Another New Nietzsche

Book reviewed in this article:
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy     

From Babylon to Christianity: William Foxwell Albright on Myth,Folklore, and Christian Origins

The American Orientalist William F. Albright (1891–1971) is remembered as a leading voice of twentieth‐century “biblical archaeology,” a field that aimed to demonstrate empirically the Hebrew Bible's substantial historicity. Less well known is Albright's research on Christian backgrounds, which by contrast reflected modernist theology's scepticism about the gospel narratives' literal truth. Drawing ideas from the “Pan‐Babylonian” school of biblical criticism, Albright invoked the influence of ancient Near Eastern myth and folklore on the Christ story, this being the culminating theme of his magnum opus From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940). Originally Albright believed that this mythological interpretation would reestablish Christianity's intellectual credibility in the twentieth century and thus help revive New Testament theology. Yet in the latter part of his career he omitted the mythological thesis from his writings, apparently having concluded that it was harmful to orthodox Christian faith.     

Nietzsche,Perspectivism, Anti-realism: An Inconsistent Triad

“Philosophical perspectivism” is surely one of Nietzsche's most important insights regarding the limits of human knowledge. However, the perspectivist thesis combined with a minimal realist metaphysical position produces what Brian Leiter calls the ‘Received View’: an epistemologically incoherent misinterpretation of Nietzsche which pervades the secondary literature. In order to salvage the thesis of perspectivism, Leiter argues that we must commit Nietzsche to an anti-realist metaphysical position. I argue that Leiter's proposed solution is (1) epistemically weak, and (2) inconsistent with much of Nietzsche's views on truth, knowledge and the psychological make-up of human beings. I argue that we need to abandon the scheme/content distinction on which both the Received View and Leiter's anti-realist construal of perspectivism are predicated and instead construe perspectives as environments of power.     

New World,New Politics,New Labour: Third Way Revisionism and Prophetic Political Theology

Abstract

Tony Blair's vision of a ‘third way’ political programme is formative of New Labour's second term revisionism, claiming to transcend traditional left-right distinctions and embody the principles of ‘equal worth’, ‘opportunity for all’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘community’. Drawing upon a variety of sources, Anthony Giddens among them, the following material sketches the lineaments of the ‘third way’ agenda Having identified its political aspirations and principal theoretical components, the article suggests a number of areas representing potentially fruitful points of contact for further theological reflection.