Lectures on the philosophy of religion: The Philosophy of Religion

Repetition means getting our cognitive and moral bearings not through prompted remembering, but quite unexpectedly as a gift from the unknown, as a revelation from the future. Repetition is epiphany that sometimes grants the old again, as new, and sometimes grants something radically new.

Reidar Thomte's Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion is an excellent read for students beginning their study of one of the "greats" of the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy. Thomte directly appropriates Kierkegaard's insightful language and discussion of theological and philosophical issues that stimulated him, all of which are still alive and well today. 

 John Gerassi had just this opportunity as a child, his mother and father were very close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the couple became for him like surrogate parents. Authorized by Sartre to write his biography.

Through the interviews with both their informalities and their tensions, Sartre’s greater complexities emerge. In particular we see Sartre wrestling with the apparent contradiction between his views on freedom and the influence of social conditions on our choices and actions. We also gain insight into his perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the disintegration of colonialism.

The world houses people equally with natural things. When the world is thus treated as a gathering or even a gathering of natural things, it is not conceived as nature, and we do not understand that it is something that is in itself a holistic system, a system of regulations and arrangements, especially laws.