Search results for ""Author Heinrich Meier""

Heinrich Meier's guiding insight in Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed religion. Philosophy must rationally justify and politically defend its free and unreserved questioning, and, in doing so, turns decisively to political philosophy. In the first of three chapters, Meier determines four intertwined moments constituting the concept of political philosophy as an articulated and internally dynamic whole. The following two chapters develop the concept through the interpretation of two masterpieces of political philosophy that have occupied Meier's attention for more than thirty years: Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. Meier provides a detailed investigation of Thoughts on Machiavelli, with an appendix containing Strauss's original manuscript headings for each of his paragraphs. Linking the problem of Socrates (the origin of political philosophy) with the problem of Machiavelli (the beginning of modern political philosophy), while placing between them the political and theological claims opposed to philosophy, Strauss's most complex and controversial book proves to be, as Meier shows, the most astonishing treatise on the challenge of revealed religion. The final chapter, which offers a new interpretation of the Social Contract, demonstrates that Rousseau's most famous work can be adequately understood only as a coherent political-philosophic response to theocracy in all its forms.

Read more less

Heinrich Meiers Dialog unter Abwesenden hat wie kein anderes Buch der letzten Jahrzehnte die internationale Debatte über Carl Schmitt und die Politische Theologie verändert. 1988 erschienen, bestimmte es zum ersten Mal das Zentrum und den Zusammenhang von Schmitts Werk als Politische Theologie. Die 3. Auflage enthält neben dem Epilog von 1988, der sich mit Derridas Politik der Freundschaft auseinandersetzt, ein neues Nachwort.

Read more less

Nichts ist so umstritten im Denken von Leo Strauss und nichts ist so zentral für sein Verständnis wie das theologisch-politische Problem. Da es im Zentrum von Strauss' Politischer Philosophie steht, findet der Streit seinen Niederschlag in allen großen Kontroversen, die sein uvre umgeben. Heinrich Meiers theologisch-politisches Traktat ist die erste Schrift zu Strauss, die das Problem, von dem Strauss sagte, es sei das Thema seiner Untersuchungen gewesen, zu ihrem Thema macht. Neben dem programmatischen Vortrag "Das theologisch-politische Problem", der auf dem internationalen Leo Strauss Symposium in München im Juni 2002 große Beachtung fand, enthält sie den Kommentar "Zur Genealogie des Offenbarungsglaubens", der eine kühne genealogische Skizze von Strauss aus dem Nachlass zugänglich macht und argumentativ entfaltet, sowie den Text "Der Tod als Gott. Eine Anmerkung zu Martin Heidegger", der den Blick auf einen Philosophen richtet, auf dessen Denken das theologisch-politische Problem seinen langen Schatten geworfen hat, ohne dass es bei ihm jemals ein Thema von Gewicht war.

Read more less

Auseinandersetzung mit Carl Schmitt. Die Politische Theologie erhebt den Anspruch, auf den Glauben an die göttliche Offenbarung gegründet zu sein. Heinrich Meier nimmt diesen Anspruch radikal ernst, um in der Auseinandersetzung mit Carl Schmitt den grundsätzlichen Unterschied zwischen Politischer Theologie und Politischer Philosophie zu bestimmen. Der Band enthält darüber hinaus den Essay Der Streit um die Politische Theologie , in dessen Mittelpunkt die Begegnung Schmitts mit Blumenberg steht.

Read more less

On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life presents Heinrich Meier’s confrontation with Rousseau’s Rêveries, the philosopher’s most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study of Rousseau, Meier unfolds his stunningly original interpretation in two parts. The first part of On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life approaches the Rêveries not as another autobiographical text in the tradition of the Confessions and the Dialogues, but as a reflection on the philosophic life and the distinctive happiness it provides. The second turns to a detailed analysis of a work referred to in the Rêveries, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” which triggered Rousseau’s political persecution when it was originally published as part of Émile. In his examination of this most controversial of Rousseau’s writings, which aims to lay the foundations for a successful nonphilosophic life, Meier brings to light the differences between natural religion as expressed by the Vicar and Rousseau’s natural theology. Together, the two reciprocally illuminating parts of this study provide an indispensable guide to Rousseau and to the understanding of the nature of the philosophic life. “[A] dense but precise and enthralling analysis.”—New Yorker

Read more less

Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, The Concept of the Political, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of Concept that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers.Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reason­and ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives. “Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books

Read more less

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s most famous and most puzzling work, one in which he makes the greatest use of poetry to explore the questions posed by philosophy. But in order to understand the movement of this drama, we must first understand the character of its protagonist: we must ask, What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Heinrich Meier attempts to penetrate the core of the drama, following as a guiding thread the question of whether Zarathustra is a philosopher or a prophet, or, if he is meant to be both, whether Zarathustra is able to unite philosopher and prophet in himself. Via a close reading that uncovers the book’s hidden structure, Meier develops a highly stimulating and original interpretation of this much discussed but still ill-understood masterwork of German poetic prose. In the process, he carefully overturns long-established canons in the academic discourse of Nietzsche-interpretation. The result is a fresh and surprising grasp of Nietzsche’s well-known teachings of the overman, the will to power, and the eternal return.

Read more less

Heinrich Meier's guiding insight in Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed religion. Philosophy must rationally justify and politically defend its free and unreserved questioning, and, in doing so, turns decisively to political philosophy. In the first of three chapters, Meier determines four intertwined moments constituting the concept of political philosophy as an articulated and internally dynamic whole. The following two chapters develop the concept through the interpretation of two masterpieces of political philosophy that have occupied Meier's attention for more than thirty years: Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. Meier provides a detailed investigation of Thoughts on Machiavelli, with an appendix containing Strauss's original manuscript headings for each of his paragraphs. Linking the problem of Socrates (the origin of political philosophy) with the problem of Machiavelli (the beginning of modern political philosophy), while placing between them the political and theological claims opposed to philosophy, Strauss's most complex and controversial book proves to be, as Meier shows, the most astonishing treatise on the challenge of revealed religion. The final chapter, which offers a new interpretation of the Social Contract, demonstrates that Rousseau's most famous work can be adequately understood only as a coherent political-philosophic response to theocracy in all its forms.

Read more less