Table Of ContentThe Philosophy of Reenchantment
This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment
and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology,
ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the
debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham,
Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett.
The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as
enchantment, strong evaluation, transcendence, resonance, perceptual
experience, religious meaning, moral experience, interpretation, attention,
and the sacred or reverence-worthy; notions that are crucial to human
self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also
explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates
on major concepts such as disenchantment, realism, nature, and God. In
this way, this volume seeks to put the concept of reenchantment firmly on
the contemporary philosophical agenda by showing the extent to which
it connects with central questions about agency, value, metaphysics, and
religion.
The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and
advanced students in philosophy (especially those working in moral
philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and social theory),
theology, religious studies, and sociology.
Michiel Meijer is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Research Foundation –
Flanders (FWO) in the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Antwerp. He is the author of Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong
Evaluation (2017) and has published widely on subjects such as moral
value, human agency, moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral
phenomenology, and moral psychology in the fields of metaethics,
normative ethics, and social theory.
Herbert De Vriese is Assistant Professor at the Center for European
Philosophy of the University of Antwerp. His work focuses on
secularization, critique of religion, and disenchantment in general, and
the role of philosophical theory and critique in historical and sociological
debates on (the end of) classical secularization theory, postsecularism,
and classical narratives of disenchantment in particular.
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Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy
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Perception and the Inhuman Gaze
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Logics of Genocide
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Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith
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The Philosophy of Reenchantment
Edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese
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The Philosophy of
Reenchantment
Edited by Michiel Meijer
and Herbert De Vriese
First published 2021
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Varieties of Reenchantment in a
Disenchanted World 1
MICHIEL MEIJER AND HERBERT DE VRIESE
PART I
Reenchantment and (A)Theism 15
1 What Is Reenchantment? An Interview With Charles Taylor 17
MICHIEL MEIJER AND CHARLES TAYLOR
2 Religion Without Magic: Responding to the Natural World 38
JOHN COTTINGHAM
3 Might There Be Secular Enchantment? 54
AKEEL BILGRAMI
PART II
Genealogies of Reenchantment 79
4 Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the
Forgotten Story of Transcendence 81
GUIDO VANHEESWIJCK
5 Theorizing Reenchantment Across Different Value Spheres 105
HERBERT DE VRIESE
vi Contents
6 Reenchantment as Resonance 132
PAOLO COSTA
PART III
Working With Reenchantment 159
7 The Eyes of a Child 161
SOPHIE-GRACE CHAPPELL
8 Nature, Enchantment, and God 178
FIONA ELLIS
9 Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification: On Taking
Morality (Too) Seriously 195
MICHIEL MEIJER
10 Detachment and Attention 220
ROB COMPAIJEN
11 Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism 239
DAVID MCPHERSON
Epilogue: On the Call From Outside 260
JANE BENNETT AND AKEEL BILGRAMI
List of Contributors 271
Index 275
Acknowledgments
The interview in Chapter 1 has previously been published as Michiel Meijer
and Charles Taylor, “Fellow Travellers on Different Paths: A Conversation
with Charles Taylor,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, online first article
(August 2019): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719866233.
The discussion between Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami in the e pilogue
was first published on the website The Immanent Frame: S ecularism, Reli-
gion and the Public Sphere. We thank both authors for the permission to
reprint their blog posts. See Jane Bennett, “On the Call from Outside,”
The Immanent Frame, August 18, 2010. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/08/18/on-
the-call-from-outside/; Akeel Bilgrami, “Understanding Disenchantment,”
The Immanent Frame, September 6, 2010. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/09/06/
disenchantment/.
Introduction
Varieties of Reenchantment in a
Disenchanted World
Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese
Preliminaries
The Philosophy of Reenchantment goes back to a conference held at
the University of Antwerp on 6 and 7 December 2018. The conference
theme, “Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World,” stemmed
from the recognition that the current philosophical debate over reen-
chantment is far from being a coherent and well-organized discussion, as
it allows for a wide range of conceptions and applications across distinct
philosophical domains and approaches. The aim of the conference was
to bring clarity to this debate by bringing together a variety of schol-
ars from different philosophical traditions (most of whom appear in the
present volume) on the basis of a shared agenda for something called
“reenchantment” in going against the grain of the dominant scientistic
trend in philosophy. In a crucial attempt to achieve that aim, the pre-
sent book develops and integrates a number of key ideas from the recent
work of the contributors so as to offer the first integral account of what
is involved in understanding reenchantment as a distinctive approach to
philosophy.
The background to the volume is (quite obviously) the major influence
of the well-known Weberian claim that the modern world is a “disen-
chanted” one, that is, to borrow a phrase from Jane Bennett, the image
of modernity as either “a place of dearth and alienation (when com-
pared to a golden age of community and cosmological coherency) or a
place of reason, freedom, and control (when compared to a dark and
confused premodernity).”1 Our concern here is not whether disenchant-
ment is a laudable or a regrettable historical development. Rather, the
assumption is that “disenchantment” is a fairly recognizable condition in
which experience and understanding in present-day liberal society takes
place, and as such provides the implicit background of the more explicit
beliefs and sensibilities of the majority of its members. The narrative of
disenchantment emerges here as what Charles Taylor calls a “context of
understanding,” a lived condition which includes both matters that are
explicitly acknowledged by almost everyone (such as that there are no
