One of the most interesting aspects of Józef Bocheński’s philosophy was its relation to Henri Bergson’s thought, particularly to his philosophy of religion. Unlike the majority of the Catholic philosophers at that time, Bocheński did not stress the significance of dynamic religion, but rather focused on the role of static religion in human life. In his view, what was of particular interest within this religion was its fabulation function. This direction of the philosopher’s research stemmed (...) from the realism and empiricism proper to the analytic philosophy developed by Bocheński and became increasingly visible as the years passed. In this text the author shows how Bocheński’s analyses of religion, referring to both daily human experiences and logic, moved towards Bergsonian static religion, while diverging from dynamic religion and its key notion of mysticism. (shrink)

. In this essay I point toward the difficulties inherent in ontological objectivity and seek to restore our truth claims to validity through a relational ontology and the dynamic of coimplication in signals and noise. Theological examination of art and science points toward similarities between art, religion, and science. All three have often focused upon a “metaphysics of presence,” the desire for absolute presence of the object . If we accept a relational ontology, however, we must accept that the (...) revelation of presence is always simultaneously a concealment. This helps explain technoscientific achievement without recourse to a philosophically flawed objectivity. Twentieth‐century information theory shows the impossibility of a “pure signal.” By accepting that signal and noise are permanently interconnected, we begin to see how noise makes signal possible and even how noise becomes signal . Information theory thus underscores important similarities and leads toward new approaches in aesthetics, Christian theology, and scientific research. By comparing art, religion, and science, I argue that rejecting a metaphysics of presence without rejecting presence itself allows human beings to know the world. Although religion, science, and art often seek the absolute presence of their objects, they function better without. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 299-303 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History. Edited by Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 416 pp. Although this book is not about interreligious dialogue per se, it makes several important contributions to it. Two of the necessities for successful interreligious dialogue are a knowledge (...) of the religions of other cultures and an awareness of one's own culture's past misinterpretations of these religions in order to guard against repeating them. This book helps accomplish both of these aims very well. First it helps to understand Asian religions as they are practiced in the United States. This book discusses Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, and Chinese religions in America, and it includes selections on Jainism and Sikhism; (it excludes Islam as a monotheistic religion with Middle Eastern roots). Second, the book adroitly catalogues the ways that Americans have misinterpreted Asian religions in the past. Its selections demonstrate that two of the worst errors that Americans commit in dealing with Asian religions is either romanticizing them as being all "spiritual," and thus categorically different from the "worldly" West, or of ignoring their diversity. Anyone reading these selections will be less likely to repeat these errors.The book is an anthology of primary documents with well-written, brief introductions to the selections. Its aim is not just to describe Asian religions in America, but also to document American encounters with Asian religions since the American Revolution. The book is organized historically in four major sections: 1784-1840, 1840-1924, 1924-1964, and 1965 to the present. Within each historical section, the authors have chosen selections that illustrate how Americans during that time viewed Asian religions, how Asian religions were practiced in the U.S., and how Asian religions influenced American culture during that time period.The first section (1784-1840) is, not surprisingly, the shortest. It has one chapter on how Americans abroad viewed Asian religions and another chapter on how those at home viewed Asian religions. This period is dominated by a belief that Christianity is the one, true religion; Asian religions by contrast, are full of "debasing superstitions and cruel abominations" (p. 58). Even those who try to get beyond such crude views demonstrate a gross ignorance of Asian religions. For example, Hannah Adams (the first woman in America to support herself through writing) claimed that the Dalai Lama was the spiritual leader or "pope" of China as well as Tibet (p. 55). Better informed and more balanced are the comments from two of the period's most important intellectuals, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Franklin, like other Deists, admired Confucian naturalism and humanism, and he reprinted excerpts of Confucius in the Pennsylvania Gazette. John Adams defended the sublimeness of Indian religion, claiming that it had heavily influenced Greek philosophy because Pythagoras had learnt his most important doctrines there.The second section (1840-1924) has six chapters covering missionaries and their [End Page 299] critics, literary encounters with Asian religions, the World Parliament of Religions, the immigrant experience in America, academic discussions, and American sympathizers and converts to Asian religions. Several selections from nineteenth-century dictionaries and books show how Asian religions were commonly perceived at the time. While there was growing sophistication about Asian religions, the period's most popular book on the subject (James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions) still maintained that only Christianity had the fullness of truth and Asian religions were static and stunted. On the other hand, this section balances out Christian triumphalism with some excerpts from Henry Steel Olcott and other Americans who converted to Asian religions. Substantial selections from Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and T. S. Eliot reveal how Asian religions deeply influenced the most important writers of the time.The third section (1924-1964) has four chapters dealing with the closing of America to Asian immigrants, Hindu gurus and their disciples in America, Buddhist masters and their students, and one on artists and missionaries. It reprints sections of the Asian exclusion act of 1924... (shrink)

베르그손의 도덕과 종교의 두 원천은 우리에게 주체화에 관한매우 독특한 이론을 제시한다. 이에 따르면, 인간이 자신의 실존을장악하는 주체가 되는 것은 종교를 통해서이다. 지성적 동물인 인간은 인간의 존재가 무의미한 세계 표상을 통해 인간을 허무주의의 고뇌에 빠뜨린다. 주체화는 이러한 지성의 자기 해체적 위험에대한 방어적 반작용에서 시작된다. 그런데 베르그손은 두 종류의주체화, 즉 정태적 종교의 작화 본능에 따른 사회적 주체화와 역동적 종교의 신비주의적 직관에 따른 우주론적 주체화를 제시한다. 이 두 주체화 방식에 대한 검토로부터 우리는 주체와 종교의 관계에 관한 다음의 결론들에 이르게 된다. 1) 종교는 주체화의 (...) 필수적인 요소이다. 2) 하지만 두 가지 주체화 양태에 따라서 두 가지 종류의 종교가 있다. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Reason and Religion”: The Science of AnglicanismRaymond D. TumblesonThis essay explores a rhetoric of “reason” in Anglican anti-Catholic polemics during the short and turbulent reign of James II. This reign witnessed an intense propaganda battle between Catholic and Anglican pamphleteers because the former for the first time in over a century were permitted openly to put their case, and in response the latter defended their doctrine and status (...) as the established church with a new urgency. For the first time, the possibility, feared by English Protestants and hoped for by Catholics, that given encouragement many people would convert to Catholicism, “the most conspicuous deviant element in society,” seemed credible, although, unsurprisingly given the brevity of James’s rule, both hope and fear proved groundless. 1 In addition to reiterated claims to have scripture and antiquity on their side, apologists for the Church of England offered a third and clinching argument against Catholicism—that reason itself was with them. They saw no contradiction between what Richard Sherlock calls a “scripture-based argumentative framework” and “the priority of natural reason.” 2 In A Rational Account of the Grounds of Protestant Religion Edward Stillingfleet developed what would become the predominant Anglican theological case against Catholicism twenty years later, when he endorsed “the judgement of Sense” as the means to a “certainty “ independent of the Papal “Infallibility “ that “Destroy[s] the obligation to Faith which ariseth from the rational evidence of Christian Doctrine.” 3 Far from mutually [End Page 131] exclusive, Protestantism and reason seemed naturally complementary, even identical, to Anglican polemicists: only Popery, in its superstition, idolatry, and implicit faith, was antagonistic to reason. As Richard W. F. Kroll observes, the “defense of contingency, premised on a skeptical empiricism, becomes not the chief discourse of dissent but, again, its opposite: the language of the most visible institutions returned to power after the Restoration.” 4 Reason and the Anglican monopoly of worship are consistently identified by Anglican apologists of the 1680s, and Popery threatens both.What Terry Eagleton has called “the Enlightenment dream of a world entirely transparent to reason, free of the prejudice, superstition and ob-scurantism of the ancien regime” has unacknowledged antecedents in Protestant polemics against “the prejudice, superstition and obscurantism” of Catholicism. 5 This essay examines the differences between the polemical literatures of the reigns of Charles II and James II, the ways in which “reason” becomes an important force against Catholicism, and the method in which this usage entangles anti-Catholicism in the construction of modern science. In 1685, the year of James’s coronation, John Williams argued that religious services ought to be conducted “in a Tongue understood of the people,” recommending that “we consult the reason of the thing.” 6 In attacking Catholicism, Anglican theologians redefined religion itself as based more on reason than on faith, because Papists could lay equal claim to faith, but only the Church of England possessed reason as they defined it. Stillingfleet’s theological career is paradigmatic for Restoration Angli-canism’s enlistment of reason in sectarian disputes: his Originae Sacrae (1662) defends Christianity as rational, then in 1665 A Rational Account of the Grounds of Protestant Religion narrows religious rationality to exclude Catholicism; in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, the 1681 The Unreasonableness of Separation chides Dissenters for being “unreasonable” because they do not conform to the Church of England; and finally in 1687 The Doctrine of the Trinity and Transubstantiation Compared, as to Scripture, Reason, and Tradition returns to the subject of A Rational Account, tightening its six hundred learned pages into colloquial propaganda aimed at lay readers. 7 In the clear light of reason, where the only static—in Michel [End Page 132] Serres’s sense—is corruption, disagreement (with Anglicanism) becomes impossible. 8This paper examines sectarian polemics in order to approach the relation between science, the paradigmatic modern intellectual structure, and theology, the paradigmatic premodern intellectual sructure, from an unaccustomed angle. The immense wave of propagandistic Anglican theologizing under James II establishes the superiority of the Church of England to Rome by re-borrowing the methods and conventions of rationality which scientific experimentalism itself had originally derived from theology. 9 In these tracts... (shrink)

