In 2004, two great figures of Europe’s Life of the Mind met to discuss the times of faith and secularization. This is the book containing their thoughts.

Ratzinger has been extremely bold in trying to confront the implications of science for a modern worldview in the full philosophical spectrum, not just limiting to the ethical backyard. Probably, he has been the last, being forced to recognize that the project set in motion by Galileo 400 years ago is now the master creator of metaphors, of contents, the framer of the boldest hypotheses.

The following videos (“Sea of Faith”) were realized by Don Cupitt for BBC and represent the attempt to factor in the role of modern science in the dissolution of the theological world view. They make for a very interesting view.

1. Galileo, Descartes, Pascal (mp4)
2. Freud, Jung, Darwin, William Smith (mp4)
3. David Friedrich Strauss, Albert Schweitzer (mp4)
4. Marx, Kierkegaard (mp4)
5. Schopenhauer, Vivekananda, Annie Besant (mp4)
6. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein (mp4)

At the end of the day, as Jonathan Israel’s book “Radical Enlightenment” shows, beside a conciliatory, Voltaire-like world-view, the Enlightenment knew a much more radical and uncompromising theoretical direction, meant to dispose of neuroses and childish dreams once and for all. Spinoza was its main driver, his ideas slowly percolating via German Idealisms into the main river of European Civilization.

“Sancte Spinoza, ora pro nobis” (Goethe)

Categories: Episteme, Society, Spinoza