Time and Transcendence: Secular History, the Catholic Reaction and the Rediscovery of the Future

ISBN-13: 9789401051064 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 309 str.

G. Motzkin

Opis

This book investigates one aspect of the story of how our religiously-oriented culture became a secular one. It concentrates on the conflicts enveloping the attitude to the past from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The background argument is that the way the process of secularization occurred in one particular religious context, the Roman Catholic one, was determinative for the possibility of something such as secular culture, and hence for both the modem secular attitude to the past and the modem religious one. In recent years a spate of scholarship has suggested that the expanded version of Weber's theory, according to which modernity is a consequence of Protestan- tism, is not quite accurate. Robert Merton modified this theory to argue that modem natllral science originated in the context of seventeenth-century 1 Protestant England. Against this position, many scholars have investigated 2 origins for the development of science in Catholic countries. The development of natural science, however, is not the whole story of the development of modem secular culture, even if the story of that development is restricted to the development of knowledge. Our modem universities are organized around the division between humanities and natural sciences, and it can be thought that this process of modernization or secularization affected the humanities no less than the sciences.

Spis treści

Preface. Section I: The Genesis of Secular History from Criticism and Memoirs. Introduction. Part I: The Problem of Religion. Part II: The Problem of Time. Part III: The Problem of Retrospection. 1. Memoirs and History: Saint-Simon. 2. From Education to Criticism: Lenglet. Section II: The Catholic Reaction to Secular History and the Rediscovery of Time. Introduction: Religion and the Secular Concept of Subjectivity. 1. The Development of the Catholitic Concept of Tradition from the Council of Trent to the Tübingen School. 2. The Tradition as an Alternative to Secular History in French Traditionalism. 3. The Catholic Turn to Philosophy as an Alternative Tradition. 4. The End of Continuity and Heidegger's Rediscovery of the Problem of Time. Index.