Foundational Theology

Der Hauptteil des Buches zeichnet in einem chronologischen Close-Reading die Entwicklung des Derridaschen Werkes und die Bedeutung seiner zentralen Termini – différance, Spur, Schrift – nach. Zugleich wird dabei die performative Struktur seines Denkens und Schreibens aufgedeckt, die für das Verständnis unverzichtbar sind: die Nachträglichkeit der Einführung des Terminus »différance«, die Bedeutung des »donc« und des »vielleicht«, des Sich-selbst-riskierens-im-Nichts-Sagen-Wollen sowie der Rede vom »Unmöglichen« im Kontext von Gerechtigkeit und Politik.
Eingebettet sind diese Lektüren in den Horizont einer notwendigen Neubestimmung der Grundlagen und Möglichkeiten (fundamental-)theologischen Sprechens.

Modern philosophical spectators have often found fault with the ways in which miracles were received by the pre-modern peoples of Europe and the Mediterranean. Historians such as Gibbon and philosophers as various as Hume and Lessing criticized the pre-modern world, implicitly or explicitly, for the epistemic significance that it ascribed to miracles. In various ways, these and so many other modern thinkers have suggested that miracles cannot play the role that the pre-modern world gave to them. In this paper I reflect on this notable disparity in the reception of miracles in modern and pre-modern times. The possible terms of its explanation is suggested in the view of Elizabeth Anscombe, who argues that the evidentiary significance that pre-modern people gave to miracles necessarily involves certain theological presuppositions. Supernaturally aberrant phenomena--supposing, contra Hume, that such phenomena really occurs--only constitutes a "sign," Anscombe argues, when one already espouses some theistic framework in light of which such a phenomenal event can be interpreted to be a supernatural sign of attestation or authorization.
Anscombe's view is that of a Catholic philosopher in dialogue--and as I suggest, in some degree of tension--with the magisterial teaching of Vatican I, which describes miracles as "external signs" that independently (and non-circularly) attest the truth of the Gospel and authorize the Church.
The thesis of this paper is that, while there are certain presuppositions involved when miracles (or "supernatural phenomena") are regarded as signs, they are not such as to threaten the externality that Vat. I  ascribes to them. Thus, with an eye to giving an explanation for the disparate modern and premodern receptions of miracles, I draw on the work of the 19th-century German theologian, Matthias Joseph Scheeben, to identify the presuppositions that are sufficient and necessary in order to regard miracles as signs. The crucial presupposition, I propose, that explains the modern/premodern reception disparity is the reality of extrinsic authority. The significance of supernatural events, I suggest, is likely to be ambiguous in the modern, democratic West, because in this cultural circumstance the correlation of power and authority is no longer taken for granted as in other times and places, and the notion of extrinsic authority--an authority not derived from the "consent of the governed"--is generally and presumptively rejected.