The crisis of Muslim religious discourse: The necessary shift from Plato to Kant

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Notes

1 Reviewed by this writer in The Journal of North African Studies 24:2 (March 2019), 327–329.

2 Lahouari Addi’s book under review was first published as La crise du discours religieux musulman: Le nécessaire passage de Platon à Kant (Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2019).

3 On a personal note, this book takes me back to my Harvard summa thesis on Plato and Kant.

4 In Plato’s cosmology, as delineated in the Timaeus, the demiurge is an overworked artisan struggling to shape restless matter into eternal forms. For recent discussions, see M.R. Wright, ed., Reason and Necessity: Essays on Plato’s Timaeus (Swansea: Gerald Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000).

5 Addi cites a famous speech of Pope Benedict XVI given at Regensburg in 2006 that gives evidence of Kant’s centrality. The Pope singled out Kant, along with the Protestant Reformation and the new theology of the nineteenth and twentieth century, as one of the major waves of ‘de-Hellenization’ against the ‘exclusive relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity considered to be the cradle of the true faith’ (153). The Pope ‘explicitly rejects Kant, invoking Plato against him, which betrays a fear that faith is not confirmed by reason’ (154).

6 Kant specifically compares his critique of pure reason, reversing the subject object dichotomy, to Copernicus’ daring hypothesis of a heliocentric rather than earth-centered universe. See his Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant generates the categorical imperative from the individual’s practical reason and capacity to legislate universal rules. Religious faith is grounded in the human aspiration that good intentions have beneficial outcomes.

7 Boukrouh’s Party of Algerian Renewal won 1.46% of the vote in Algeria’s relatively free legislative elections of 2012.