This article provides a brief introduction to the interplay between law and religion in the health care context. First, I address the extent to which the commitments of a faith tradition may be written into laws that bind all citizens, including those who do not share those commitments. Second, I discuss the law’s accommodation of the faith commitments of individual health care providers—hardly a static inquiry, as the degree of accommodation is increasingly contested. Third, I expand the discussion (...) to include institutional health care providers, arguing that the legal system’s resistance to accommodating the morally distinct identities of institutional providers reflects a short-sighted view of the liberty of conscience. Finally, I offer some tentative thoughts about why these dynamics become even more complicated in the context of Islamic health care providers. (shrink)

Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny have criticized attempts to classify various ways of relating science and religion. They hold that all typologies are too simple and too static to illuminate the complex and changing historical interactions of science and religion. I argue that typologies serve a useful pedagogical function even though every particular interaction must be seen in its historical context. I acknowledge the problems in making distinctions between categories of classification and examine some alternative typologies that (...) have been proposed. I leave as an open question whether my fourfold typology is applicable to differing religious traditions. Finally I consider some parallels between typologies for science‐religion interactions and typologies for relationships between religions. Can our discussions be both interdisciplinary and interreligious without the danger of imposing the conceptual framework of one discipline or religious tradition on another discipline or tradition? (shrink)

This article explores the concept of 'adaptive symbiosis' between religion and culture, challenging the notion of religions as static or immutable entities by showcasing their dynamic engagement with and adaptation to local cultural contexts. The notion of ‘adaptive symbiosis’ transcends mere coexistence or amalgamation, embodying a deep, complex process of mutual adaptation. Within this evolutionary dance, both religion and culture emerge not merely as participants but as co-creators of a new reality. Through the examination of various religious (...) traditions—such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and others—it illustrates how religions evolve in symbiotic relationships with host cultures, leading to the creation of hybrid cultural-religious identities. Highlighting the mechanisms of biological adaptation—mutualism, amensalism, commensalism, and parasitism—as metaphors, the article delves into the complex interplay between religious teachings and cultural integration. It argues against viewing religions as immutable, instead presenting them as evolving entities that contribute to the richness and diversity of human civilization, especially in the context of globalization. This dynamic, evolving space of adaptive negotiations underlines the importance of understanding the fluid nature of cultural and religious boundaries in contributing to novel forms of expression and identity. Through this exploration, we aim to shed light on the enduring and evolving relationship between religion and culture, highlighting how this dynamic interplay contributes to the richness and diversity of human civilization. (shrink)

Criticism of post-modernizm and post-colonializm caused to question the mission of anthropology in terms of understanding different societies. Materialist, secular and anthropocentric anthropological approaches based on enlightenment and modern assumptions have faced criticism by many disciplines from philosophy and critical theory to science and quantum theory. Anthropology of religion which is a branch of cultural anthropology is also effected by changes within the broader field of anthropology. The aim of this project is to shed light on the potential of (...) the critical approach, which emerged in anthropology of religion recently and underlined the ontology, to understand religious experiences and practices of different societies. This approach is called ontological turn. In this article, first I point out the historical process in anthropology which led to the turn to ontology. Social structuralism and representationalism which played an important role for the formation of anthropology impacted significantly the ways in which anthropology understands nature and human being. According to these assumptions commonly used in anthropology, while human beings try to understand universal and static natural law principles, they create representations about nature. But, for there is only one nature, there must be only one true representation. This attempt to understand nature through representations created the base for the concepts of belief, knowledge, and mind of Edward Tylor who was the pioneer of cultural anthropology. While the mind refers to rational capacity of human being, belief is an area of irrational representations that human beings pragmatically need. Religious assumptions and practices are listed under incorrect representations. The concept of belief has been frequently used after Tylor as well to understand societies which are located outside of modernity. What ontological turn aims with criticism of conceptual framework is to prevent the domination of Western based reality. Therefore, one of the most emphasized arguments is the multiplicity of reality. This approach of ontological turn is called as taking everything serious. New definitions which are made in a way including the experiences of ethnographic objects mean taking them serious. Acceptance of the concepts by anthropologist in the ethnographic field means acceptance of difference in reality. The act of definition and conceptualizing is the act of creating different realities. In many ethnographic researches, ethnographers choses their concepts before entering to the field. This means that trying to fit differences within existing concepts and confirming the existing thoughts from different perspectives. Understanding ethnographic materials with its own terms or analyzing, explaining or interpreting ethnographic phenomenon by eliminating presumptions was always a concern for anthropology. These questions are asked so commonly that they can be seen as banal questions. The difference of ontological turn is not to ask these questions, but to ask ontological questions as an epistemological approach. The base of this ontological approach is the thought that what forms anthropologists’ perspective are not social or cultural but ontological assumptions. Thus, the question to be asked is how anthropologists’ assumptions about what the world is can be eliminated. To sum up, the idea of taking everything serious in ontological turn aims to eliminate the hierarchy between the subject and object of ethnography. Instead of seeing ethnography as an object of anthropology through modern categories, ontological turn suggests seeing ethnography as a real source to create new concepts and analytical tools. (shrink)

From the first words of this book we are informed that if we want to understand Hegel’s philosophy we should study his lecture notes, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and that if we desire to understand Hegel’s view of Christianity, we should make the effort to comprehend the intellectual and social history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Williamson then tells us that he has divided his work into three parts. In Part I we are given (...) the necessary background material that allows us to deal intelligently with Hegel’s early religious thought. In Part II the problem of religion is integrated into the broader philosophical problems that were developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the dialectical process in and through which the mind evolves from consciousness to self-consciousness and, finally, to reason. Anchored in this section is the assumption that Christianity was the truth of philosophy and “that without the Christian religion, philosophy would be without true content and direction”. Part III is the speculative section where Hegel’s position is discussed from the different perspectives of atheism, pantheism, and what our author considers the more substantial position, panentheism. Williamson defines this position as “the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe”. The use of this term to describe Hegel’s position seemed appropriate because it mediated between the dualism of theism and the static identity of pantheism. (shrink)

