1st Edition

The Philosophy of Reenchantment

Edited By Michiel Meijer, Herbert De Vriese Copyright 2021
284 Pages
by Routledge

284 Pages
by Routledge

284 Pages
by Routledge

This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett. The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment,... Read more

Introduction: Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World

Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese

Part I. Reenchantment and (A)Theism

1. What is Reenchantment? An Interview with Charles Taylor

Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor

2. Religion without Magic: Responding to the Natural World

John Cottingham

3. Might There Be Secular Enchantment?

Akeel Bilgrami

Part II, Genealogies of Reenchantment

4. Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the Forgotten Story of Transcendence

Guido Vanheeswijck

5. Theorizing Reenchantment Across Different Value Spheres

Herbert De Vriese

6. Reenchantment as Resonance

Paolo Costa

Part III. Working with Reenchantment

7. The Eyes of a Child

Sophie-Grace Chappell

8. Nature, Enchantment, and God

Fiona Ellis

9. Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification: On Taking Morality (Too) Seriously

Michiel Meijer

10. Detachment and Attention

Rob Compaijen

11. Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism

David McPherson

Epilogue: On the Call from Outside

Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami

Biography

Michiel Meijer is postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp. He is the author of Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation (2017) and has published widely on subjects such as moral value, human agency, moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral phenomenology, and moral psychology in the fields of metaethics, normative ethics, and social theory.

Herbert De Vriese is Assistant Professor at the Center for European Philosophy of the University of Antwerp. His work focuses on secularization, critique of religion, and disenchantment in general, and the role of philosophical theory and critique in historical and sociological debates on (the end of) classical secularization theory, postsecularism, and classical narratives of disenchantment in particular.

"All in all, this series of essays is an excellent scholarly introduction to this nascent subfield of reenchantment within philosophy of religion. The contributors seem to be mostly moral realists, if not religious. The book raises many important issues and questions as to what reenchantment means and whether the concept itself is reified to the point of adequate engagement."
-John Mauger, Claremont Graduate University, Nova Religio