Historicity, language, and epistemology have become the decisive transcendental parameters of an objectifying understanding of truth in modernity. Faith, religion, and theology are also increasingly subject to this methodological primacy, which not only limits the immediacy of original impressionistic experience, but also the equally universal and singular religio inherent in it, insofar as it expresses the unavoidable proto-relation of absolutely passible conception of life in a purely phenomenological sense. This article discusses this on the basis of the affective contact that people were able to make through Jesus' words and deeds on this side of traditional typologies, in order to deepen such a result to that original "word of life” which is inherent in all our acts, in order to discern the self-affective truth of God as pre-linguistic "sonship” or "incarnation” in ourselves, as Jesus of Nazareth lived it. This enables us to establish criteria for all religious phenomena, insofar as it cannot be abstracted from the immediate experience of absolute life, which is why further current works by Kasan, Vidalin, Lind, and Remmel are addressed.

In this editorial for the special issue on Franz Kafka, Yvanka B. Raynova examines Kafka's relationship to Nietzsche as well as the very different and often contradictory interpretations of Kafka's work by philosophers and literary critics. She argues that although Kafka's novels cannot be directly "translated into a philosophical, theological, sociological, or psychoanalytical discourse" (Jürgen Born), they should not be interpreted and evaluated solely from a literary perspective, as they raise institutional questions that have led to socio-critical and political associations that are just as urgent for us today. In this context, she refers to the controversies surrounding Kafka's work in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, to his current socio-political reception in art, and to the Kafkaesque in the contemporary world.

Franz Kafka's "Before the Law" distills his longer works, like The Trial and The Castle, into a single theme: Access. In "Before the Law," the main character seeks entrance into the law. The doorkeeper apathetically refuses while instigating the man's need. Often, in Kafka's works, the main character seeks access to some part of his life, but is prohibited, sometimes in a material way and, at other times, in an epistemic way. This paper will explore this access problem using Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. It will phenomenologically interrogate the concept of "access" within Kafka, using an early Heideggerian distinction between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, the former marked by thoughtless availability (thereness) and the latter by a sustained and thoughtful suspension, the result of a break from the regular availability of life's tools (the lack of thereness), forcing Kafka's main characters to dwell in the negation of access.

The aim of this paper is to revisit the theme of paradise and animality in the work of Kafka, whilst at the same time elucidate Agamben's complex understanding of these notions with the help of the literary imagery of Kafka. In a world where many find themselves crushed by the anthropological machine, Agamben outlines an intuition Kafka had about animals, that can help humans to reconcile with their animal nature, and let them guide us back to paradise. If animals have never left paradise, and the human realm is not substantially different for the animal realm, then like the animals we have never truly left paradise but only think we did. It is only in trying to uphold a higher, human sphere, through self-subjection and exclusion, that we leave the paradisical realm. Kafka's creatures show us the ridiculousness of these divisions between human and animals.

This paper sets out to investigate the Nietzschean connection between Sylvia Wynter and Reiner Schürmann through a reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche’s account of ‘bad conscience’ is read through the Wynterian and Fanonian concept of ‘sociogeny’ to demonstrate its necessity to Nietzsche’s project of the Great Redeemer. This paper, then, demonstrates a previously undiagnosed influence of Nietzsche on Wynter and the role that anarchy plays in her construction of the ‘human being as praxis’. The essay concludes with an amelioration of Schürmann’s epochal genealogy to account for a racialized lacunae present in his Western genealogy of thought. It is by bringing all three together that we understand anarchy as being firmly committed to anti-racist and anti-anti-Black enactments. It concludes by highlighting the possibility of metaphysics after the withering of epochal archē in what this paper calls ‘the multitude of metaphysics’.

Nietzsche’s criticism of the masses could have looked hackneyed at the end of the XIXth century, had it not the originality of moving onto psychological and biological levels what others previously elaborated only at a social scale: a "herd instinct" explaining both the lack of social cohesion and the loss of possible individual affirmation in democratic and egalitarian ages. As he sees the utilitarian promotion of happiness and empathy as part of the problem, he fiercely condemns John Stewart Mill’s philosophy – as he understands it. Our point is to throw into relief that Mill’s theory of individuality is but closer to Nietzsche’s views for regenerating life against the spreading of democratic "nihilism". Our cross-reading of Mill and Nietzsche therefore aims at offering a reassessment of their antagonism and at highlighting ways of overcoming "nihilism" via culture and cultivation of the "character" and the individual surpassing of oneself.

Simone Weil's ideas proved fundamental for Iris Murdoch, opening up a difficult path of thought for one rooted in the British philosophical tradition in the 1950s (Sim 1985, Bok 2005, Lovibond 2011a, Panizza 2022a, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022). Grasping the Weilian-inspired moral theory of attention sketched by Iris Murdoch is a prerequisite for comprehending the development of her moral ideas (Panizza 2015, Broackes 2012) and the form they may take in her literary writings (Griffin 1993, Morgan 2006). This paper argues that we can read an expression of Simone Weil in Iris Murdoch's novels which articulate her notions of grace and gravity, but also convey the Weilian insights that shape Murdoch's moral perfectionism. It investigates three of Murdoch's well-known male protagonists, i.e., Bradley Pearson, Charles Arrowby and Hilary Burde, so as to comprehend how their moral failures relate to a defective implementation of the concepts of love and attention as theorised by Simone Weil as leading to goodness. Hence, it offers a new examination of the way in which the Murdochian literary staging of inattention as a cause of moral deficiency reveals its Weilian-based ethics of attention.

Aus-einander-setzung between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction and Gadamer's Concept of Solidarity This paper will analyze the debate between Gadamer and Derrida and Gadamer's concept of solidarity. The previous research literature focused only on their first debate, which could only lead to limited results, even though the exchange between these two philosophers continued after the first debate. In addition, Gadamer revised a large part of his speech, which caused the first debate with Derrida, for publication. In this way, the accentuation of concepts and themes that Derrida found problematic in the published version differs considerably from that in Gadamer's real speech. For this reason, this paper will consider Gadamer's original manuscript, which is preserved in Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach. My point is that in Derrida's funeral oration for Gadamer, Uninterrupted Dialogue, can be found some shared points of view between both philosophers, namely their interpretation of Paul Celan's poems. By means of their Celan interpretations, I will demonstrate that it is not good will that unites all human beings, but their existential fate to find death. Here we encounter the problem of solidarity in Gadamer's work, since in his interpretation of Celan he considers death (or mortality) to be the "ultimate solidarity" of human beings, whereas in his other texts he defines solidarity as a kind of friendship. Hence, Gadamer's understanding of solidarity is discussed in the last part of this paper. My argument is that the concept of solidarity and that of belonging are interconnected in Gadamer's texts and that in this point the concept of openness shows its fundamental role.