Recovering an ancient debate on the meaning of the Latin word pomoerium, I will show that if John Searle has offered the standard version of social ontology, Maurizio Ferraris has good reasons to claim that his ‘Theory of Documentality’ can go further. Nonetheless, his anti-post-modernism and his blindness about the religious origins of the social objects he deals with, reduce the width of his argument. Complementing his hasty analysis of mimesis with the mimetic theory of religion, violence and the (...) sacred, put forward by René Girard, I will try to show that social objects always hide a scapegoating event and not just a document, as Ferraris would say. Recovering the underlying Derridean paradigm and adding a Girardian reading, such an investigation would turn Ferraris’ static and insufficient analysis into a dynamic ontology of actuality. Thus my aims are: 1) to verify to what extend Ferraris’ theory holds ground, 2) point out, through the application of mimetic theory, certain limits of the theory pertaining to the origins of the social objects investigated, and 3) hint at a new paradigm based on the graft of Derridean thought with the trace of Girardian thoughts on mimesis. (shrink)

The thirteen essays that constitute this volume clearly show that for over four decades Terence Penelhum has been among the most perceptive writers on Hume. Although he carefully spells out the historical context of Hume’s discussions in a number of these essays, Penelhum’s metier is not identifying antecedents or targets, but instead analyzing with clarity Hume’s views and revealing their interconnections and defects. In doing this, Penelhum succeeds not only in drawing out the implications of Hume’s philosophy but also in (...) displaying its richness. As its title indicates, the work focuses on three areas in Hume’s writings: his discussion of the self and personal identity, his views on moral psychology and freedom of the will, and his treatment of religious belief. Because Penelhum’s views on these matters have not been static, one virtue of this collection is that the reader can follow the evolution of his thoughts about Hume. In particular, each of the new essays, “Hume, Identity and Selfhood”, “Hume and the Freedom of the Will”, and “Religion in the Enquiry and After”, serves both as a summary of Penelhum’s current thinking on the topic and a commentary on his previous work. (shrink)

Milbank employs a static notion of otherness and a dynamic understanding of difference, i.e., he seeks the erasure of difference and the simultaneous recognition of the perduring reality of otherness. Otherness we will always have with us, but difference is to be overcome. This is illustrated by reference toMilbank’s treatment of “the problem of other religions” in his 1992 article “The End of Dialogue.” A contrast to Milbank’s position is found in panentheistic views (e.g., McFague, Hodgson) which seek the (...) erasure of otherness and the recognition of difference as an existential but perduring quality of human life. A foundational otherness is simply not there; difference is a constant factor in human life, in creation, in the God-world relation and in the life of Godself. This view finds support in post-modern natural science: which affirms the radical interdependence of all beings and all lifeforms. Otherness is an error and difference is purely epiphenomenal. We are all connected. There is no other. (shrink)

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason remains one of the most opaque of Kant's published writings. Though this opacity belongs, partly, to the text itself, a key claim of this article is that this opacity stems also from the narrow lenses through which his readers view this text. Often read as part of Kant's moral philosophy or his universal history, the literature has thus far neglected a different vantage point on the Religion, one that does not refute (...) the utility of these lenses but complements them. This paper places the Religion alongside parts of Kant's corpus that it is less typically paired with, namely his natural history writings—in particular, his writings on the concept of race and the development of the human races. I argue that by doing so, we can shed much light on Kant's infamous claim that there is a radical evil in the human species. More precisely, we will come to appreciate that this evil is not, as it is usually understood, a static property or fixed characteristic of human beings. Instead, radical evil concerns a dynamic, changing defect in human nature that increasingly threatens our aspirations to collective moral perfection. (shrink)

This book examines matters of religious freedom in Europe, considers the work of the European Court of Human Rights in this area, explores issues of multiculturalism and secularism in France, of women in Islam, and of Muslims in the West. The work presents legal analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on concepts such as laïcité, submission, equality and the role of the state in public education, amongst others. Through this book, the reader can visit inside a French public school located in (...) a low-income neighborhood just south of Paris and learn about the complex dynamics that led up to the passing of the 2004 law banning Muslim headscarves. The chapters bring to light the actors and cultures within the school that set the stage for the passing of the law and the political philosophy that supports it. School culture and philosophy are compared and contrasted to the thoughts and opinions of the teachers, administrators and students to gage how religious freedom and identity are understood. The book goes on to explore the issue of religious freedom at the European Court of Human Rights. The author argues that the right to religious freedom has been too narrowly understood and is being fenced in by static visions of Islam. This jeopardizes the idea of religious freedom more broadly. By becoming entangled with regional and domestic politics, the Court is neglecting important nuances and is jeopardizing secularism, pluralism and democracy. This is a highly readable and accessible book that will appeal to students and scholars of law, anthropology, religious studies and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This essay explores possible paths after postcolonial theory, with the after understood not as a negation, but as a form of inheritance and the creation of routes, such that an aftermath need not have a resentful or self-hating relation and nor simply an acceptance of given pictures of ‘western’ thought. The route explored here is neither fully secular nor religious, and nor from a radically alternative ontology, but rather prompted by three enduring concerns within the global humanities, explored in three (...) sections of this paper. The first section ‘Political Theologies as an Alternative to the Dichotomy of Religion and Secularism’, asks what the difference and proximity between theology and theory may be, if we acknowledge the at times less visible theological genealogies of ‘secular’ social and critical theory. Rather than taking such genealogies only to be an effect of Eurocentrism, or as the lasting hegemony of Protestant Christian assumptions, we examine other ways of navigating tentative movements across ontological borders. The second section, ‘Theory as Darsan (Pilgrimage/Path/School)’ suggests that rather than thinking of concepts as anchored entirely to given territories or identities or as tools of ‘generalization’, we might place the word theory in relation to its genealogical kin, theos and theoria/darsan, as the formation of contemplative styles that emerge through forms of recurrent journeying within and across territories, following the tracks of others. As an instance of such journeying, we focus on a particular thinker, Stanley Cavell, whose writing suggests ways of remapping geographies of thought, in ways that could be significant for global thought, across so-called western and non-western territories. How might such journeys be continued? Section 3: ‘A Darsan: the Killing of Birds, Some Centuries Apart’ offers one such journey, three minor coordinates of a world map, located in three poetically enshrined bird killings, in Valmiki’s Ramayana, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker, each of which incants a curse of unsettlement, and a fault line in relation to being human. This article hopes to contribute to debates on decolonization, currently underway in universities across the world, and seeks to offer a possible alternative to static conceptions of west and non-west. (shrink)

In our literature, following Professor D. Ugrinovich, it is still customary to divide religious studies into theoretical and historical ones. It even found its name in the name of some religious departments, institutes. We will not discuss here the issue of the legitimacy of such a division. To me, the philosophy of religion is one of the disciplinary entities of religious studies, as is the history of religion. The main specificity of religious studies is that it studies (...) class='Hi'>religion not as a whole, but as a whole, in the organic totality of all its components and functions. Religion appears to him not as a static phenomenon, but as a dynamic phenomenon. The subject of religious studies is a functioning religion, and this functioning occurs through the interaction and interplay of all its components, and not with the absolute extinction of something in it in the change of historical eras, because religion has a prehistoric meaning. (shrink)

