I hadn’t thought that I’d be able to get to this year’s Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion conference (poster here), since a) it clashed with a conference in London at which I was already due to present on Poetry and Prayer, and b) it was pretty expensive (£195 reduced rate!) and I’m unemployed.
But I had to withdraw from the London conference anyway (because I’m unemployed and couldn’t afford to go to that either - I also withdrew from the Haunting Memories conference).
So the organisers of ACPR 2012 have asked me to attend as a ‘working delegate’, which is great!
Read moreMeillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.
