Usually I try to give a short intro to a subject matter but time is pressing at the moment. In short, Dr. Caputo and I have travelled different roads but have gotten to the same point spiritually. For myself, I came by the highways of Process Theology (Whitehead) via Continental Thought. For John, he came by way of progressive Catholicism which finds him in the Radical (religious) and Continental theology side of things. It would not be coincidental that we have each needed to deconstruct our past in order to get where we are today.
I have many of Dr. Caputo's books and am recommending the current new series of five volumes below which summarize his thinking over these many years. My first meeting with John was when hosting him and Peter Rollins for a week via my computer per GCAS' request (sic, Creston Davis) many years ago. I've stayed aware of John's work ever since then; and regarding Pete, I met him personally and have listened to him many times via Rob Bell and Mars Hill, and Pete's own network. If memory serves correctly, I believe Pete is a protege of John's.
All for now. Enjoy!
R.E. Slater
November 14, 2024
John Caputo Bio (Wikipedia) - Syracuse University site link
Caputo received his BA in 1962 from La Salle University, his MA in 1964 from Villanova University, and his PhD in philosophy in 1968 from Bryn Mawr College.[4]
Caputo is a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy, with a particular expertise in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Over the years, he has developed a deconstructive hermeneutics that he calls radical hermeneutics, which is highly influenced by the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Additionally, Caputo has developed a distinctive approach to religion that he calls weak theology. Recently, his most important work has been to rebut the charges of relativism made against deconstruction by showing that deconstruction is organized around the affirmation of certain unconditional ethical and political claims.
Caputo has a special interest in continental approaches to the philosophy of religion. Some of the ideas Caputo investigates in his work include the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and others; the critique of ontotheology; the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with Augustine of Hippo and Paul of Tarsus; and medieval metaphysics and mysticism. In the past, Caputo has taught courses on Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.
Ilia Delio sits down with philosopher-theologian John D. Caputo (Jack). Ilia asks Jack about how he got from Continental Philosophy to what he calls weak theology, and theo-poetics. Then they tackle the big, enduring question Jack and Ilia like to often ask—what is going on “in the name of God?” and why it might benefit us to stop talking about “God.”ABOUT JOHN D. CAPUTO“The name of God is the name of the impossible, and the love of God transports us beyond ourselves and the constraints imposed upon the world.”John D. Caputo, the Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Villanova University) and the Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus (Syracuse University), is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who works in the area of “weak” or “radical” theology, drawing upon hermeneutic and deconstructive theory. His most recent books are What to Believe: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology (2023) and Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (2022). His The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006), won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence in the category of constructive theology.
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5 Volume Summation Series
by John D. Caputo
Volume 1 brings together the earliest publications of John D. Caputo when the young “Catholic philosopher” was working out the relationship of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart to what Martin Heidegger called “thinking” and “Being.” The collection reflects an early interest in mathematical logic, includes his work on Kant and the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, and extends to the essays of the early 1980s where we can see the main lines of Radical Hermeneutics beginning to take shape.“John Caputo’s extraordinary work from his earliest work on Eckhart, Heidegger and others to his later work on Derrida, and his contemporary philosophical theology have been a singular resource for all serious contemporary scholars. I heartily endorse this project.” —David Tracy, Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies,, University of Chicago Divinity School“The John D. Caputo Archives comprise an essential resource for all scholars working in contemporary European Philosophy, especially Continental Philosophy of Religion.” —Kevin Hart, Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia
Book 2 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological PapersVolume 2: 1986–1996: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, by John Caputo (Author), Eric Weislogel (Editor)Volume 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction covers the period when Caputo first worked out his notion of “radical hermeneutics,” where the strategies and resources of deconstruction prove to be the way to come to grips with the “difficulty” of the hermeneutic situation, in which radical does not mean radically grounded but radically exposed to instability and undecidability. In essays on Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida, he shows how hermeneutics is inwardly disturbed by deconstruction and deconstruction is inevitably an account of the hermeneutic condition, where each is the condition of the other. Here, too, Caputo makes his first explorations into the implications of deconstruction for faith, ethics and religion. The volume includes several essays previously unpublished or unavailable.
Book 3 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers: Volume 3. 1997–2000: The Return of Religion, by John Caputo (Author), Eric Weislogel (Editor)The Return of Religion,Volume 3 of this collection of John D. Caputo’s papers, covers the period when the “return of religion” was in the air, and, in particular, when Caputo was conducting a dialogue between Jacques Derrida and leading theologians and philosophers of religion at the Villanova University conferences. Here are the papers from that era, several of them originally published in hard-to-find forums, that articulate just what it is that theology has to learn from deconstruction—and deconstruction from theology—in the search for a postmodern or postsecular approach to religion. In these essays, Caputo enters into dialogue with Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Marion, and Wyschogrod, among others, addressing such themes as radical hermeneutics, the gift, the tout autre, the impossible, the il y a, Catholicism and postmodernity, and religion without religion.
Volume 4: Continental Philosophy of Religion collects the papers published by Caputo at the time a continental version of the philosophy of religion was taking shape, when postmodern theory provided a different way to think about God and religion, which in turn opened up a new way to think about postmodern theory. With papers on Augustine, Radical Orthodoxy, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Gadamer, and Marion and others, Caputo questions the distinction between theism and atheism, the religious and the secular, in search of the God who comes after the God of metaphysics in a religion without religion.