This paper offers an historical perspective to the discussion of the relationship between Christianity and nonhuman-human animal relationships by examining the animal protection movement in English society as it first took root in the nineteenth century. The paper argues that the Christian beliefs of many in the movement, especially the evangelical outlook of their faith, in a considerable way affected the character as well as the aims and scope of the emergent British animal welfare movement - although the church authorities (...) did not take an active part in the discussion and betterment of the conditions of animals. An explicitly Christian discourse, important in creating and sustaining the important philanthropic tradition in Britain, mobilized the movement. The paper also traces the gradual decrease of the centrality of the movement's Christian elements later in the century when evolutionary ideas as well as other developments in society shed alternative light on the relationship between human and nonhuman animals and brought about different trends in the movement. This paper sees Christianity not as a static and defining source of influence but as a rich tradition containing diverse elements that people drew upon and used to create meanings for them. The paper implicitly suggests that both a religion's doctrines in theory and the outcome of a complex interaction with the changing society in which the religion is practiced determine its potential to influence animal-human relationships. (shrink)

There is a common pattern for researchers to study one particular new religion, write a monograph or article on that specific group, and then begin the cycle all over again with a different group. This approach causes one to remember such groups as relatively stable organizations, fixed in memory at a specific stage of development, rather than as dynamic, evolving groups. In the present article, we will examine new data on contemporary Pagans that takes a quasi-longitudinal approach to survey (...) data. Though our focus will be limited, the result will nevertheless be a partial statistical picture of Paganism as a changing, evolving movement, rather than a static statistical snapshot. (shrink)

Dynamic Structure of Reality makes available in English some of the most mature thought of the modern Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri. He first presented this material as a set of 1968 public lectures in Madrid. They were collected, edited, and published in 1989 as Estructura dinámica de la realidad. In 1962 Zubiri had published Sobre la esencia, a work of metaphysics that was praised by critics with one qualification: its treatment of reality was too static. The 1968 course was (...) devised as a response to those critics. Dynamic Structure of Reality retraces the road Hegel traveled concerning the creation of a self and how that self is realized by an interplay between spirit and nature. Like his great predecessor José Ortega y Gasset, and like his great Jewish contemporary Emmanuel Levinas, Zubiri takes religion in all seriousness and locates its questions within the questions of modern philosophy. In harmony with science, he advances a new idea of becoming. Reality, not being, becomes. As reality’s traits are revealed, in different degrees, reality resembles God, the universal self-giver. Zubiri systematically touches on many disciplines to show the varieties of self-giving--throughout the universe--of structural dynamism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Can't a First Mover Be Accidentally Moveable?Bolstering Aquinas's Case for Divine Immutability in the Face of Objections from Theistic PersonalistsMats WahlbergIntroductionIn his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Brian Davies coined the term "theistic personalism" in order to have a name for a kind of monotheism that is quite widespread, but that differs significantly from the "classical theism" of the Church Fathers, the great medieval (...) theologians, and the Reformers.1 Theistic personalists claim that the personal nature of the biblical God cannot be reconciled with some of the core tenets of classical theism, in particular the doctrines of divine immutability, timelessness, and simplicity. Although personalists typically agree with the classical tradition that God exists necessarily and is the ultimate explanatory principle, they also claim that he is changeable and metaphysically composed. God's attributes or properties are distinct from each other and from God himself, and God can be causally affected by events in the created world. Some of the most influential figures within contemporary analytic philosophy of religion—thinkers like Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig—defend personalism of various shades.Within contemporary systematic theology, theistic personalism is also [End Page 1305] dominant. The long-standing tendency to contrast (unfavorably) a "Hellenistic," "static" conception of God with a "biblical," "dynamic" conception is evidence of this, as is the common tendency to historicize God's being along Hegelian lines. Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert Jenson, Eberhart Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, and many other theologians have rejected core elements of classical theism, such as God's immutability and impassibility. It is fair to say that most contemporary theologians regard the idea that God suffers alongside his creation as almost axiomatically true, and this view entails that God can change.2In book I of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], St. Thomas Aquinas attempts to build a philosophical case for classical theism. He starts with two Aristotelian arguments from motion, presented in chapter 13, whereby he claims to establish that there is an immutable First Mover. Taking himself to have proved this, Aquinas then systematically unfolds the other doctrines of classical theism, using divine immutability as a key premise. In chapter 14, St. Thomas describes his modus operandi: "In order to proceed by the way of remotion about knowledge of God, let us take as principle that which is already manifest by what we have said above, namely that God is altogether unchangeable [quod Deus sit omnino immobilis]."3Prima facie, this seems to be a promising method. If divine changelessness can be proved at the outset from the mere fact that there is motion, then the road to classical theism lies open. Given divine immutability, it readily follows that God lacks beginning and end, and perhaps also that God is eternal in the sense of being altogether timeless, as Aquinas argues in chapter 15. At the very least it follows that God lacks passive potentiality, since change is the actualization of some potential (ch. 16). From the lack of potentiality, furthermore, it follows that God is pure act, and from this it follows that he lacks any kind of composition whatsoever, so he is altogether simple.This is basically how Aquinas argues in SCG I. The success of Aquinas's case for classical theism depends, however, on whether the crucial premise of divine immutability can be proved without reliance on any of the other divine attributes that I have just mentioned. Theistic personalists claim that [End Page 1306] this cannot be done, and that the controversial divine attributes of classical theism can be proved only in a circular way, relying on one attribute (such as divine simplicity) in order to prove another (such as divine immutability), and vice versa.In this article, I will try to show that this accusation is false, and that God's changelessness can be demonstrated without assuming divine simplicity, eternity, or any other divine attribute that is at issue between classical theists and personalists. Immutability can, if this is true, function as the cornerstone in a case for classical theism, in the way that Aquinas suggests. In what follows, I will do... (shrink)

This article’s premise is that science holds the promise of deepening religious perspectives on creation. The natural sciences have convincingly proved that nature is not static, or a ready-made creation dropped from heaven. Theologians need to read nature as scientists see it and engage with that understanding theologically.The concept of resonance is applied to denote this tangential relationship as an eco-social constructivist understanding of reality. Two proponents, one scientist and one theologian, have been chosen who share this view of (...) a holistic reality, and the objective is to determine the degree of resonance viable of these magisteria. A method of polycentric hermeneutics is thus pursued.Although we referred to the concept of consilience regarding von Humboldt’s enterprise, it is not in the authors’ scope to achieve this with science and theology as disciplines sui generis. However, if resonance becomes vital in understanding reality, faith is inevitable. If a creation theology seeks a degree of plausibility, it requires the feedback-loop methodology of science. We all share one earth: the closer we all come to a shared end, the closer we also come together and relativise differences. The naturalist Edward O. Wilson suggested that science and religion should set aside their differences to save the planet. Resonance has the potential to let new horizons emerge in our mutual endeavour to come to grips with reality and to map out certain tangentially overlapping magisteria.Contribution: Through resonance, the thought constructs of a scientist and a theologian are juxtaposed. An iterative hermeneutics’ importance is emphasised in the theology and science discourse, if faith seeks understanding and leads to awe. And the conclusion is that the ‘spiritual dimension’ and the ‘natural dimension’ do not only overlap but are tangential, as they engage with the same reality. (shrink)

How to interpret autonomy plays a crucial role that leads to different readings in Kant’s moral metaphysics, philosophy of religion and moral psychology. In this paper I argue for a two-layered conception of autonomy with varying degrees of justification for each: autonomy as a capacity and autonomy as a paragon-like paradigm. I argue that all healthy rational humans possess the inalienable capacity of autonomy, i. e. share the universal ground for the communicability of objective basic moral principles. This initial (...) understanding stands for autonomy as a capacity about which we can talk of universal validity and justification. Nevertheless, the way a person fully actualizes herself, her freedom, namely autonomy, is shaped by her initial conception of autonomy and moral view of the world. Autonomy as an organic experience of real moral agents, which means an ongoing, non-static, irreducible and inexplicable judgmental process concerning one’s actualization of oneself gives way to consider autonomy as a godlike state of the soul even though one cannot provide objective validity for this. (shrink)

Those of us with time to concentrate on our historic mission to exploit workers and oppress minorities have a great need to "legitimate" our nefarious activities. The first legitimator we came up with was religion which has worked pretty well through most of history but, "the static world of social relations legitimated by God reflected, and was reflected by, the dominant view of the natural world as itself static".

