Inhaltliche Zusammenfassung: | Introduction -- Chapter 1. Ashoka, and the edicts against the absolute -- Chapter 2. Origen, salvation is for everyone, even the pharaoh -- Chapter 3. Nicholas of Cues, one religion and many different rituals -- Chapter 4. Las Casas, the duel over the civilisation of the New World -- Chapter 5. Montaigne, “qui sont les barbares ?” -- Chapter 6. Lessing and the code of the three rings -- Chapter 7. Kallen and the harmony of an orchestra -- Chapter 8. Dupuis, pluralism in Christian theology -- Chapter 9. A Samoan adventure with consequences -- Chapter 10. Isaiah Berlin and the pluralism of values.
This book offers an account of ten crucial moments in the history of ideas, which represent ten key moments of the discovery of pluralism. From the Indian emperor Ashoka to Origen and from Nicola Cusano to Las Casas, Montaigne, Lessing, giants who opened the way to the thought of tolerance, challenging the dogma of a unique truth dictated by authority, followed in this reconstruction by other glowing thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Horace Kallen, Margaret Mead, and Jacques Dupuis. These protagonists, each in their own way, battled against monism for the respect of differences and for the knowledge of otherness. This kind of hall of fame of pluralist thinkers ends with the most important figure of the pluralism of values, Isaiah Berlin, of whom an unpublished interview appears here for the first time in English. The volume is unique in this two-thousand-year-old variety of voices gathered under the denominator of cultural pluralism that they embody in the deepest and most challenging sense, often at the limits and beyond the limits of heresy. It is of great value and interest to scholars and students of theoretical, moral, political philosophy, sociology, comparative studies, comparative literature, religious diversity, religious studies, anthropology, and all those interested in the history of tolerance. |
