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E.E. Reed

@poetryforsupper.bsky.social

we shall not live by bread alone. public works are for the public.

3024 Posts609 Follower308 Folgt
E.E. Reed@poetryforsupper.bsky.social · yesterday

Mail. Whether conscious or unconscious, societies orient themselves around what they understand to be the ultimate concern. Let us, then, refuse all demagogues and authoritarians. Let us come together as citizens to cultivate neighborhoods where all have a place and all have dignity.

Bretherton, Lloyd, Napolitano. What is Political Theology? Cover. We realized the term political theology is highly problematic given the first-order political commitments of key figures, most notably the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. But we waved off the skepticism of colleagues who took the term to be unredeemable. Surely concepts can take on new life. Surely political theology could be just as—if not more useful as a critical tool, helping us notice what the wealthy and powerful would prefer to conceal rather than being a means of legitimizing or sanctifying the state.We started to worry: Had the skeptics been right? Was political theology unredeemable? No. As we talked with one another and with colleagues and students, we were convinced that the skeptics were wrong. We have seen too many instances, around the world and across his-tory, of religious ideas, practices, and modes of imagining fueling struggles for liberation. We decided to write this book because we are convinced that the term political theology need not be ceded to demagogues, authoritarians, and fascists, religious or otherwise. Our task, then, is to separate the sort of political theology that lends itself to domination and exploitation from the sort of political theology that lends itself to democratic renewal and liberation.One of our purposes in writing this book is to demonstrate why political theology is so vital. Our hypothesis is when the multiple uses of the term political theology rub up against one another, sparks fly.
Levi Stahl@levistahl.bsky.social · 6d ago

By my math the top 10 editions of the Odyssey that have been in the marketplace since the beginning of 2024 have sold almost 4 times as many copies year to date as they had at this point in 2024. By next month they’ll be well over 4x; not unreasonable to think it might be 10x by year’s end.

E.E. Reed@poetryforsupper.bsky.social · last wk.

my most immediate reaction: Nolan has made a strong adaptation that captures much of the spirit of the poem. whatever disagreements i may have with plotting or pacing, i am grateful he has translated this character into this medium.

E.E. Reed@poetryforsupper.bsky.social · 2w ago

Phenomenology Friday “For Gadamer, Phenomenology was meant to move beyond the ‘pointless’ Cartesian question…. Humans were being reconnected with the world in all its richness.”

THE DESTINY OF PHENOMENOLOGY: GADAMER ON VALUE, GLOBALISM, AND THE GROWTH OF BEING JESSICA FRAZIER University of Oxford What was the long-durée trajectory implied in the phenomenological movement's original goals, and how might it speak to the work of phenomenologists today?' This article will approach these questions by looking at Hans-Georg Gadamer's reading of the German phenomenological tradition and its goals of enlivening life, restoring our connection to powerful, guiding value-experiences, and exploring the unfolding of consciousness into ever-new global cultural expres-sions. Many have taken Phenomenology primarily as an epistemological project, an attempt *to lucidate... connections between veritable being and knowing " thereby solving problems intro-duced by scepticism. From this perspective, phnomenological analysis of experience serves as a methodological tool intended to tackle philosophical problems by grounding our discussions in an appropriate type of encounter with 'things themselves", as they are given"? It thus treats psychological attitudes as a tool of analysis. But in this popular picture of Phenomenology. other wider concerns of the tradition are often occluded including Phenomenology's attempt to reground experiences of value, to empower the creative nature of consciousness, and to reveal the nature of both individual and global flourishing. One of the latest heirs of the German tradition, Gadamer left a clue to this broader concep-tion in Truth and Method where he cited Hegel's parable of the girl in the orchard. She observes the way nature generates trees, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit, but does not realise that she too is a "fruit" of the same driving force of existence, and subject to the same conditions of unceasing growth: ...just as the giri who presents the plucked fruit is more than Nature that presented it in the first place with all of its conditions and clements- -trees, air, light, and so on-insofar as she combines all …towards mind and into culture. For Gadamer, Hegel was the great synthesising thinker who took the historical trajectory of philosophy forward in a great leap; ... it was Hegel who saw himself faced with the philosophical task of gathering together the new 'sciences" and everything else that did not merge with science, such as metaphysics and religion, and thereby to raise them up into the unitary whole of an encompassing concept." Hegel thus captures Being as a multilayered and dynamic process of development. But he also hints at the creative power of our own nature: we do not just exist. We are existence-converters. doing ontological work through the vast collective thought-forms we call philosophies and religions to make more things, and more kinds of things come to be. In the following pages we look at Gadamer's idea that global culture's continuous collaborative unfolding into new expressions is the proper destiny of humanity... and analysis of those global ideas in such a way that it amplifies and refines them, is the proper destiny of Phenomenology. The context in which Gadamer worked was quite different from that of Husser or Heidegger; he came from a largely secular upbringing with his chemist father in cosmopolitan Breslau, writing in post-war (and even post-reunification) Germany. In his work he addressed issues such as cultural conflict, environmental care, and nuclear arma-ment. Even among the phenomenologists of the 1980s and 1990s. his perspective was often more expansive and liberal—he was the only speaker at a conference on Religion and the Religions with Derrida, Vattimo, and others in 1994 (when he himself was 94) to remind the group that they should be looking to 'other religious worlds and other cultural worlds' beyond Abrahamic monotheism.® He wrote in a festschrift that our 'conception of the world must no longer be Eurocentric and that we must fight the global transformation' of world cultures toward a unitary cultural model' by attending to '…Gadamer reflected on the German tradition of Phenomenology at length-both in his explicitly phenomenological works (Truth and Method and the essays he wrote around the time of its publication, such as Man and World [1960). The Nature of Things and the Language of Things (1960), The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century [19621, and The Phenomenological Movement [1963]), and also in his collections on Parmenides. Plato, and Hegel (including his first book on Plato's Philebus) which set out the early history of phenomenological philosophy as he saw it. In his accounts, he discusses a number of goals that he saw unfolding in the early years of the twentieth century in German universities. In their attempt to understand reality, phenomenologists wanted to aid the movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles. ° But there was a critical element to this project insofar as Being needed to be rediscovered not as particular things, nor as the sum of present entities, but as the preconditional ground in which metaphysics as the root of the tree of philosophy is supported". "Further, some attempted to expand the traditional project of clarifying reality by opening the 'empirical' beyond sensory data to affec-tive, aesthetic, and evaluative data. This would enable us to reground the realm of value as a distinctive reality-in-itself. For Gadamer, Phenomenology was meant to move beyond the "pointless Cartesian question of 'how the subject, filled with his own representations, knows the external world", to a new model of the subject as "already with objects" as given by intu-ition." Humans were being reconnected with the world in all its richness. In essays such as The Phenomenological Movement (1960), he told a historical narrative of Phenomenology as a "missionary consciousness" providing a new way of assessing reality that carried all the way into the doctrine of God'.!4 The turn to language in …
E.E. Reed@poetryforsupper.bsky.social · 2w ago

we’re planning a trip to DC later this summer, so we’re watching Crash Course US History together as a family, and i got real excited about positive and negative freedom, and after i talked several minutes my wife interrupted and said it might be time for bed, but the kids said no! let dad talk!