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Umberto Eco's still relatively unexplored Il cimitero di Praga (2010) underscores the recurrent embrouille between truth and fiction in the literary and historiographical fields. Importantly, it also engages in the current philosophical debate on the relevance of what the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has recently defined as New Realism. This essay focuses on Eco's ethical and philosophical engagement in relation to the narratological features of the novel. By exploring the author's notion of negative realism, it suggests Eco's proposal in the novel of a 'third way', namely, of an interpretative path between postmodernism and New Realism that may envision a distinct approach to the hermeneutics of Reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including theorist Carl Schmitt's political theology in contrast to the ontology proposed by Martin Heidegger, the future of political theology beyond the theology of sovereignty of Schmitt and less than in the concept of Jewish messianism, and the changing structure of international law in relation to Schmitt's concept of nomos.

This article takes its point of departure in Phillip Blond's Christian criticism of secular materialisms and the failure of modern thought to appreciate the true materiality of creation. He challenges secular thought and returns to a combination of Greek and Christian Trinitarian thought, in order to reach for a new ground for political theology Blond's Christian ontological claims are contested, but an aspect of them is brought into the context of cultural creation and related to questions of the spiritual dimension of cultural artefacts in a secular setting. Against the background of Friedrich Nietzsche's struggle with the difficulty of singling out a pure secular culture from the old and (in his view) stifling religious heritage in society and culture, this article suggests that a radical notion of human intentional (but finite) creation, analogous to Blond's idea of God's infinite creative intention, may be helpful for a construction of a materialistic critical theory about contingent spiritual obstacles to political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]