Part 2: Why Continental Philosophy?

The prominent American philosopher Thomas Nagel observes: ‘It is not exactly correct to say that Anglo-American philosophy avoids the big questions…. Nevertheless, the fear of nonsense has had a powerful inhibiting effect…. It is understandable that an attachment to certain standards and methods should lead to a concentration on problems amenable to those methods…. But it is often accompanied by a tendency to define the legitimate questions in terms of the available methods of solution.’[iii]

Continental philosophy is necessary for theology because theological realities, like all realities, can be discovered and described only by methods that are attuned to their structures. Some key types of information – about the nature of God, of humans in relation to God and each other, and about the world they inhabit – systematically elude traditional analytic or scientific examination. This is because God, humans, and the world are not merely data points or objects of scrutiny, but are related to each other in ways that fundamentally affect how each can be understood and described.

As T.F. Torrance noted, it is ‘the nature of the particular object itself which must prescribe the relevant mode of knowing, and thus the form and content of whatever knowledge arises’.[iv] Taking this challenge seriously is a key priority of continental philosophers. They therefore approach their studies through four hermeneutical questions:

• What kinds of objects does an enquiry have in view?
• Who does the enquiring, and how are they related to these objects?
• What form does knowledge or understanding take within this dynamic?
• How is such knowledge acquired, expressed, assessed, and passed on?

Adequate responses to these questions demand methods that take seriously the need for openness to God as object and goal of enquiry, and the significance of humans’ relations to Him, to each other, and to the world. The following sections introduce continental philosophy’s actual and potential orientation towards revelation and newness, as well as some of its key methods and ideas. The sections also note where these methods and ideas have played significant roles in the course of scientific progress in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This will lay the groundwork for Part 3, demonstrating the potential of philosophical theology in the continental tradition.

Openness and Revelation

The questions that guide continental philosophy require a rigorous attentiveness to reality. It is a hallmark of continental thinkers including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Luc Marion, and William Desmond (*1951) to understand Being not as closed or inert, but as revelatory, and therefore as requiring openness, both in the sense of receptivity and of reciprocity. Their methods are designed not only to understand this claim in the abstract, but also practically to enable the openness it demands.

Since its early origins with Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) focus on newness and creativity in his philosophy of time and free will, Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) account of the dynamic and open structure of our conscious engagement with the world, and Martin Heidegger’s description of ‘the open’ as the space where we encounter reality – or as Heidegger would put it, where Being reveals itself to us –, an embrace of openness has been at the heart of the continental philosophical tradition.[v] This embrace continues to be evident in the ‘post-structuralist’ stream of continental philosophy, including Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) creative re-interpretation of political and intellectual history to discover previously unseen insights and dynamics, Gilles Deleuze’s (1925–1995) interpretation of reality as an ongoing flow of different events that are always unfolding and changing, Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) early emphasis on the open possibilities of interpretation and meaning, as well as Derrida’s later quasi-religious account of ‘the future’ (l’avenir) that is ever-arriving and yet always open to new possibilities.[vi] ‘Openness’ is also a hallmark of the responses to these ideas formulated by recent religious philosophers and theologians, such as Jean-Luc Marion, who adapted many of his former teacher Derrida’s ideas to develop a new philosophical account of revelation, William Desmond, who against Deleuze argues that a true openness or porosity to reality must not rule out but embrace the spiritual and indeed the transcendent, and John Milbank (*1952), who has deployed Foucault’s genealogical method to uncover previously neglected dimensions and understandings of spiritual realities within the traditions of Christian theology and exegesis.[vii]

