[pt] Analiso nesta pesquisa bibliográfica a mística cristã como promotora da emancipação humana. A definição de Modernidade enquanto autonomia humana fica relacionada com ambiente supostamente fértil para gerar ateus. Esta inferência encontra óbices decisivos. A teologia política emancipadora pode até ter início na experiência mística em que ocorrem fenômenos como o êxtase e a contemplação, no entanto, ela só será completa se for promotora da práxis, ações sociais públicas situadas na história. Entre ateus e místicos o elo possível é a emancipação humana. O sentido de hermenêutica, conforme o concebe Paul Ricoeur, se constitui como importante marco metodológico e teórico. O ateísmo Moderno é descrito pelas biografias e bibliografias pontuais dos mestres da suspeita (Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche e Sigmund Freud), enquanto o sentido de místico não é representado na retórica apologética, mas na expressão do testemunho, seja dos filósofos (Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur e Gianni Vattimo) ou de teólogos (André Torres Queiruga, Jurgen Moltmann e John Baptist Metz). As melhores definições de fé são experiências existenciais. A teologia política é teologia se é mística. O ânimo trazido pela experiência com o Espírito Santo conduz a práxis do seguimento a Jesus, em que a face de Deus é buscada e a face do próximo é encontrada. / [en] I analyze in this bibliographic research the Christian mystic as a promoter of human emancipation. The definition of Modernity as human autonomy is related to a supposedly fertile environment to generate atheists. This inference finds decisive obstacles. The emancipatory political theology may even begin in the mystical experience in which phenomena such as ecstasy and contemplation occur, however, it will only be complete if it promotes praxis, public social actions situated in history. Between atheists and mystics the possible link is the human emancipation. Hermeneutics, as Paul Ricoeur conceives it, is the methodological and theoretical framework adopted in this study. Modern atheism is described by the biographies and bibliographies of the masters of suspicion (Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud), while the meaning of mysticism is not found in the apologetic rhetoric, but in the witness expression of philosophers (Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur and Gianni Vattimo) and theologians (André Torres Queiruga, Jurgen Moltmann and John Baptist Metz). My findings are that the best definitions of faith are existential experiences, therefore, political theology is theology if it is mystical. The liveliness brought by experiencing the Holy Spirit leads to the praxis of following Jesus, in which the face of God is sought and the face of the neighbor is found.

Research on the topics of atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion has been limited during much of the last century. We explain the reasons for a lack of research in this field and discuss the recent interest in this topic. The most recent wave of research has been concentrated during the past decade and tends to look at the dual issues of who composes the religiously unaffiliated and why they choose this self-identification. Recent research has begun to take a much wider and deeper view on the subject. This includes research on particular segments of the population such as atheists, as well as understanding how the religiously unaffiliated are viewed by the broader culture. We conclude by describing important directions for future research. In particular, there is a need to break out the separate forms of irreligion and use creative new methodologies to find and study this significant portion of the population.

La critique feuerbachienne de la philosophie idéaliste de Hegel a beaucoup influencé ses contemporains et les matérialistes et humanistes du 19eme siècle. Cependant, les études françaises ne rendent pas compte de sa contribution à l'histoire de la philosophie autant qu'elles le devraient. Le but de ce travail est de présenter l'évolution de la pensée de Feuerbach de sa jeunesse hégélienne jusqu'à son matérialisme anthropologique et humaniste. Cette évolution est le résultat de la remise en cause progressive puis du renversement de la philosophie spéculative. Sa critique de la religion diffère profondément de celle des Lumières françaises dans le sens où loin de ne voir dans la religion qu'erreur, tromperie et fanatisme, il reconnaît que le religion exprime un trait anthropologique essentiel: l'essence de l'homme. La pensée de Feuerbach réside essentiellement alors dans une nouvelle interprétation du phénomène religieux en lui donnant une explication anthropologique. L'être humain est un mélange de rationalité et de sensibilité, d'affectivité et de passivité, qui doit être considéré en même temps en tant qu'individu et qu'être social. En opposition à l'interprétation de Marx, j'étudie plus particulièrement dans cette thèse, le rôle de la praxis sociale dans l'anthropologie feuerbachienne. Enfin, méthodologiquement, en plus d'une lecture attentive de l'ensemble du corpus feuerbachien, je re-contextualise sa pensée au sein du mouvement jeune-hégélien, et après la révolution de 1848. / Feuerbach's anthropological critique of Hegel's idealism has strongly influenced German materialists and humanists in the nineteenth-century as well as the following generations of thinkers. Even so particularly French scholars may still not recognize his contribution as central in the history of thought. The aim of my work is to present the development of Feuerbach's thought in particular how Feuerbach's early Hegelianism evolved into professing an empirical realism and materialist humanism, resulting in what was considered by Feuerbach himself as the negation of speculative German idealism. His critique of religion is fundamentally different from that of the French Enlightenment since according to him religion is not only fraudulent and deceptive, but also an essential anthropological feature. Essentially the thought of Feuerbach consists in a new interpretation of religion's phenomena, giving an anthropological explanation. For Feuerbach, the human subject was a complex weave of rationality and sensuality, affectivity and passivity, sociality and individualism. Contrasting with Marx's interpretation of Feuerbach, in this work 1 will study the role of the social praxis in Feuerbach's anthropology. Besides including a thorough reading of Feuerbach's work, my thesis will present a re-contextualisation of it in the Left Hegelian mouvement and after the March Revolution, as an additional rnaterial for my interpretation.

