What is Peter J. Steinberger reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Peter J. Steinberger, author of The Problem with God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be Wrong.

His entry begins:

I am currently reading – actually for the second time, but this time far more closely – Robert Brandom’s Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. If the world of modern philosophy has long been divided into two quite distinct camps that pay very little attention to one another – “analytic” and “continental” respectively – Brandom is, along with others in the so-called “Pittsburgh School” such as Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell, one of the very few analytic philosophers who has been seriously interested in and influenced by the continental tradition. While I myself am a political philosopher rather than a philosopher per se, my approach, like Brandom’s, is...[read on]

About The Problem With God, from the publisher:

Whether people praise, worship, criticize, or reject God, they all presuppose at least a rough notion of what it means to talk about God. Turning the certainty of this assumption on its head, a respected educator and humanist shows that when we talk about God, we are in fact talking about nothing at all—there is literally no such idea—and so all of the arguments we hear from atheists, true believers, and agnostics are and will always be empty and self-defeating.

Peter J. Steinberger’s commonsense account is by no means disheartening or upsetting, leaving readers without anything meaningful to hold on to. To the contrary, he demonstrates how impossible it is for the common world of ordinary experience to be all there is. With patience, clarity, and good humor, Steinberger helps readers think critically and constructively about various presuppositions and modes of being in the world. By coming to grips with our own deep-seated beliefs, we can understand how traditional ways asserting, denying, or even just wondering about God’s existence prevent us from seeing the truth—which, it turns out, is far more interesting and encouraging than anyone would have thought.

Learn more about The Problem with God at the Columbia University Press website.

Writers Read: Peter Steinberger.

--Marshal Zeringue