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Atheism Revisited Rethinking Modernity and Inventing New Modes of Life Edited by szymon wróbel krzysztof skonieczny Atheism Revisited Szymon Wróbel • Krzysztof Skonieczny Editors Atheism Revisited Rethinking Modernity and Inventing New Modes of Life Editors Szymon Wróbel Krzysztof Skonieczny Faculty of “Artes Liberales” Faculty of “Artes Liberales” University of Warsaw University of Warsaw Warsaw, Poland Warsaw, Poland Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw, Poland ISBN 978-3-030-34367-5 ISBN 978-3-030-34368-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34368-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland C ontents 1 Introduction to Atheism 1 Szymon Wróbel and Krzysztof Skonieczny Part I Rethinking Modernity 15 2 Modernity and Secularism 17 Jacek Dobrowolski 3 Early Modern European Atheism with Chinese Characteristics: First Jesuit Descriptions of Neo- Confucianism and Their Spinozist Reception 33 Mateusz Janik 4 Beyond the Enmity: The Mechanization of Nature and the Moderate Political Atheism 45 Ivan Dimitrijević 5 Heidegger on Technics, Power, and the Planetary 65 Krzysztof Ziarek 6 Political Significance of Atheism: Karl Marx’s Idea of the “Positive Abolition of Religion” 81 Andrzej Gniazdowski v vi CoNTENTS 7 Nietzsche, Saint Paul and the Will of Life 95 Agata Tymczyszyn 8 “We Are Still Pious”: Nietzsche and the Hard Problem of Atheism 111 Krzysztof Skonieczny 9 The Visible Absence of Color: Herman Melville’s Troubled Atheism 127 Adam Lipszyc Part II Inventing New Modes of Life 139 10 Philosophical “Fundamentalism” Today: On Return Statements—The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy (EUP, 2016) 141 Gregg Lambert 11 New (and Old) Atheism(s) Reconsidered 165 Íñigo ongay de Felipe 12 Reason Is Not Winning: A Proposed Blueprint for Moving Forward 179 H. Chris Ransford 13 From Atheism of the Concept Towards Atheism Without the Concept 189 Szymon Wróbel 14 Toward a Coalition of the Reasonable: Beyond Atheism Versus Religion 221 Julian Baggini Index 235 n C otes on ontributors Julian Baggini (Academic Director, The Royal Institute of Philosophy, UK) is the author, co-author or editor of over 20 books including How the World Thinks (2018), A Short History of Truth (2017), The Ego Trick (2011), Freedom Regained (2015) and The Edge of Reason (2016). He has written for numerous newspapers and magazines, as well as for the think tanks, The Institute of Public Policy Research, Demos and Counterpoint. He has also appeared as a character in two Alexander McCall-Smith nov- els. His website is www.microphilosophy.net. He was the founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine and has a PhD in the Philosophy of Personal Identity. Ivan Dimitrijević (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, Poland) holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw. He has published several papers and essays in political philosophy and political theology and is the author of La contraffazione della politica: la paura della fine, la tutela del bios e il potere della socializzazione (Saonara: il prato, 2016) and co-author of Come la teoria finì per diventare realtà: Sulla politica come geometria della socializzazione (Udine-Milano: Mimesis, 2014, with P. orłowska). He has edited and translated Alessandro Biral’s Plato and the Political Knowledge (Saonara: il prato, 2016) into English. Jacek Dobrowolski (Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, Poland) is a three-time final nominee in the Polish national philosophical essay contest and winner of the main award in 2014. He has also written vii viii NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS three books in philosophical anthropology of modernity, inspired by post- modern continental thinkers and critical theory—one of them was translated into English as The Rise and Fall of Modern Man (2016). Andrzej Gniazdowski (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences) is a philosopher, historian of Ideas and translator. His main fields of research include phenomenology, philosophical anthropology and political philosophy. He published a. o.: Philosophy and Guillotine. The Traditionalism of Joseph de Maistre as Political Hermeneutics (1996); Politics and Geometry. The Phenomenology Edmund Husserl’s and the Problem of Democracy (2008); Antinomies of Radicalism. The Political Phenomenology in Germany 1914–1933 (2015). Mateusz Janik (Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland/East China Normal University in Shanghai, China) works in the field of Early Modern Political Philosophy and Metaphysics. He is the author of “Spinoza’s Political ontology” (in Polish, 2017) and a variety of articles on Political and Social thought. His current research interests are focused on the global and comparative philosophy, particularly the reception and impact of neo-Confucian thought on the early modern European philosophy. Gregg Lambert (Syracuse University, USA) holds a research appointment as Dean’s Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he also served as Founding Director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center and Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a collaborative research network between Syracuse University, Cornell University and University of Rochester funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history and especially for his work on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Adam Lipszyc (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, also teaches in Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and at the Franz Kafka University of Muri) has published seven books in Polish and a num- ber of papers in Polish and English. His most recent publication is a philosophical analysis of Freudian thought (Freud: Logic of Experience, 2018). He has co-edited (together with Agata Bielik-Robson) a volume of essays Judaism in Contemporary Thought (2014). He has edited and co-trans- NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS ix lated into Polish two volumes of essays, one by Gershom Scholem and one by Walter Benjamin. Íñigo Ongay de Felipe (University Deusto, Spain; Fundación Gustavo Bueno) has also served as a professor at the Facultad de Filosofía de León in León Guanajuato (México) and as a visiting professor at several univer- sities in China (Minzu University of Beijing, Qingdao University, Shanghai University) and the Americas (Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica). His research covers a broad variety of issues ranging from the general philosophy of science with particular attention to the philosophy of biology and life sciences to the history of modern and contemporary philosophy. H. Chris Ransford (Australia) was educated as a physicist and engineer in three countries and holds several advanced degrees including a “Grande Ecole” degree (Dipl.-Ing., INPG Grenoble (Institut polytechnique de Grenoble)). He was a guest academic at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany on a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholarship and a research fellow and staff at both Monash University and the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Far Horizons of Time: Time and Mind in the Universe (2015), God and the Mathematics of Infinity (2017) and In Search of Ultimate Reality: Inside the Cosmologist’s Abyss (2019). Krzysztof Skonieczny (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, Poland) is a philosopher. In 2011/2012, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY (State University of New York), Buffalo, and in 2012/2013, he spent six months as a researcher at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours. His interests include political philosophy, psychoanalysis, posthumanities, animal studies and contemporary American literature, which he occasionally translates. Agata Tymczyszyn (Jagiellonian University, Poland) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw). Her interests include the problem of language in classical psychoanalysis, the notion of power in Shakespeare’s works and the concept of labour in philosophy of Karl Marx. Szymon Wróbel (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, Poland and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences) is the author of numerous books and articles scattered in various scientific journals. His latest book, in Polish, is Philosopher and Territory. The Policy of Ideas in the Thoughts of Leszek Kołakowski, Bronisław Baczko, x NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS Krzysztof Pomian and Marek J. Siemek, published in 2016. He leads the experimental Laboratory of Techno- Humanities at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”. Krzysztof Ziarek (Department of Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA) teaches twentieth- and twenty- first- century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (1994); The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, the Event (2001); The Force of Art (2004) and Language After Heidegger (2013). He has also published two volumes of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski (2000) and Sąd dostateczny (2005). His current work focuses on questions of technology, power and singularity, most notably in the work of Martin Heidegger.