This thesis explores the use of identity politics within the atheist movement at both the national and individual levels. I conducted a content analysis of two national atheist groups and three best-selling atheist authors in order to assess the use of atheist identity politics at the national level. I then conducted 15 in-depth interviews with a sample of atheists in Portland, Oregon about their atheist identity and their reactions to and identification with national atheist movement strategies. Findings suggest that national atheist organizations and atheist authors are using a strategy of identity politics that encourage atheists to "come out" as atheists, complain about church/state violations, and criticize religion's influence in American society. They liken their movement to the gay identity movement and argue that as more atheists "come out", they will see less stigma and more respect towards atheists. However, individual atheists do not always identify with these movement strategies. Most participants said that atheism is not a particularly salient identity for them and thus most did not see themselves participating in atheist activism. Further, they implied that they experience little stigma in their everyday lives and are more concerned with promoting religious tolerance and secular policies. I argue that the lack of social identification with atheism, combined with limits to the gay analogy, are likely inhibitors to the success of an atheist movement.

Although the ‘death of God’ theology attracted considerable attention during the 1960s, in recent decades it has fallen into neglect. Nonetheless, the issues raised by the ‘death of God’ theology were important ones and it remains an interesting question whether the ‘death of God’ theologians were able to make substantial contributions to them. This thesis re-examines the work of the ‘death of God’ theologians. It argues that the popular view – that the ‘death of God’ theology represented a common tendency, or movement, towards atheism among certain prominent American Protestant theologians – is mistaken. Through a series of detailed studies of Thomas J.J. Altizer (chapters 3 and 4), William Hamilton (Chapter 5), Paul van Buren (Chapter 6), and Harvey Cox (Chapter 7), the thesis shows not only that the significance of the ‘death of God’ theologians has been widely misinterpreted, but that their work contains a number of features which have been under-emphasised or even overlooked. The aim of the thesis is to provide a more balanced contemporary reading of their work. The work of Altizer receives special attention and a case is made for the view that he should be read as a Protestant mystic of a peculiar sort.

This study has its background in the debate about religion and the existence of God, which has been an ongoing issue throughout the Western cultural tradition. Today´s information society has been an impact on the increasing interest for this subject. The essay’s main task is to accomplish a rhetorical analysis of two books, Illusionen om Gud (2008) by atheist Richard Dawkins and Guds dödgrävare (2010) by Christian John Lennox, in order to investigate the authors’ use of rhetorical strategies to influence their audience. The texts are studied using a qualitative approach with the theoretical basis of some well-defined rhetorical variables: ethical, logical and pathetic means of persuasion, propaganda, and the important factor that a message always is presented in a certain context in which the recipients both have their own values and subjects to general truths and common frames of reference. The analysis is intended to convey the rhetorical essence of each author, and uses this image to discuss aims and methods in the communication. Both authors demonstrate varying propagandistic strategies and base their arguments from common context and widely recognized frames of reference. Lennox almost exclusively uses methodological logo arguments, while Dawkins often uses the pathetic persuasion founds.

