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Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two major approaches. According to the first, this reception was governed by a universal Enlightenment rationalism that was present in Judaism no less than in Kantian philosophy. According to the second, it was the fact that Kantianism contained a latent Judaic kabbalistic philosophy that made it attractive to Jewish intellectuals. This paper departs from both approaches by showing that when Jewish intellectuals encountered Kantianism they found neither a universal rationality to which Judaism should conform, nor an esoteric Jewish metaphysics to which Kantian philosophy had already conformed, but something else entirely, namely a hostile philosophical religion that sought to reconstruct Judaism in its own image. As a result of the historical context in which this challenge arose, some Jewish intellectuals accepted this reconstruction as a rational reform, while others repudiated it as a Christian-rationalist assault on Jewish law and tradition. Characterized first by the absence of a defensive Jewish Schulmetaphysik that might combat Kantianism on its own grounds, and second by the preparedness of enlightened intellectuals to extort Jewish acceptance of Christian rationalism by withholding citizenship rights, this context made Kantian philosophy into an offer that was difficult for Jewish intellectuals to refuse, or accept.

This essay argues that today's dominant understanding of secularization—as an epochal transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason—first appeared in philosophical histories at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was then anachronistically applied to early modern Europe. Apart from the earlier and persisting canon-law use of the term to refer to a species of exclaustration, prior to 1800 the standard lexicographical meaning of "secularization" was determined by its use in public law and diplomacy to name the civil conversion of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction. Prior to the same point the most important use of the adjective "secular" was in political jurisprudence as a synonym for temporal, civil, and political, to name a religious–political settlement from which rival theologies had been excluded as the condition of its negotiation. But this usage was domain-specific, was quite compatible with religious devotion, and had nothing to do with the putatively secular character of the spheres of philosophy or the natural sciences, thence "society". Far from seeing a shift from religious belief to autonomous rationality, early modernity in fact witnessed a significant intensification of religious belief and practice under the impact of rival confessional movements. It also emerges that the nineteenth century was characterized not by the supersession of confessional religions—or their conversion into rational religion or moral philosophy—but by their remarkable persistence and adaptation to new circumstances. In light of this, the essay argues that the variant philosophical-historical conceptions of secularization—as the epochal supersession of religious belief by human rationality—should not be understood as theories of a putative process but as "combat concepts". These were internal to an array of rival cultural-political factions that first emerged in early nineteenth-century Protestant Germany and that continue to do battle today.

Justifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an 'idea' of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an 'event' capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in 'being'. In offering a sketch of the emergence of the modern humanities from early modern humanism, the paper argues that these twin philosophical justifications fail to capture both the array of intellectual arts that have informed the humanities disciplines and the variety of uses to which these arts have been put. Nonetheless, the two philosophical constructions have had a concrete impact on the disposition of the modern humanities, seen in the respective structuralist and poststructuralist reconfigurations of the disciplines that began to take place under the banner of 'theory' during the 1960s. In discussing the effects of theory on the humanities in Australia, the paper focuses on the unforeseeable consequences of attempts to provide arts-based disciplines with a foundation either in cognitive structures or in an 'event' that shatters them. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Some have seen the desuetude and final abolition of England's blasphemy laws in 2008 as the belated triumph of a liberalism grounded in individual rationality and consent. Postcolonial scholars, though, have interpreted the decriminalisation of blasphemy as symptomatic of the ideological role of liberal individualism, acting on behalf of a secularised nation-state, in repressing immigrant communities committed to the political exercise of religion. In showing that modern English blasphemy laws arose with the formation of the Anglican confessional state, forming part of its political theology and jurisprudence, this article argues that the abrogation of the laws signified neither the victory of rational individualism nor the triumph of a repressive secular state, but the final undoing of the Anglican settlement by an opposed political theology and jurisprudence.