Volume 5: Coming out as a Theologian collects the papers published by Caputo during his first years in the Syracuse University Religion Department when, as Catherine Keller said, he “came out of the closet as a theologian”—a “weak” or “radical” theologian, nothing confessional or denominational. Caputo here puts deconstruction into the service of a “constructive theology” of the “event” in a series of lively essays, including several previously unpublished pieces, while also engaging the work of T. J. J. Altizer, Ted Jennings, Louis Mackey, Jean-Luc Marion, Calvin Schrag, Mark Taylor, Merold Westphal, David Wood, and Edith Wyschogrod.
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Other Books by John D. Caputo
More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Studies in Continental Thought)
Truth: Philosophy in Transit
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John D. Caputo
John D. Caputo | |
|---|---|
| Born | John David Caputo October 26, 1940 (age 84) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US |
| Alma mater | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | James K. A. Smith |
| Other notable students | Theodore George |
Main interests | |
Notable ideas | |
| Website | https://johndcaputo.com/ |
John David Caputo (born October 26, 1940) is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University.[1] Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity[2] and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology.[3] Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.
Education
Caputo received his BA in 1962 from La Salle University, his MA in 1964 from Villanova University, and his PhD in philosophy in 1968 from Bryn Mawr College.[4]
Work
Caputo is a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy, with a particular expertise in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Over the years, he has developed a deconstructive hermeneutics that he calls radical hermeneutics, which is highly influenced by the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Additionally, Caputo has developed a distinctive approach to religion that he calls weak theology. Recently, his most important work has been to rebut the charges of relativism made against deconstruction by showing that deconstruction is organized around the affirmation of certain unconditional ethical and political claims.
Caputo has a special interest in continental approaches to the philosophy of religion. Some of the ideas Caputo investigates in his work include the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and others; the critique of ontotheology; the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with Augustine of Hippo and Paul of Tarsus; and medieval metaphysics and mysticism. In the past, Caputo has taught courses on Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.
Positions held
Caputo taught philosophy at Villanova University from 1968 to 2004. He was appointed the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University in 1993. Caputo was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, where he taught in both the departments of philosophy and religion from 2004 until his retirement in 2011. He is emeritus professor at both Villanova University and Syracuse University and continues to write and lecture in both the United States and Europe. He is active in the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and he chairs the board of editors for the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.
Notable former students of Caputo
- Theodore George
- Michael Brogan
- James K. A. Smith, professor, philosopher and theologian
- Nythamar de Oliveira, professor, philosopher and theologian
Bibliography
- (1978) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Ohio University Press)
- (1982) Heidegger and Aquinas (Fordham University Press)
- (1986) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Fordham University Press paperback with a new "Introduction")
- (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Indiana University Press)
- (1993) Against Ethics - Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Indiana University Press)
- (1993) Demythologizing Heidegger (Indiana University Press)
- (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indiana University Press)
- (1997) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed./auth. (Fordham University Press)
- (2000) More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Indiana University Press)
- (2001) On Religion (Routledge Press)
- (2006) Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon Press)
- (2006) The Weakness of God (Indiana University Press)
- (2007) After the Death of God, with Gianni Vattimo (Columbia University Press)
- (2007) How to Read Kierkegaard (Granta; Norton, 2008)
- (2007) What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Baker Academic)
- (2013) The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana University Press)
- (2014) Truth [Philosophy in Transit] (Penguin)
- (2015) Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Fortress Press)
- (2015) The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Polebridge Press)
- (2018) Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (Pelican)
- (2018) The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, ed. B. Keith Putt (Indiana University Press)
- (2019) Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Indiana University Press)
- (2020) In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (Fordham University Press)
- (2021) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 3 [1997-2000]: The Return of Religion, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
- (2022) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 1 [1969-1985]: Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism, Thought, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
- (2022) Specters of God: An Anatomy of Apophatic Imagination (Indiana University Press)
- (2022) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 2 [1986-1996]: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
- (2023) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 4 [2001-2004]: Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
- (2023) What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology (Columbia University Press)
- (2024) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 5 [2005-2007]: Coming Out as a Theologian, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
See also
References
- ^ "John D. Caputo". Westar Institute. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
- ^ Camilleri, René (October 18, 2009). "Reinvent the Church". Times of Malta. Retrieved August 20, 2012.
- ^ "John D.Caputo". College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
- ^ "Villanova University Catalog" (PDF). Villanova University.
External links
Online writings
- John D. Caputo at philpapers.org
- "After Jacques Derrida Comes the Future" at the Wayback Machine (archived September 27, 2007), by John D. Caputo
- "For Love of the Things Themselves: Derrida’s Hyper-Realism" at the Wayback Machine (archived September 27, 2007), by John D. Caputo
- "Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)" (pdf), by John D. Caputo
- "Scripture: A Prologue" (pdf), by John D. Caputo
- "Without Sovereignty, Without Being: Unconditionality, the Coming God and Derrida's Democracy to Come" (pdf), by John D. Caputo
- "Theopoetic/theopolitic" (pdf) John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller
'Cross Currents; Winter 2007; V. 57, No. 1'
Interviews
- Interview with Carl Raschke
- Interview at The Modern World
- After Atheism: New Perspectives on God and Religion, Part 2 by David Cayley, Ideas, broadcast 1 May 2012