Il est peu de notions aussi vastes que celle du non-savoir, mais le flou du caractère nécessairement négatif de sa définition s’accompagne tout de même du sentiment que la source de ce qui ne peut qu’être déterminé négativement par la pensée (non, cela n’est pas le savoir) ne peut qu’être positive. Notion à l’applicabilité infinie, parce qu’en elle vient s’abîmer tout ce qui ne peut tenir dans l’espace de la maîtrise relative à ce dont on peut dire : je sais de quoi il s’agit. Est non-savoir tout ce qui se rapporte au bouillonnement pulsionnel de la vie et à l’échéance fatale de la mort. Ce qui pousse l’homme au meurtre, au génocide, à la guerre et à la violence révolutionnaire se confond avec un contenu affectif et identitaire qui ne peut être ramené au savoir sans laisser de reste. Mais tenter de comprendre ce qui échappe à l’entendement est cela même qui relance sans cesse la réflexion comprise comme cœur du savoir. Le savoir se montre ainsi sous une extrême dépendance face à son Autre. À la lumière de cette hypothèse devant beaucoup aux découvertes de la psychanalyse, le présent mémoire s’est donné pour objectif de jeter un regard frais sur quelques grandes tensions sociopolitiques de l’Histoire; mais il a d’abord fallu évaluer philosophiquement la possibilité d’un concept de non-savoir. Des champs identitaires majeurs — révolutions totalitaires ou démocratiques, bouleversements ou synergies culturelles — sont ainsi analysés sous l’angle d’une économie pulsionnelle qui s’inscrit dans une interaction perpétuelle avec ce qui s’ébauche ici comme une économie du rapport entre non-savoir et savoir. Est ainsi produite une esquisse des rapports possibles entre la vie pulsionnelle de l’homme, le savoir institutionnel et le monde sociopolitique. / Few notions are as vast as that unknowing; but the imprecise nature of its definition is nonetheless accompagnied by the implication that what offers itself only negatively to the mind has a positive source. The applicability of the notion of unknowing is infinite; it swallows up all that resists the mastery indicated by statements about that which is. Unknowing encompasses all that belongs to the boiling drive of life and to the faceless moment of death. What leads human beings to murder, to genocide, to war and to revolutionnary violence is bound up with an affective content of identification that cannot be subsumed by knowledge without leaving a residue. Yet attempting to understand what exceeds the mind’s grasp serves as the motor of mental reflection at the heart of knowledge production itself. In this sense, knowledge is inescapably dependent on its « other ». In light of this hypothesis drawn from the domain of psychoanalysis, this thesis aims to reexamine the conceptual underpinnings of basic sociopolitical tensions in History. The conceptual impetus driving major identity movements — such as totalitarian or democratic revolutions and cultural disruptions or synergies — is analysed in terms of a libidinal or drive-oriented economy which is in perpetual interaction with what this thesis characterizes as an economy of the relation between knowing and unknowing, between knowledge and its negation.

Ce mémoire se propose d’étudier la manière nouvelle dont se présente la croyance religieuse à l’âge séculier dans la philosophie de la religion du philosophe Charles Taylor. Plus précisément, nous cherchons à démontrer que la croyance et l’incroyance possèdent les mêmes fondements phénoménologiques, qui sont à trouver du côté des questions identitaires. Afin d’y arriver, nous commençons par analyser sa redéfinition de la sécularité afin de comprendre pourquoi l’âge séculier n’est pas en soi un âge irréligieux. Nous montrerons en quoi, selon Taylor, les Occidentaux partagent un même « arrière-plan » moral et spirituel – le « cadre immanent », que nous appréhendons comme le contexte au sein duquel émergent les positions croyantes et athées. Nous présentons ensuite une brève analyse des éléments historiques et phénoménologiques du cadre immanent ainsi que de sa fonction « transcendantale », ce qui nous permet d’expliquer la raison pour laquelle Taylor soutient que la croyance et l’incroyance relèvent avant tout de l’identité morale et des considérations éthiques qui soutiennent notre vision du monde. Ici nous suivons Taylor en affirmant que ce sont toutes deux des expériences vécues qui a priori s’équivalent sur le plan rationnel. Enfin, au cœur de notre réflexion se trouve la mise en valeur d’un concept très important que Taylor développe à partir des travaux de William James, à savoir l’« espace ouvert jamesien ». Cette ouverture, rendue possible par la sécularité elle-même, vise à rendre compte d’un état de lucidité par lequel nous pouvons ressentir la force des deux options. / This paper aims to describe how Charles Taylor articulates his philosophy of religion in his major work, A Secular Age. We argue that belief and unbelief share the same phenomenological fundamentals, which can be found in the constituents of identity. In order to do that, we shall first analyse his redefinition of secularity in order to see how the secular age is not irreligious in itself. What will emerge of this preliminary investigation is the Taylorian idea that all Westerners share the same spiritual and moral “background”, the “immanent frame”, which must be understood as the context in which we form our beliefs. Then we develop an analysis of the historical elements of the immanent frame and of its “transcendental” function, which makes it possible to explain why Taylor conceives belief and unbelief as questions of moral identity. We follow Taylor in arguing that they are both lived experiences of equal rational value. At the heart of our paper, there is an important concept that Taylor has developed from William James’s work, which is the “Jamesian open space”. This openness illustrates a state of lucidity that is characterised by the ability to feel the force of both options, belief and unbelief.

The Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) was among the most controversial figures writing in English in the eighteenth century. His satirical exploration of the nature of human sociability and economic prosperity infuriated his contemporary critics and deeply influenced the ideas of later Enlightenment philosophes. One of the most persistent questions about Mandeville's work concerns the sincerity of his declarations of Christian piety. Mandeville is commonly identified as a deist. This thesis explores the possibility that he was an atheist. The question is examined through an analysis of Mandeville’s major influences, most notably French Jansenism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, erudite libertinism, and Dutch republicanism. Key figures that Mandeville engaged with in his writings include Pierre Bayle, René Descartes, Shaftesbury, Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Nicole, and Pierre Gassendi. In the process of discussing Mandeville’s putative atheism, the methodological problem of researching and identifying atheism in early-modern Europe is explored. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Emory University, 1983. / Bibliography: p. 227-239.