Secularization : an Essay in Normative Metaphysics / by Ulrich Steinvorth.
Steinvorth, Ulrich, author.
2017
H61.15
Available Online

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Title Secularization : an Essay in Normative Metaphysics / by Ulrich Steinvorth.
Author Steinvorth, Ulrich, author.
ISBN 3319638718
9783319638713
9783319638706 (hbk.)
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63871-3
Published Cham Springer International Publishing Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (VI, 223 pages)
Item Number 10.1007/978-3-319-63871-3 doi
Call Number H61.15
Dewey Decimal Classification 301.01
Summary This book answers questions about secularization: Does it dissolve religion, or transform it into faith in a universally valid value? Is it restricted to the west or can it occur everywhere? Using ideas of Max Weber, the book conceives secularization as a process comparable to the rational development of science and production. What is the value secularization propagates? Sifting historical texts, Steinvorth argues the value is authenticity, to be understood as being true to one's talents developed in activities that are done for their own sake and provide life with meaning, and as unconditionally commanded. How can a value be unconditionally demanded? This question leads to an investigation of the self that combines Kant's ideas on the conditions of the possibility of experience with modern brain science, and to the metaphysical deliberation whether to prefer a world with creatures able to do both good and evil to one without them. It is not enough, however, to point to facts. We rather need to understand what secularization, religion and their possible rationality consist in. Max Weber's sociology of religion has provided us with the conceptual means to do so, which this book develops. Secularization is rediscovered as the same progress of rationality in the sphere of religion that we find in the development of the spheres of science, art, the economy and politics or public affairs. It proves to be the perfection rather than the dissolution of religion - a perfection that consists in recognizing authenticity as the successor of the absolute of religion.
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Introduction.
Chapter 1: Three theses.
Chapter 2: Similar views
PART 1: A NEW SECULARIZATION THESIS
Chapter 3: Intrinsic goals and sphere-immanent rationalities
Chapter 4: Religion and the absolute
Chapter 5: Authenticity, morality, and the post-Enlightenment absolute
Chapter 6: Authenticity in ancient China and Rome
Chapter 7: Montaigne's authenticity
Chapter 8: Mortality and Montaignean authenticity
Chapter 9: A naturalistic proof of the validity of the authenticity command
Chapter 10: Three comments on the naturalistic proof
Chapter 11: The thesis. PART 2: OBJECTIONS
Chapter 12: Religion cannot be perfected, least of all by authenticity
Chapter 13: Claims on the absolute must be infallible
Chapter 14: Hegel's red herring
Chapter 15: Rational metaphysics cannot relate to the absolute
Chapter 16 Secular societies can do without anything absolute
Chapter 17: Secularization is a unique Western development
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.

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