In the field of history of Chinese philosophy, the key points and difficulties in the research on Fang Yizhi are mainly reflected in two ideological lines: one is how the academic pattern of the transition from Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties to the texturalism in the Qing Dynasty happened; the other is how the traditional Chinese humanities accepted the western modern natural sciences and technologies. Relatively speaking, in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, there were fewer academic (...) discussions on the relationship between intellectual thought and natural science and technology, and no universally accepted explanatory paradigm has been put forward yet. To understand the relationship between science and humanities in late Ming and early Qing Dynasty, as well as that between modern western natural science and ancient Chinese traditional thought, Fang Yizhi is a precious object of study. Fang Yizhi's thinking and practice about "things" is a bridge linking the natural world and the human world. “Thing” in Chinese philosophy has both concrete and abstract attributes, including but not limited to the category of “matter” in Western philosophy. Fang Yizhi has always been regarded as an encyclopedic thinker, and his theory of things is extremely rich. The theory and practice of things are the core of Fang Yizhi's philosophy. Fang Yizhi believes that the three religions all hold that the ultimate noumenon itself is "unknowable" and at the same time is the fundamental basis of every single thing, so people can only "study its origin" from the "knowable", that is, the "thing". This train of thought lies in the base of Fang’s thinking when describing and analyzing the relationship between Dao and things, which includes both theories of the universe and the ontology. This paper holds that the basic idea of Fang Yizhi's philosophy on the theory of body and function is that ‘there is no body but there is function’, while on the theory of universe it is that what above Yin and Yang are unknowable. Because the Dao has no body, it has only the function. And because nothing above the Yin and Yang can be understood, people can only use what is below the Yin and Yang such as the principle, qi 氣, image and number, to form the universal principle through the induction of the principle of “things”. Furthermore, Fang Yizhi ascribes the body, mind, nature and destiny to the concept of things, that is to say, he regards the self as the object of rational cognition. In this relationship, "I" is not only the subject of cognition, but also the object of cognition, thus realizing introspection inward. Thirdly, utensils and heaven and earth, that is, man-made objects and natural objects, are external to the self. Although Fang Yizhi also advocated "making" things external to human beings, under the social class system of scholars, peasants, workers and businessmen, he could only engage in the research of the theory of external things, that is, the so-called science of quality and measurement. On the whole, Fang Yizhi's physical research and practice did not go beyond the scope of Chinese traditional natural science, but he was good at summarizing research methods, actively absorbing the contents of western natural science, and put forward correct ideas on many specific natural science issues. Mou Zongsan's discussion on the relationship between existence and activity inspires the author to think about the significance of the theory of “round ∴”. Fang Yizhi drew a series of laws represented by the theory of “round∴” through the induction of the principle of being. Although these laws are derived from existing things, they themselves are not static, but show two levels of active states: one is the internal dynamics of the laws, that is, the constant rotation; the other is that the law derived from the existing things can be applied to the activities of people, considering eternity and change, the right timing and other variable factors. This paper tries to follow the essence of Fang Yizhi's thought to seek for communication and connection between objects and things, between being and activity, between natural science and moral and human ethics. From the perspective of the development of modern and contemporary Chinese philosophy, the study of mind has always occupied an important position, and the corresponding philosophical research of “things” is relatively lacking. In theory, mind and thing are relative and inseparable aspects, and the thoughts on “things” in traditional Chinese thought resources are comparable to the study of mind in terms of diachronic, textual volume and theoretical depth. The rapid development of modern natural science and technology and its challenges to the human world have promoted the deep and lasting reflecting on the problem of things and the relationship between people and things in western philosophy. Scientific rationality invades every aspect of human's life. The transformation of knowledge to practical technology enhances human's ability to control and transform things. Instrumental rationality dominates human's understanding of things, and “things” fall from the meaning world of human's living situation and become the means to meet human's needs. A re-examination of this period in Chinese history, when pre-modern ideas and science and technology first collided, may be helpful to enlighten us to think about the relationship between science and technology and the world of human significance. (shrink)

The prevailing notion of tradition in modern political thought has been that of a mere repository of beliefs about the good life, a repertoire of narratives and practical articulations of social bonds that is transmitted through history in a static condition. In spite of this prolonged diminished role, we are now seeing relevant attempts of theoretical and practical reprise. In particular, the accounts about the historical evolution of practical rationality and about the transformations of the public sphere have been (...) recently a favorable place for a return of theoretical consideration about the concept of tradition. Such a comeback took different forms, from Neo- communitarianism, to Neo-pragmatism and sociological inquiry.The very notion of a tradition has been widely re-explored by some authors as an evolving rational moral research , as a place for mediation between the dimension of communicative action and the plurality of practices , as the epistemic condition for the exercise of democratic practices . Tradition is then placed at the crossroads between the evolution of forms of rational public deliberation about the common goods and the historical construction of norms, institutions and procedures which are typical of public life.The redefinition of a concept of tradition which shifts the attention from the conservation of tokens of past knowledge to the evolution of the forms of cooperative exercise of practical reason allows for a fruitful development of some related notions, like those of exemplarity, symbol and shared imaginary. Moreover, a renewed conception of tradition is a favorable condition to think differently about the ethical and political meaning of religions in the public sphere. (shrink)

This edition makes available an entirely new version of Hegel's lectures on the development and scope of world history. Volume I presents Hegel's surviving manuscripts of his introduction to the lectures and the full transcription of the first series of lectures. These works treat the core of human history as the inexorable advance towards the establishment of a political state with just institutions-a state that consists of individuals with a free and fully-developed self-consciousness. Hegel interweaves major themes of spirit and (...) culture-including social life, political systems, commerce, art and architecture, religion, and philosophy-with an historical account of peoples, dates, and events. Following spirit's quest for self-realization, the lectures presented here offer an imaginative voyage around the world, from the paternalistic, static realm of China to the cultural traditions of India; the vast but flawed political organization of the Persian Empire to Egypt and then the Orient; and the birth of freedom in the West to the Christian revelation of free political institutions emerging in the medieval and modern Germanic world. Brown and Hodgson's new translation is an essential resource for the English reader, and provides a fascinating account of the world as it was conceived by one of history's most influential philosophers. The Editorial Introduction surveys the history of the texts and provides an analytic summary of them, and editorial footnotes introduce readers to Hegel's many sources and allusions. For the first time an edition is made available that permits critical scholarly study, and translates to the needs of the general reader. (shrink)

