Michael Staudigl
On Secularism and Its Discontents: Charting Pathways with a Phenomenology of Religion.
It was in Vienna where, nearly 90 years ago, Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking critique of modern civilization appeared. Civilization and Its Discontents, as it was entitled in the English translation, became one of the 20th century's seminal books and indeed has significantly shaped the modern worldview and selfunderstanding. The discontents-in plural form-about which it speaks can easily be reduced to one single finding: modern man is unhappy. Unhappiness is the consequence of man's life within the constraints of society and the enforced renunciation of his instinctual desires. The original German title Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, literally to be translated as
Unavowed Ambiguities?: a Plea for Reassessing the Discourse on the Gift.
The article examines the deconstructive focus of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) on the gift's purity and the aporia this entails and the discussion of primacy of givenness in phenomenology of religion.
Violence and the Gift: Challenging Continental Philosophy of Religion.
An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on philosophy and religion that were discussed at the conference