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 PrintableVersion Christianity & Western Thought (vol. 3)Roads to postmodernityCHRISTIANITY & WESTERN THOUGHT (vol. 3) As you may have guessed from the title, this is not a bedtime read! For the non-specialist, the sheer volume of unfamiliar names and ideas can make reading hard going. A glossary would have been a big help — for example, chapter 1 is concerned with ‘the demise of idealism’, yet idealism is never clearly defined. This book is designed to be a ‘narrative introduction’ to the history of 20th-century philosophy — its philosophers, ideas and movements — coming from a Christian viewpoint. The authors state: ‘We make no pretensions to neutrality, but come to 20th-century philosophy as disciples of Jesus Christ’. I found this approach of being open about their biases and presuppositions very refreshing, as all too often theologians or philosophers seem to want to appear entirely neutral (even when this is entirely inappropriate from a biblical viewpoint), especially in a book such as this which is largely descriptive rather than analytical. Two opposing schoolsThe scene is set by considering three turn-of-the-century thinkers — Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson, whom I’d never heard of, but it turns out that between them they laid foundations that would flourish in the two main opposing schools of 20th-century philosophy. These are the analytic school, represented by Bertrand Russell, and the continental school, including Jean-Paul Sartre. From this basic division the two streams of 20th-century philosophy flow. In such a wide-ranging book I found that it was sometimes necessary to skim through the most involved sections so as not to lose the flow. I also found that those sections where I already had a little background knowledge were those I got the most from. Converging streamsTracking both streams through the century, they converge at one point — postmodernity. Admittedly, postmodernity encompasses many different, and even contradictory philosophies (and anti-philosophies!) — and the authors use the term in about as broad a sense as it can be taken. They steer a course through key examples of postmodern thought, beginning with Fran¨ois Lyotard’s groundbreaking work, The Postmodern Condition, through names you may have come across, such as Foucault and Derrida, but also including people who are likely to be new to the non-specialist. What’s the difference?So what makes this book distinctive? That is, what difference does the ‘Christianity’ component of the title make? Well, amid their general survey the authors do highlight areas in a philosopher’s thought that are of particular interest to the Christian, such as their position on the atheistic-theistic spectrum and specific ideas that agree with, challenge, or flatly deny tenets of the faith, accompanied by occasional brief analysis. Attention is also given to areas where faith and philosophy have intersected and influenced one another, such as process theology, attempts to build a genuinely Christian philosophy in the analytic tradition by people like Alvin Platinga, and the revival of interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in modern (usually Catholic) thinkers. A whole chapter is dedicated to ‘dialectical’ theologians — the writers selecting Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as their examples. New informationWhat can the average interested non-specialist (such as me) hope to take from this book? As already noted, the sheer volume of new information can make it quite a challenging read, and of course the work of some philosophers is not renowned for ease of understanding! I had to work hard, but found this book helpful for putting names and ideas that crop up from time to time in their context. Reading the chapter on the dialectical theologians, immediately after the chapter on existentialist thinkers such as Sartre, provided very interesting background and parallels to the work of these theologians. If you read books where the names I’ve mentioned crop up in footnotes and are quoted from time to time then this book can help you to place them. Having read through to get the flow of it, this book will now sit on my shelf as a reference for the next time an author makes a passing reference to the work of Wittgenstein or Camus as though I’m supposed to know all about them! Peter Newton, © Evangelicals Now - August 2010 |
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