Assyriologists who have studied Mesopotamian commentary formation have drawn upon ideas from scholars of religion in treating the creation of a static canon at the end of the second millennium bce as a necessary precondition for the emergence of cuneiform commentaries. The present contribution argues against the idea that Mesopotamian commentaries emerged in response to a closed canon by marshaling evidence from Mesopotamian divinatory compositions, including the celestial-divinatory series Enūma Anu Enlil and its associated aḫû, or “extraneous” tradition, (...) as well as the extispical treatise Bārûtu. These compositions illustrate that commentaries could be written about texts that were still fluid and malleable in ancient Mesopotamia. Moreover, a brief look at the phenomenon of inner biblical exegesis in the Hebrew Bible supports the idea that texts need not be unchanging to be the subject of interpretation, whether in ancient Mesopotamia or elsewhere. In response to these conclusions, I outline an alternate theory for Mesopotamian commentary formation that eschews the importance of a closed canon and stresses instead ideas of scholarly bilingualism, divination, authority, and textual decorum in ancient Iraq. (shrink)

The Norwegian high-school drama series Skam is produced and published by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, a publicly funded institution distinguished by an explicit obligation to the public interest, not only serving their audience as consumers but even as citizens. Generally, the normativity expressed in Skam may be summarized by treating all with respect, involving not only moral considerations of what is right, but also ethical conceptions of what is good, offered, opened up and obstructed by the living social order established (...) there. In season three, given attention here, the plot revolves around issues concerning same-sex relationships, mental disorder and religion. Here Skam becomes interesting for the field of moral education, elaborating on how to encounter the challenges of pluralistic societies that undergo continuous changes and in which common values have become open questions. In this paper attention is drawn toward Skam’s ethical dimension, considering Skam as an instance of public moral education. Faced with tensions, hindrances and conflicts, the norm of treating all with respect, irrespective of how trivial it may appear outside of context, becomes loaded with meaning, while the actualization of the good life is at risk. Appalling is the way hegemonic religion is transformed in the living social order. Decisive is the active role taken by the youths in the series, recontextualizing the norm. The social order here is not a static, given condition, but a continuous, moving, cultivating project. In that respect, a certain democratic aspect of the public moral education of Skam also becomes visible. Together, the youths portrayed in the series seem to accommodate a variety of expressions of life emerging within their community. (shrink)

In the verse (2:31) of the Qur’ān, it is mentioned that all names were taught to Adam (PBUH). This verse indicates that revelation is decisively the source of language. On the other hand, it is a common fact that people have been constantly producing symbols to express new ideas and concepts. This situation makes it necessary to associate the utterance (muṭlaq) and static with the relative (al-muqayyah) and dynamic between language and reality in religious thought. In the historical process, (...) Mutakallims have undertaken the responsibility of understanding and interpretation between the transcendent dimension of the religion (ad-Dīn) indicated in the Qur’ān and the innovative and dynamic dimension of life. The Mutakallims’ responsibility continues today. However, to establish the relationship among language, thought, and existence in today’s kalâm, it is necessary to identify the roots of this subject in kalām’s classical sources. In our study designed for this purpose, the truth and value of naming divine meanings in the context of ta‘līm al-asmā’ are examined. On the other hand, since dealing with such a large subject in a limited study is not possible, it is just focused on the research of linguistic theories, the relationship between language and thought, and the issue of whether the names used in the main sources to indicate the meanings are divinely determined (tawqīfī). In fact, it has been determined that the subject of ta'līm al-asmā’ is overshadowed by the vehement debates over the createdness of the Qur’ān (Khalq al-Qur’ān) and the relationship between Allāh’s essence and His attributes, although it is a Qur’ān-centered issue. As can be seen in the study, the approach of the Mutakallims to the issue of ta‘līm al-asmā’ is parallel to their understanding of Allāh’s essence and His attributes. As stated in this research, if the divine names were determined by Allāh, then Allāh’s names will be eternal. Besides, if the names expressed in human languages are the same as the essence of Allāh, this will lead to the problem of eternality. If it is said that the names are separated and unrelated from Allāh’s essence, there will be also more than one independent and eternal being. The idea of multiple eternal beings is against the principle of tawḥīd. However, in cases where the distinction between attributes and essence of Allāh is separated from each other in the mind, it causes attributes to be considered as something existing independently of the essence of Allāh. Therefore, as stated in the study, Mu‘tazilite theologians, who were very sensitive about this issue, attached great importance to the concept of eternity (qadīm) while transcending the essence of Allāh from the attributes of the created. As they appealed to tanzīh by which they transcend Him from all the originated things in time, they were focused on His eternality (qidam). In this regard, all His actions concerning the universe are regarded as temporal, in other words, originated in time (ḥādith). From this point of view, according to them, Allāh’s names specified in the Qur’ān are created just like the Qur’ān itself. Although their meanings are within the boundaries of the Divine Knowledge, their wordings (lafiẓ) belong to humans. Therefore, these names (asmâ’) that people use to describe Allāh in their speech, as Abū ‘Alī al-Jubbā’ī argues, are determined by the convention of the human. It has been determined by people via consensus, like other words of the language, to indicate the essence and attributes of Allāh in a language because of communication. Then, Allāh has sent down His message to people with these words. The conclusion that Mu‘tazilite theologians have regarded the connection of names with the meanings in Allāh’s knowledge as a linguistic use, while Sunnī theologians have addressed this issue based on the creative act (Khalq) of Allāh. There is another explanation which is known as the theory of faculty or habitus as an alternative way. Some Ash‘arî and Māturīdī theologians supported this theory. Today, the importance of this new perspective is clear, which appears another association of both ideas. In this context, it has been determined that the views of Māturīdī, who attributes the content (or meaning) of revelation (waḥy) to Allāh while arguing that its wordings belong to humans, are more appropriate to the theory of the faculty (malakah). (shrink)

Helmut Reich’s theory of relational and contextual reasoning is a courageous initiative for the resolution of cognitive conflicts between apparently incompatible or incommensurable views. Built upon Piagetian logico-mathematical reasoning, cognitive complexity theory, and dialectical and analogical reasoning, it includes the development of a both/and logic inclusive of binary either/or logic. Reich provides philosophic, theoretical, and even initial empirical support for the development of this form of reasoning along with a heuristic for its application. A valuable step beyond the limits of (...) binary, static, and formal reasoning, it takes relationship, context, and perspectival variations seriously in an explicitly reflective and iterative system. We can and do address conflicts not resolvable by conventional appeals to logic or evidence, including those at epistemic boundaries or produced by belief-commitment differences. Although this form of reasoning has real promise, including stepping beyond complementarity in the religion-science dialogue, it seems better directed to causally explanatory theories than to other forms of rendering meaning. Finally, its coextension requirement may render it problematic where functionally coherent explananda cannot be identified or are themselves produced or constituted by a belief system. (shrink)

The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. In 2020, accomplished Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physics. So, what impact does living in a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physic have (...) on living your life? The single most important impact is the strong scientific evidence supporting the existence of God. The second most important impact is that you can infer that God endorsed Christianity and the Catholic Church, because one would expect God to communicate with humanity by predetermining His will to be the predominant religion and Church on Earth. The third most important impact is the realization that your life is endlessly repeated in our block universe. The philosophy of superdeterminism has many other significant impacts on our understanding of God, the universe and meaning in life. (shrink)

