed by a closer inspection of Barth's analysis of the doctrine of analogy in a long excursus in Church Dogmatics II/1.Contrary to some readings of Barth, I find Barth to be remarkably well-informed about the sophisticated terms of contemporary Roman Catholic debate about analogy, including the work of G. Sohngen and E. Pryzwara. Barth's central objection to the doctrine of analogy in this section appears to be the doctrine's reckless division (in Barth's eyes) of the Being of God into a ‘bare’ God, the subject of natural knowledge, and the God of the Gospel, known in Jesus Christ. But such reckless abstraction cannot be laid at the feet of Roman theologians alone! Barth extensively examines, and finds wanting, J. A. Quenstedt's doctrine of analogy, and the knowledge of God it affords, all stripped, Barth charges, of the justifying grace of Jesus Christ. From these pieces, Barth builds his own ‘doctrine of similarity’, a complex and near-baroque account, which seeks to ground knowledge of God in the living act of his revelation and redemption of sinners. All this makes one tempted to say that Gunton must be wrong in his assessment either of univocal predication or of its roots in the theology of Karl Barth.But passages from the same volume of the Church Dogmatics make one second-guess that first conclusion. When Barth turns from his methodological sections in volume II/1 to the material depiction of the divine perfections, he appears to lay aside every hesitation and speak as directly, as plainly and, it seems, as ‘univocally’ as Gunton could ever desire. Some examples from the perfection of divine righteousness point to Barth's startling use of frank and direct human terms for God's own reality and his unembarrassed use of such terms to set out the very ‘heart of God’.Yet things are never quite what they seem in Barth. A brief comparison between Gunton's univocal predication and Barth's own use of christological predication reveals some fault-lines between the two, and an explanation, based on Barth's own doctrine of justification, is offered in its place.