Methods and Impact

The signature methods of continental philosophy are fine-tuned to enable a rigorous pursuit of this openness to revelation in the widest sense. ‘Method’ here refers to a characteristic approach or mode of investigation or enquiry. The most significant such approaches are phenomenology, hermeneutics, transvaluation, genealogy, and engagement with the arts.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of the structure of human consciousness from a first- and second-person point of view. Insofar as this consciousness is always directed toward objects, it is not self-enclosed but always already open. Pioneered by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology was extended by Martin Heidegger to an approach not only to particular experiences but to existence as a whole. In that approach, human existence is marked by its vulnerable but also creative openness: to the surrounding world and community, to its own unsurveyable past and future, and to being as a whole. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and others developed phenomenology into the influential intellectual movement known as ‘existentialism’. The ‘existentialist’ movement embedded in academic philosophy fundamental questions such as how to live an authentic meaningful life, the finite character of human existence, and the nature of time and temporality. It also produced many significant literary works (with Sartre and Albert Camus [1913–1960] respectively awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature), and provided the philosophical inspiration for a number of political and social reflections on the issues of freedom, race, and gender (most notably through the works of Simone de Beauvoir [1908–1986] and Frantz Fanon [1925–1961]).

Aside from its contributions to social engagement and the arts, philosophical phenomenology has also played a decisive role in shaping scientific theories about both the macro- and micro-levels of reality. The phenomenological theories of Husserl and Heidegger had a formative impact on Heisenberg’s formulation of quantum mechanics, and continue to influence its interpretation.[viii] The phenomenology of perception developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) inspired and shaped dominant scientific models both of the body-world relation (e.g. embodied/embedded cognition, enactivism, and motor intentionality) and of the ‘upsurgent’ and integrated quality of the world of perception (e.g. multisensory/multimodal integration, synaesthesia, stereopsis, and visual haptics).[ix]

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the study of methods appropriate to understanding human actions and creations, especially texts. Because of the nature of their subject matter, these methods involve an irreducible circularity. As Charles Taylor put it: ‘we are trying to establish a reading for the whole text, and for this we appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and yet because we are dealing with meaning, with making sense, where expressions only make sense or not in relation to others, the readings of partial expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately of the whole.’[x] Philosophers working in hermeneutics, such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, directed the study of human beings beyond abstract notions of ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’, towards the ways in which human identity and self-understanding are shaped by inheriting their world and language from a community, and creatively developing them.

Hermeneutics also played an important role in contemporary understandings of the nature of scientific progress, both in itself and in relation to other forms of progress. In his late work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), Husserl highlights the hermeneutical conditions of scientific inquiry through the notion of the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt): the cultural-linguistic basis of knowledge which a scientist inhabits and shares with colleagues and interlocuters.[xi] This notion anticipates the account of ‘world’ in Thomas Kuhn’s influential theory of ‘paradigm shifts’ in scientific research.[xii] As Kuhn famously writes: ‘paradigm changes…cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.’[xiii]  In his later work, Kuhn explicitly relates his theory of scientific progress to hermeneutics, calling scientific paradigms ‘the hermeneutic basis for the science of a particular period.’[xiv] His ‘discovery of hermeneutics’, he asserts, was ‘decisive’ for his ‘view of science.’[xv] ‘The natural sciences of any period are grounded in a set of concepts that the current generation of practitioners inherit from their immediate predecessors. That set of concepts is a historical product, embedded in the culture to which current practitioners are initiated by training, and it is accessible to non-members only through the hermeneutic techniques by which historians and anthropologists come to understand other modes of thought.’[xvi]

The hermeneutic interpretation of parts in relation to wholes, and vice versa, also resists an overemphasis on scientific and technological progress at the expense of growth in other domains. Industrial progress relies on the breakdown of organisms into their component material and energy, and the manipulation of these components for defined ends. However, as Heidegger and others argue, such exploitation is at once ‘true’ to reality (as proven by the fact that it succeeds) and ‘false’ to what these organisms are, destroying their particularity, integrity, and interrelations.[xvii] This means that progress in science and technology cannot be understood as progress per se, but must either be intentionally segregated from progress in other spheres, or weighed against it. Heidegger and other continental thinkers enable us to confront this challenge by developing hermeneutics as a basic category of interpretation.

