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Religion, Forgiveness and Humanity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Christopher Hamilton
Christopher Hamilton*
Affiliation:
King's College London
*
[email protected]
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Extract

There are many ways of doing philosophy of religion. No doubt all of them have need of abstract concepts and passages where reflection is more technical than it usually is, say in everyday thought and reflection. But it is well known that, in this area of philosophy, and not only in this area of philosophy, abstract reflection can run the risk of losing contact with the ins and outs, the finer-grained details, of the lived experience of reality. One way to seek to reduce this risk is to approach abstract or general reflection through philosophical reflection on specific cases. This is what I intend to do in this paper. My aim is to explore in detail a specific and, in my view, extraordinarily striking example, in this case, an example of forgiveness in a religious, indeed, Christian context, drawing out where possible general or abstract conclusions, but seeking always to root reflection in the specific case in order to understand better from a philosophical point of view what is at stake, what is important, when thinking about the issue in question. Of course, I shall be seeking primarily to elucidate philosophically the example I shall discuss, but, by implication, I hope that the kinds of questions, worries and concerns I discuss might raise consciousness – philosophical consciousness – of the kinds of questions that we might explore in other examples, specifically those which involve forgiveness in a religious context.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 77: Supererogation , October 2015 , pp. 185 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015 

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References

1 Même les Bourreaux ont une âme, Girtanner, Maïti avec Guillaume Tabard (Tours: Éditions CLD, 2010). All translations from this text are mine.

2 Ibid., 14

3 Ibid., 176

4 Ibid., 176

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 178

7 Ibid., 18

8 Ibid., 19

9 Ibid., 20

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 21

12 Orwell, George, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984): 469; 465

13 Wood, James, ‘Sir Thomas More: a man for one season’ in The Broken Estate (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999): 1

14 Op. cit., note 1, 22

15 Ibid., 60

16 Ibid., 138

17 Ibid., 79

18 Ibid., 138

19 Ibid., 77

20 Ibid., 164

21 Ibid., 177

22 Ibid., 37

23 Ibid., 164

24 Ibid., 170

25 Ibid., 173

26 Ibid., 165–171

27 Ibid., 149–50

28 Frank, Arthur, The Wounded Storyteller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

29 Quoted in Alain Finkielkraut, La mémoire vaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1989): 44–5

30 Op. cit., note 1, 177

31 Ibid., 178

32 Levi, Primo, I sommersi e i salvati (Torino: Einaudi, 2009): 34–5, my translation. Levi's text had been translated into English by Raymond Rosenthal under the title The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1989).

33 Levi, Primo, I sommersi e i salvati: 109, quoting Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2008): 141–2, my translation. Améry's text has been translated into English by Stella P. Rosenfeld and Stanley Rosenfeld under the title At the Mind's Limits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)

34 Levi, Primo, I sommersi e i salvati: 110, my translation

35 Op. cit., note 1, 176

36 Levi, Primo, Se questo è un uomo (Torino: Einaudi, 2013): 116, my translation. A more literal translation of Levi's words would be: ‘I would spit Kuhn's prayer to the ground’.

37 Op. cit., note 1, 154

38 Ibid.,19

39 Levi, Primo, I sommersi e i salvati: 63, my translation.