Are Pluralistic Societies Doomed to Collapse? Spinoza and His Conservative Critics
Author: Jason Waller (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. )
One of the most influential –and controversial– books in European history that you have probably never heard of is Benedict de Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise published in 1670. The treatise landed like a bomb among the intellectuals of the seventeenth (and eighteenth) centuries. Governments acted immediately to suppress it and within a year the book was outlawed in every country in ...
After the Cogito: Lacan on Psychoanalysis, Science and Religion
Author: Itzhak Benyamini (Bar-Ilan University, PhD.)
This paper examines the way Jacques Lacan defines psychoanalysis in the 1950s as distinct from both religion and science. Psychoanalysis, religion, and science, I shall argue, constitute a paradigmatic triangle for Lacan. In contrast to Freud’s prevalent image as a scientifically-minded and anti-religious person, Lacan’s position is much more intricate to begin with. On the one hand, he does not consider himself a man of the enlight...