Transvaluation

Transvaluation, normally associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), is a mode of critical reflection which calls into question the systems or measures by which goods are evaluated as desirable or significant. Nietzsche associates both the rise and the demise of Christianity with ‘transvaluations of all values’: the Christian faith transformed humanity’s value system by positing a God of weakness rather than power, an inversion Nietzsche regards as pernicious.[xviii] Conversely, the modern loss of faith or ‘death of God’ signifies the loss of an ultimate norm of value, and thus requires a new re-evaluation of all things.[xix] In recent continental philosophy, the method of transvaluation has fostered new ways of critical thinking that call into question the assumed neutrality of secular ways of thinking.[xx]

In approaching the naturalistic, materialist outlook that dominates modern secular society as a specific and historically contingent value system, continental philosophers have opened up what is sometimes called a ‘post-secular’ space in which to explore fundamental questions that are explicitly or tacitly out-of-bounds in contemporary philosophy.[xxi] For instance, Deleuze’s discussion of the scholastic theological distinction between ‘univocal’ and ‘analogical’ accounts of being has stimulated much interest in how theological and religious insights could speak to contemporary philosophical inquiries into the nature of reality.[xxii] Derrida’s work has generated much interest in how the awareness of ‘absences’ in our structures of thought reintroduces the question of God.[xxiii] Similarly, in his final works, Foucault calls attention to the ancient understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise, critiquing the contingent secular assumptions underlying the way in which philosophical thinking is currently conducted.[xxiv]

The ‘post-secular’ fascination with religion and spiritual knowledge is even more evident in the generation of continental philosophers following Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. The philosophical interest of fundamental questions of religion and reality is manifest in the influential writings of Alain Badiou (*1937), Giorgio Agamben (*1942), and Slavoj Žižek (*1949) on concepts such as grace, the Trinity, and the incarnation.[xxv] More radically, the transformative power of these questions is evident in the ‘theological turn’ both of recent French phenomenology and of deconstruction. Phenomenologists including Michel Henry (1922–2002), Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952–2019), and Jean-Luc Marion have directed increasing attention to phenomena such as revelation, prayer, and liturgy. [xxvi] Deconstuctionist philosophers like Gianni Vattimo (*1936), John D. Caputo (*1940), Mark C. Taylor (*1945), and Richard Kearney (*1954) have produced critical works on ‘weak theology’, ‘religion without religion’, and ‘anatheism’, which interpret various religious and theological motifs in new light to reverse the seeming obsolescence of religion.[xxvii]

Genealogy

Post-secular philosophical responses to modern secularity and its dogmas often take the form of ‘genealogical’ critique. Like transvaluation, ‘genealogy’ as a critical philosophical method is often traced to Nietzsche, who argues that many secular Western moral values find their philosophical origins in Judeo-Christian religious ideas. Contemporary secular philosophers such as Foucault and Agamben continue this tradition.[xxviii] Nietzsche’s critical use of genealogy has also been adopted in a number of critical ‘post-secular’ works by Christian thinkers such as John Milbank and Charles Taylor (*1931) to show the enduring influence of theological ideas on the emergence of modernity, and the dangers of truncating these ideas.[xxix]

While many of these critical genealogical accounts of modernity are focused on the power relations and dynamics which underly modern society and politics, the genealogical method has also informed recent works in the history and philosophy of science, and the emerging academic field of ‘science and technology studies’.[xxx] Bruno Latour (*1947) has demonstrated, through genealogical analysis of the development of the natural sciences, that the modern division of nature and culture, which separates the sciences from the humanities and structures the modern university, has never been sustained. His analysis of the practice of science, its objects and its methods, opens new areas of engagement with hermeneutics and religion, particularly in the analysis of the environmental crisis and what he terms ‘political ecology’.[xxxi]

Along with transvaluation, genealogy has provided continental philosophy with tools and insights to reflect critically on the historical contingency of widely held intellectual positions in contemporary society and academia, and to progress beyond these presuppositions towards a fuller and more holistic understanding of the world. By examining how contemporary positions relate to and differ from the past, genealogical enquiry not only shows what advancements have been made in and through intellectual inquiry across time, but also calls us to consider and appreciate these advancements with an attitude of humility, reminding us that progress does not come from nowhere, but always builds on previous efforts and failures, and that the quest for knowledge is never complete, but an ongoing and constantly evolving endeavour.[xxxii]

