17 (2021–2022), s. 13–46
GIANNI VATTIMO’S CONCEPT OF RELIGION Łukasz Gołąb1 Sydney, Australia
Introduction Secularisation is a social process gradually reducing the influence of the Christian religion on social institutions and the public sphere in the West. Over the last decades, it has shaped various modes of thought about how people view the world and their place within it. In the last few decades, there are three principal philosophical traditions (all of which rose to prominence during the last two centuries) that have enabled so-called “postmodern thinkers” to propose various projects that seek to reconcile Christianity with their philosophical ideas. Those currents are nihilism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism. In the view of several postmodern authors, their proposals did not result in atheism but rather provided a possibility of putting forward a new, secularised version of religion2. Gianni Vattimo is one of the thinkers 1
2
Łukasz Gołąb – magister filozofii (2018, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski); obecnie student teologii w Catholic Institute of Sydney, ORCID: 0000-0001-6006-1903. This attempt can be seen on both philosophical and theological grounds. Philosophers worth mentioning here are: J. Derrida, Circonfession, trans. G. Bennington, J. Derrida, Paris 1993; J.D. Caputo, The weakness of God. A Theology of the Event, Bloomington 2006, J.L. Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. B. Bergo, G. Malenfant, M.B. Smith, New York 2008, E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh 1969. A significant philosophical volume