"Alternative Selves" and Authority in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart The article engages with "alternative selves," a concept found in The Stone Carvers by a Canadian writer, Jane Urquhart. Her fiction is first seen in the context of selected texts by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, who explore the clash between female characters' conventional roles and their "secret" selves. My analysis was inspired by Pamela Sue Anderson's A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, which stresses the need for (...) "reinventing ourselves as other" in the face of biased beliefs and dominant epistemology. In particular, my article refers to Anderson's concern with Kant's imaginary from The Critique of Pure Reason, where "the territory of pure understanding" is projected on the island, while desire, chaos and death are identified with the sea. Seen through the prism of a feminist reading of the philosophical imaginary, the sea becomes the female beyond. Urquhart's three novels: Away, The Stone Carvers and A Map of Glass dissolve the opposition between Kantian island and water, by showing how reason is invaded by desire and death, and how the female protagonist embodies the elements that have been repressed. Urquhart's fiction, which is "landscape driven," provides the image of a dynamic relationship between the qualities that form a static binary opposition in Kantian discourse. Mary in Away, Klara in The Stone Carvers and Sylvia in A Map of Glass all subvert the dominant epistemology by following their desire, which becomes "a positive energy" and not "a deviation from a good rational norm," to refer to another concept by Anderson. Urquhart's Mary, Klara and Sylvia have to contend with power vested in collective beliefs and stereotypical construction of femininity. By venturing into the liminal zone beyond the territory of "pure understanding," the three protagonists regain their voices and discover their authority. The article ends with the analysis of a Homeric intertext in A Map of Glass, where Sylvia identifies with Odysseus "lashed to mast" so that he would not respond to the call of the siren song. Reading Homer's passage on the siren song, one realizes that the use of the Kantian imaginary turns Ithaca into the island of truth, and the sea into the stormy beyond, identified with desire, death and femaleness. While the Odyssey suppresses the dangerous message of the siren song, Urquhart's fiction rewrites it and reclaims it as positive inspiration for the female protagonist. (shrink)

In a world of confrontations between numerous cultures, traditions, languages, and religions, the meaning of “human” and “humanism” reaches a higher level of “humanness.” The pluralism of cultural, political, and religious outlook creates new options and alternative interpretations of what constitutes the “human.” True humanness is always there, open and accessible to all, with nothing being hidden or obscured. At the same time, true humanness is also a matter of doing, not just being. To be “true” is to live the (...) truth, to be with it, and to be part of it. We exist inside this truth as a passion, which informs all the decisions we make in life. So true humanness is not something objective and static, something to be studied from a distance; true humanness is an up-close and personal way of living, a mode of existence, something that is relational. Our way toward a more complex understanding of humanness faces similar obstacles as a yogi encounters on his way to the final way of Yoga. Patañjali in his Yoga Sutras describes these obstacles—kleshas—as the afflictions of the human mind, or destructive and disturbing emotions: ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. A higher understanding of “humanness” will not be reached without an ethical engagement of individuals, as well as formal and informal commitment of institutions and nations. Such an endeavor will consequently reveal yet-undiscovered human potential, leading to a renaissance of our acting, thinking, and believing. (shrink)

The article attempts to present and pass comment on a number of themes found in the last book by Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. The author has selected ethical themes only, but presents them in the general context of Bergson’s philosophy. In her interpretation Bergson places morality in two irreducible moral worlds, one founded on the concept of moral duty, which creates static morality incorporated in social life, and another, founded on (...) the concept of moral challenge or inspiration which adds a dynamic dimension to moral reactions wherever they are motivated by an elemental, creative, supra-rational feeling known to exceptional individuals only. (shrink)

A genealogical account of state sovereignty explores the ways in which the concept has emerged, evolved, and is in decline today. Sovereignty has a theological foundation, and is deeply bound up with the idea of God, in particular a voluntarist God, presented as being capable of intervening directly in the world. Religious conflicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forced the separation between religion and politics, and opened the space for the emergence of a national state endowed with sovereignty (...) which has dominated the world until now. Today’s rise of international and transnational obligations challenges the conventional understanding of state sovereignty, which cannot account for the normative density of the global order and the corresponding decline of state-based political authority. In order to explain that, I contrast two competing understandings of state sovereignty: a static one and a dynamic one. The static understanding regards sovereignty as absolute within the state territory. The dynamic understanding regards sovereignty as evolutionary: according to this account, the state is just one possible form that sovereignty can take. I conclude by suggesting that the dynamic understanding of state sovereignty is better suited to explaining the decline of state sovereignty. (shrink)

W. Norris Clarke's metaphysics of the universe as a journey rests on six major positions: the unrestricted dynamism of the mind, the primacy of the act of existence, the participation structure of reality, and the person, considered as both the starting point of philosophy and the source of the categories needed for a flexible contemporary metaphysics. Reflecting on his conscious life and the universe around him, the finite person mounts by a two-fold path to its Infinite source, who, though immutable (...) in His natural being, is mutable in the intentional being of His personal knowledge and love. The personal God is the efficient cause from whom the universe comes and the final cause to whom it returns.Less optimistic than Norris Clarke, John Caputo wonders about his metaphysics of the person. In a hermeneutical interpretation of the human face, the person through whom Being "sounds" discloses an ambiguous Being that both reveals and conceals itself. Far from grounding a casual ascent to God, hermeneutical phenomenology allows us no more than the right to interpret the world and its transcendent source through our own free decision.Although impressed by Norris Clarke's attempt to introduce mutability into God, Lewis Ford still finds Clarke's Thomistic God unacceptable. As a Whiteheadian, he proposes in place of Thomas' God, whose perfection consists in static unity, a God whose perfection consists in a never-ending process of unification. John Smith argues against the traditional dichotomy made between the ontological and cosmological arguments. Rather than opposed methods of proving God's existence, they should be taken as complementary journeys to the divine presence which discloses itself, although diversely, in the soul and in the world. There are parallels between Smith's historical study of two arguments and Clarke's two-fold path to God. Yet Smith is critical of Thomas' cosmological journey to God and does not share Clarke's confidence in its validity. Significant studies in their own right, the three essays as a group challenge Clarke's whole metaphysics of the universe as a journey. Meeting the challenge, Clarke clarifies and refines his own thought.An account of Clarke's philosophy by Gerald A. McCool, S.J. preceds this unified and stimulating philosophical discussion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eleatic BergsonDonna Jones (bio)Suzanne Guerlac. THINKING IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO HENRI BERGSON. Ithaca: Cornell UP 2006. [TT]In her Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson Suzanne Guerlac reminds her readers that the metaphysician has indeed been the subject of many hatreds, as the Bergsonist Gilles Deleuze once noted. But from this taut philosophical study one cannot easily make out any possible grounds for enmity; nor were (...) any expressed in the special Bergson issue of Modern Literary Notes edited by Guerlac. In this short review essay I shall voice some of that historic criticism, especially in regard to the social and political implications of his thought. Guerlac’s study may also win its own opponents for its sharp criticisms of Deleuze’s interpretations of Bergson and (in her reading) comically machinic view of life [TT 176–87]. This alone makes the book worth reading; it is also exhaustively researched, and I cannot remember learning as much from the footnotes of any other book.Bergson is presented here as a great metaphysician on the nature of time and space, the philosophical father of nonlinear science, and a theorist of concrete and affective individuality. Rejecting implicitly Leszek Kolakowski’s reading of two Bergsons, Guerlac presents him as neither a cosmologist who opposes life and matter nor an existentialist who retrieves consciousness by opposing time to space. Nor does he emerge as a systematic thinker in this study. In the last chapter Guerlac offers a dizzying defense of Bergson for providing the philosophical basis for cultural studies of the qualitative irreducibility of affectual states, the metaphysics of chaos theory, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the rudiments of an aesthetic theory of digital art and virtual reality.All of this follows from the epochal significance of Bergson’s metaphysical distinction between time and space as carefully grounded in the most advanced physics of his time. Guerlac does not discuss in any detail Bergson’s vitalist critiques of Darwinian biology in Creative Evolution, the work through which the metaphysical arsonist fired the modernist imagination in diverse, contradictory, and at times violent ways.1 Nor does she explore the occult and mystical themes that run throughout Bergson’s work and informed his personal and professional associations.In fact, Guerlac writes: “An explicit appeal to the social values of mystical experience in this study [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion] appeared to vindicate those who had criticized Bergson all along for being simply a mystic. And yet the title of the work, and the basis for the notion of closed and open societies, derive from scientific, not mystical discourse. They refer us to an opposition between closed and open systems in Sadi Carnot’s theories of thermodynamics” [TT 9]. Yet Bergson bases the opposition [End Page 21] between closed and open societies not in thermodynamics but in sociobiology. Having sociobiological reasons to believe in the power of the myths of closed morality on the human mind—groups that had instilled loyalty through myth and ritual had been more successful in the course of evolutionary history; that is, humans susceptible to myth have been successful in a positivist Darwinian sense—he called for the cooptation of such susceptibility by those myths and rituals that instilled loyalty to humanity as such. Humanity could dynamically extend the scope of sociability rather than follow the roles and customs that maintained a closed society in static equilibrium. Though Bergson would later courageously risk pneumonia to stand as an old man in the cold rain to register as a Jew in Vichy France, he claimed in this last book from 1932 that the only complete inspiration for universal openness could be found in Christian mysticism and mythology [Two Sources 227]. He explicitly criticized the insularity of the Judaic religion (and caricatured Eastern forms of mysticism). In other words, Bergson put his faith in Christian mystics alone and thus invited the charge of having laid the foundation for mystical and intolerant leadership.Bergson’s universal humanism also crashed on the limits of colonial racism. In considering closed primitive societies, Bergson called attention to missionary stories full of detailed accounts of childish and monstrous deeds. He implored his... (shrink)

