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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Book | Chapter

181805

Onfray's popular atheological manifesto

a philosophical estimate

Garry W. Trompf

pp. 137-154

Abstract

Having critiqued Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion as the nearest thing to an Anglophone manifesto for atheists, I now turn to Michel Onfray's French equivalent, the highly popular Traité d'athéologie (2005), to critique it in a comparable manner. Whereas Dawkins, in the tradition of Darwinian evolutionism, extols a virtually hypostatized Natural Selection as a surrogate for God, Onfray wants to take the French Enlightenment and the French revolutionary impetus to their logical conclusions and makes a supreme virtue out of good sense, rationality and intelligence. Onfray is an advocate not only of atheism, but his own form of hedonism, anarchism and aesthetic cynicism. As usual, I will maintain that any atheistic position must fall back on the "ultimacy' of its protagonists' own arguments, and once again it can be established that in Onfray's case his platform statement is full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings, logical slides and internal inconsistencies, and injections of angry irony and personal emotion that weaken his case. As usual, I simply concentrate as a scholar of religious questions on the argumentative backing and relative weight of Onfray's case against religion (especially the three major monotheisms), and as an historian of ideas I will attempt to explain Onfray's manifesto against the background of the Frenchman's whole philosophical opus, especially his ongoing work Contre-histoire de la philosophie (2004–).

Publication details

Published in:

R. Cotter Christopher, Tuckett Jonathan (2017) New atheism: critical perspectives and contemporary debates. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 137-154

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-54964-4_8

Full citation:

Trompf Garry W. (2017) „Onfray's popular atheological manifesto: a philosophical estimate“, In: C. R. cotter & J. Tuckett (eds.), New atheism, Dordrecht, Springer, 137–154.