Christian belief suffered a serious setback in the first half of the 19th century, when critics like Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss suggested that the Bible was a story-book like any other – a multi-authored compilation of fact, fiction, folktale and fantasy, a fabrication on a par with the Iliad, the Aeneid or the Niebelungenlied.

In theory the Christians could have turned the challenge back on their assailants: they could have accepted that their holy books were works of myth-making, while affirming that they told the greatest stories in the world. In practice however the case was not so easy to make. You cannot spin much depth of character or narrative suspense from the conviction that Jesus saves and that all manner of things will be well. Even Charles Dickens was baffled. He was a supreme storyteller, and – though he was not much of a Christian – he wanted his children to know “something about the History of Jesus Christ”. In the late 1840s he wrote The Life of Our Lord and recited it to them at Christmas. “No one ever lived,” he began, “who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong.”

via Jonathan Rée – Dissing God | New Humanist.

Annie Cohen-Solal was born in Algeria.  She is currently Professeur des Universités at the Université de Caen Basse Normandies and Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.  She first came to New York in 1989 as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States,  after her Sartre biography,  Sartre: A Life, had become an international best seller.

via Interview with Annie Cohen-Solal | WKNO.

The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick

In the movie, one sees, roughly, a family, the O’Briens, dealing with the death of one of their own. Then, nothing less than a depiction of the creation of the universe and the evolution of life on earth. Next, a troubled boy coming of age in the traditional family where father rules, mother loves, and Oedipus stirs. Finally, a vision of the afterlife.

Many critics describe The Tree of Life as a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life; Malick is one of a surprising number of contemporary filmmakers who began in philosophy. He studied at Harvard with philosopher-humanist and film theorist Stanley Cavell, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, translated a volume of Heidegger, taught philosophy at M.I.T. before deciding he was not a very good teacher, became a journalist, rewrote screenplays, and eventually became a filmmaker.

Given Malick’s background and his film’s eschewal of a clear narrative, it’s not surprising that some would see The Tree of Life as dealing with philosophical questions. Malick, however, begins his film with an epigraph, a passage from the Book of Job that suggests something different: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?”

The traditional understanding of those lines suggests the humbling of Job, a good man put to a test of faith by a compassionless god. The passage can be understood to represent the essence of Malick’s project itself, a dialectic of grand ambition and abject humility. On the one hand, he audaciously depicts creation—we will be there when all the sons of god shout for joy. On the other, he shows us a father, mother, and their three sons, who, like all humanity, inevitably endure profound humbling.

via Boston Review — Alan A. Stone: Imagining Faith.

Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the universe. Its methodological error lies in the fact that it over-estimates the epistemological value of our logical operations… But philosophy has no immediate influence on the great majority of mankind; it interests only a small number even of the thin upper stratum of intellectuals, while all the rest find it beyond them. (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Lecture xxxv)

Still, as Philip Rieff observed in his classic 1959 book, “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist,” the father of psychoanalysis was also a moralist, and a conservative one at that — conservative in both his personal mores and in his deep seated conviction that repression and self-restraint are essential to civilization. In his science, Freud prescribed a vision of the good life and in that regard he was, for all his sneering at philosophy, a member of the Socrates guild.

via Freud as Philosopher – NYTimes.com.

I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth

KRONOS: Nihilism is one of the most ambiguous philosophical concepts. What is your idea of it? Would you consider yourself a nihilist? Does nihilism totally exclude religion? What about Meillassouxs nihilistic faith fuelled by the inexistence of God?

RB: Very simply, nihilism is a crisis of meaning. This crisis is historically conditioned, because what we understand by ‘meaning’ is historically conditioned. We’ve moved from a situation in which the phenomenon of ‘meaning’ was self-evident to one in which it has become an enigma, and a primary focus of philosophical investigation. The attempt to explain what ‘meaning’ is entails a profound transformation in our understanding of it; one that I think will turn out to be as far-reaching as the changes in our understanding of space, time, causality, and life provoked by physics and biology.

via KRONOS – english – I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth – metafizyka – kultura – religia.

What do we mean when we say that the hills are alive to the sound of music? Isn’t the point not that music has sound but that it is sound? And does this mean that the source of the sound – the singer, the violinist, the guitarist – doesn’t, from a musical point of view, really matter? This week, we explore some difficult questions in the philosophy of music.

via Philosophers Zone – 5 March 2011 – The Sound of Music.

via YouTube – From Existentialism to Postmodernism (1 of 3).

How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.

via LRB · Terry Eagleton · Indomitable.

1. How do you consider your role as film critic?

In the first place, I consider my role as a film critic — and also as a Professor of Film Studies at a university — as consisting in saying, “look at this!” I try to make my readers, and my students, more fully aware of films that they might not have known about otherwise, or might have had difficulty in grasping otherwise. This isn’t to say that everyone will have the same taste as I have, or like the same films that I do. But a major reason to write about films, or to teach about them, is to point things out, and hopefully to allow people (my readers, or my students) to experience things they might not have experienced otherwise.

via NEGATIV: Steven Shaviro über Filmkritik.