Engaging the Arts

Through intellectual currents such as existentialism, continental philosophy has shared a particularly strong affinity with the arts: In addition to the literary works of existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, who were also high-accomplished novelists and playwrights, continental philosophers have also engaged closely with visual art, notable examples ranging from Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Cézanne and Michel Henry’s explication of Kandinsky in the phenomenological tradition to Foucault’s commentaries on Manet and Magritte as well as Deleuze’s landmark study of Francis Bacon’s dynamic paintings in the post-structuralist tradition.[xxxiii]

Continental philosophers engage with the arts not simply because many believe that artistic creations can be a more powerful medium than theoretical prose to capture the realities of life and existence. Continental philosophers also believe that art and poetry can inspire and foster a mode of thinking that allows us to discover dimensions of reality that are not easily accessible through other methods. In addition to the contrast Heidegger draws between ‘poetic’ (or sometimes ‘meditative’) thinking and ‘technological’ (or sometimes ‘calculative’) thinking,[xxxiv] one notable example is the distinction between ‘durational’ thinking and ‘spatialised’ thinking made by Henri Bergson (another Nobel Prize laureate in literature). As Bergson observes, when we are listening to music, what we experience in an uninterrupted melody is fundamentally different from the same notes disjoined. Melodies are not reducible to abstracted series of musical notes (as they appear spatially on a musical score), which Bergson associates with spatialised thinking.[xxxv] The experience of the ‘flow’ of time we encounter when we are playing or listening to music gives us access to a non-representational mode of durational thinking which reveals to us that time is, as Sir John (indirectly influenced by Bergson through Teilhard de Chardin [1881–1955]) says, ‘a constituent of everything’.[xxxvi] For Bergson, this durational mode of thinking opens us up to the spiritual dimensions of the world: it is, as Bergson puts it, ‘what attains the spirit…. Its real domain being the spirit, it would seek to grasp in things, even material things, their participation in spirituality’.[xxxvii]

Humility and Progress

Through these methods, continental philosophy takes a humble approach to human beings, knowledge, and language. Its understanding can be summarized as follows:

• Humans as embodied and desirous: Continental philosophers treat human beings not primarily as rational agents, but as creative and receptive actors shaped at all levels by their embodiment, relationships and desires.
• Knowledge as inhabitation and technique: Continental philosophers conceptualize knowledge not primarily as the amassment of facts and their arrangement in logical propositions, but as the capacity to inhabit and shape a world.
• Language as conversation and poesis: Continental philosophers understand language not primarily as a vehicle of information, and therefore as ideally univocal and technical. Rather, they understand it primarily as a medium of conversation and expression, and therefore as inherently multifaceted and malleable.

These approaches do not intend to minimize the mental capacities of humans, the penetration and reliability of knowledge, or the clarity and revelatory power of language. Rather, they seek to be true to their forms and operations, so as to maximize our understanding ‘not just…of what is to be understood but also of the fundamental nature of spiritual understanding itself’.[xxxviii]

Although these approaches problematize certain constructions of progress, they do not oppose progress as such. Rather, they regard progress as rooted in the vitality of traditions of conversation, practice and inhabitation: the energy generated by such traditions ever to widen the horizons of conversation and discovery, equipped and willing to venture ‘into the vast unseen’.

Part 3: Widening Horizons in Philosophical Theology

References

[iii] Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ix–x.

[iv] T.F. Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 13f, as summarized by Trevor Hart, Between the Image and the Word (London: Routledge, 2013), 25.

[v] By Henri Bergson, see esp. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977 [1932]). ‘Openness’ is articulated by Bergson variously through this work, including the notions of ‘open morality’ and ‘open society’. But, above all, it refers to an ‘attitude [which] is that of the open soul’ (ibid., 38). By Edmund Husserl, see esp. Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1973 [1900/1913]). By Martin Heidegger, see esp. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962 [1927]).