Kant uses ‘wish’ as a technical term to denote a strange species of desire. It is an instance in which someone wills an object that she simultaneously knows she cannot bring about. Or in more Kantian garb: it is an instance of the faculty of desire’s (or will’s) failing insofar as a desire (representation) cannot be the cause of the realization of its corresponding object in reality. As a result, Kant originally maintained it to be antithetical to morality, which deals (...) with ‘ought implies can’. However, Kant’s notion of wish is not static. On the contrary, I argue in this article that Kant re-evaluated the capacity to wish as (to some extent) causally efficacious and, further, of moral relevance. This re-evaluation has not been discussed in the literature, yet has been lurking in plain sight in a subtle but decisive shift evident in two versions of a footnote from the *Critique of the Power of Judgement* (KU). (shrink)

The "Sinderesi School" dedicated his annual research (2015-2016) to investigate "fast-paced living a new model of being." In fact, humanity has passed from a slow and static world to a fast and interconnected way of living. This change has consequences in dealing with space and time, in shaping a culture, in regulating daily work and, most of all, in searching for the meaning of human existence. These were the main fields of investigation, and are here presented as the fruits (...) of a shared intellectual journey. The first section of this collection three lectures regarding the different approaches to human changing, made by the eastern and Western cultural traditions. the second part gathers the findings of a shared and intensive debate on the various aspect of human life mentioned above. Overall, this book shows how humanity is charged with an unprecedented "stewardship of the earth" that could be assumed only in a reasonable spirit of dialogue and mutual understanding"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

This essay contends that reality is a creative evolutionary process by which the virtual is transformed into the actual and argues that our critical conception of realism in literature needs to be altered to reflect this purposive and progressive living reality in contrast to the static and dead actuality assumed by the conventional notion of realism as mimesis. Realist fiction writers who are profound creators have strategically employed metaphysically dipolar and ethically earnest literary genres in tandem with mimetic realism, (...) resulting in complexly interactive alternative and prophetic realisms that function as catalytic agents for progressive change in our world. (shrink)

The study of organizational ethics continues to be the focus of significant academic attention, however it is a discourse that remains largely informed by a form of morality that is perhaps best described as ordered and cognitive. Traditional approaches to questions of organizational ethics emphasize a fundamentally static view of organizations and the people within them, reinforcing notions of mind/body dualism and reifying ethics as an outcome of human agency, choice, and deliberate intention (see MacKay and Chia). We challenge (...) this approach and instead argue in favor of ethics research that adopts an ontology grounded in process metaphysics. Escaping the confines of Cartesian dualism, we reconceptualize organizational ethics as something that is in fact not held constant, is not a static termination point or an outcome of events, but is rather an input into the continually reconstituting context of the organization over time (see Langley, et al.). The process ethics we articulate provides a grounding for moral critique in diverse communities that is not undermined by relativism. Moreover, it provides guidance to managers and employees facing moral problems without forcing them to face a tyranny of principles. We consider how a process ethics would be enacted in organizations through managerial decision-making and in the treatment of employees. (shrink)

Polanyi is widely known for his development of personal knowledge, but he was also keenly inter­ested in what can be called, personal existence. The historical backdrop of reviving, the once dead language of, Egyptian Hieroglyphics provides valuable insights into Polanyi’s critique of objectiv­ism and deciphering a human ontology. From applying physiognostic to telegnostic information to understanding static and dynamic meaning, Polanyi’s philosophy of language and machines provides a wealth of vantage points from which to study who and what we (...) are. (shrink)

"What is sexist oppression?" "What should be done about it?" Organized around these questions, Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader provides an overview of theoretical feminist writing about the quest for gender justice. Incorporating both classic and cutting-edge material, the reader takes into account the full diversity of women, highlighting the effects of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, and religion on women's experience. Theorizing Feminisms is organized into four sections and includes fifty-four essays. The first section introduces several basic concepts commonly (...) employed when thinking about sexism--oppression, social construction, essentialism, intersectionality, gender, race, and class--and also raises questions about the perspective and legitimacy of the theorist. The second section surveys three approaches that attempt to characterize in a general way the source of injustice toward women: humanist feminism ("the sameness approach"), gynocentric feminism ("the difference approach"), and dominance feminism. Offering an alternate perspective, the third section introduces two "localizing" approaches, grounded in postmodernism and identity politics, respectively. Skeptical of theories that attempt to analyze social phenomena across history and culture, authors in this section challenge, rather than answer, the text's organizing questions. The final section explores the relationship of feminist theory to three liberatory projects--postcolonialism, neo-materialism, and queer theory--that do not characterize themselves as feminist, yet take gender as a significant category of analysis. Each section opens with an introduction and each essay is followed by helpful study questions. The majority of the essays are presented in their entirety. Theorizing Feminisms underscores the strong connection between feminist theory and practice by including essays that illustrate important political inspirations or applications of each theoretical approach. It also presents versions of the same approach from various points in history, revealing feminist theory to be dynamic and evolving, rather than static. Ideal for interdisciplinary courses in feminist theory, this volume will also serve as an invaluable reference for current and future generations of theorists. (shrink)

This book is an appreciative exposition of Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion. It maintains that Bergson has a "revolutionary doctrine of the nature of morality." Although the author did not attempt to relate Bergson’s moral philosophy to the contemporary philosophical scene, she did fully display a base in which Bergson’s account can be evaluated in contemporary terms. Of particular interest is Bergson’s distinction between morality of obligation and morality of aspiration, or between static and dynamic morality. (...) The former is a morality of social pressure, the latter a morality of exceptionable individuals who reveal to men "new and higher moral goals." Bergson centers his attention to the morality of aspiration on mystical experience as the "peak" emotional experience. Questions may be raised whether this account can appropriately apply to Oriental mystics, for example, Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu and the Zen Buddhists who seem to give no role to emotion in their account of alleged mystical experiences. It is doubtful whether all paradigmatic individuals recognized by Bergson can be regarded as unequivocal expression of the emotion of love. This narrow account of Bergson on the morality of aspiration does not detract from the importance of at least some analogous distinction to focus on the standard-guiding function of paradigmatic individuals in various moral practices. (shrink)