Ludwig Feuerbach

This book explores the contemporary crisis of biblical interpretation by examining modern and postmodern forms of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. Garrett Green looks at several thinkers who played key roles in creating a radically suspicious reading of the Bible. After Kant, Hamann, and Feuerbach comes Nietzsche, who marked the turn from modern to postmodern suspicion. Green argues that similarities between Derrida's deconstruction and Barth's theology of signs show that postmodern suspicion ought not to be viewed simply as a threat to theology but as a secular counterpart to its own hermeneutical insights. When theology attends to its proper task of describing the grammar of scriptural imagination, it discovers a source of suspicion more radical than the secular, the hermeneutical expression of God's gracious judgement. Green concludes that Christians are committed to the hermeneutical imperative, the never-ending struggle for the meaning of scripture in the hopeful insecurity of the faithful imagination.

D.Z. Phillips argues that intellectuals need not see their task as being for or against religion, but as one of understanding it. What stands in the way of this task is certain methodological assumptions about what inquiry into religion must be. Beginning with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, Phillips goes on to examine these assumptions in the work of Hume, Feurerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch. The result exposes confusion, but also gives logical space to religious belief and shows how the academic study of religion may return to the contemplative task of doing conceptual justice to the world. Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation extends in important ways D.Z. Phillips' seminal 1976 book Religion Without Explanation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and theology.

This volume traces the emergence of German Idealism from Kant and his predecessors through the first half of the nineteenth century, ending with the 'irrationalism' of Kierkegaard. This book provides a broad, scholarly introduction to the period for students of philosophy and related disciplines, as well as some original interpretations of these authors.

Daniel Brudney traces the development of post-Hegelian thought from Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer to Karl Marx's work of 1844 and his "Theses on Feuerbach," and concludes with an examination of "The German Ideology." Brudney focuses on the transmutations of a set of ideas about human nature, the good life, and our relation to the world and to others; about how we end up with false beliefs about these matters; about whether one can, in a capitalist society, know the truth about these matters; and about the critique of capitalism which would flow from such knowledge.

Brudney shows how Marx, following Feuerbach, attempted to reveal humanity's nature and what would count as the good life, while eschewing and indeed polemicizing against "philosophy"--against any concern with metaphysics and epistemology. Marx attempted to avoid philosophy as early as 1844, and the central aims of his texts are the same right through "The German Ideology." There is thus no break between an early and a late Marx; moreover, there is no "materialist" Marx, no Marx who subscribes to a metaphysical view, even in "The German Ideology," the text canonically taken as the origin of Marxist materialism. Rather, in all the texts of this period Marx tries to mount a compelling critique of the present while altogether avoiding the dilemmas central to philosophy in the modern era.

A defense of Marxism as an integral world outlook, against those who would vulgarize and/or distort it. Appendix includes "The Materialist Conception of History, " and "The Role of the Individual in History."

In this time of great change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Karl Marx's relevance to modern social science may seem remote. However, this important study by Charles McKelvey shows just the opposite: Marx's concept of science can help social scientists gain a greater understanding of today's world society. Western ethnocentrism has, McKelvey argues, isolated the Euro-American sociologist from a true picture of the Third World. Modern sociology must rethink itself, McKelvey maintains, in light of Marxian concepts, Immanuel Wallerstein's "world systems perspective," and the cognitional theory of philosopher Bernard Lonergan.