[vi] By Michel Foucault, see esp. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 140–148. By Gilles Deleuze, see esp. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). By Jacques Derrida, see esp. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006).

[vii] By Jean-Luc Marion, see esp. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). By William Desmond, see esp. ‘On God and the Between’, in Lieven Boeve and Christophe Brabant (eds.), Between Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 99–125; esp. p. 105. By John Milbank, see esp. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Order, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

[viii] See e.g. Patrick A. Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: A Study of the Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965); Michel Bitbol, Mécanique quantique, une introduction philosophique (Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 1997); Kristian Camilleri, Heisenberg and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: The Physicist as Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris, Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013); Steven French, The Structure of the World: Metaphysics and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[ix] See e.g. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1983); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher (eds), The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), passim; Anastasia Kozyreva, ‘Non-representational Approaches to the Unconscious in the Phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 1 (2018): 199–224. On the broader impact of phenomenology on psychology, see esp. Peter Ashworth and Man Cheung Chung (eds), Phenomenology and Psychological Science (New York: Springer, 2006).

[x] Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–57, 18.

[xi] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), esp. 137–141.

[xii] Although Kuhn himself did not study with Husserl directly, he was influenced by Husserl’s former student, Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964).

[xiii] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 111.

[xiv] Thomas Kuhn, The Road Since Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 218.

[xv] Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xiii.

[xvi] Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, 218.

[xvii] See esp. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question concerning Technology’, in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35.

[xviii] See esp. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. H.L. Menken (New York: Knopf, 1918 [1895]), conclusion.

[xix] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974 [1882]), 181-2 (para. 125, ‘The Madman’).

[xx] Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 1.

[xxi] For a discussion of the extent to which naturalism or materialism dominates analytic philosophy, see Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds), Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On the implications of this theoretical dominance for the study of religious issues, see Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. ch. 1.

[xxii] See esp. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. As Philip Goodchild points out, Deleuze’s own philosophical project ‘can in some ways be regarded as a work of theology.’ Philip Goodchild, ‘Deleuze and Philosophy of Religion’, in Morny Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 150.

[xxiii] See Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002).

[xxiv] Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

[xxv] See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000); Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001); Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). See also the discussion of ‘resurrection’ and ‘immortality’ in Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London; New York: Continuum, 2009), especially 507–514.

[xxvi] On the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, see e.g. Christina M. Gschwandtner, ‘Turn to Excess: The Development of Phenomenology in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought’, in Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 445–466.

[xxvii] On the ‘deconstructionist’ interest in religion, see Gregg Lambert, Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann (eds.), Reimagining the Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

[xxviii] By Michel Foucault, see esp. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. By Giorgio Agamben, see esp. The Kingdom and the Glory. See also Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[xxix] See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 295, 774, 851n2, for Taylor’s acknowledgement of Milbank’s influence.

[xxx] See Dorothea Olkowski, ‘Rethinking Science as Science Studies: Latour, Stengers, Prigogine’, in Todd May (ed.), Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2014), 109–26.

[xxxi] See esp. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

[xxxii] Cf. Templeton, Humble Approach, esp. 35–7.

[xxxiii] See, respectively, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–190; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL Northwestern University Press, 1964), 9–25; Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2009); Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe: Illustrations and Letters by Rene Magritte, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting (London: Tate Publishing, 2009); Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2004).

[xxxiv] See esp. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

[xxxv] Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Dover, 2007), 123–4.

[xxxvi] Templeton, Humble Approach, 25. Sir John is here quoting N. M. Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 55. Bergson’s philosophy of time had a great impact on Teilhard de Chardin’s cosmology, which in turn influenced Sir John’s vision; see Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard, 103; Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, Bergson et Teilhard de Chardin (Paris: Seuil, 1963); see also Templeton, Humble Approach, 25, 30–32, 55, 86, 93.

[xxxvii] Bergson, The Creative Mind, 21.

[xxxviii] The John Templeton Foundation strategic plan for its Religious Cognition strategic priority.