Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek

Following Heidegger, for Vattimo Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death coincides with the end of metaphysics, the ability to reduce existence to its first principles.

The link between the two is, rather, deep-seated, rooted in a conceptual relationship that is less easy to dismiss.

Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations into the nature of being

Indeed, for Vattimo, the lightening of existence or, as he often refers to it, its weakening allows for a post-metaphysical return of religion. Nevertheless, any such “return” must, if it is to be legitimate, pass through God’s death, meaning that it must be “weak” (i.e. lacking ultimate foundations) rather than “strong.” Religion—and any other for

Is religion just a human projection or is there something divine about human thought?

If it is the mode in which the weakening of Being realizes itself as the kenosis of God, which is the kernel of the history of salvation, secularization shall no longer be conceived of as the abandonment of religion but as the paradoxical realization of Being’s religious vocation.

upended traditional metaphysics, concerned with the existence and nature of God, in favor of an analysis of the human subject and how he or she knows the world.

it is also worth recognizing that the question of religion, generally speaking, has been part and parcel of the European philosophical tradition from its inception.

Having recognized its family resemblance with the biblical message of the history of salvation and with God’s incarnation, philosophy can call the weakening that it discovers as the characteristic feature of the history of Being secularization in its broadest sense, which comprises all forms of dissolution of the sacred characteristic of the modern