While a narratological reading of the Gospels is relatively well accepted, their characterisation as parts of the genre of ancient biography was much antagonised in former times. Although things have changed thanks to seminal monographs on the problem from the second half of the 20th century and to continuing work, some questions remain open. Therefore, a narratological comparison of Gospels with concrete representatives of the ancient bios could possibly help to clarify the relations between both. In what follows, the oldest (...) Gospel is read simultaneously with Plutarch’s Biography of the Younger Cato. Three observations are made: a) The structures of the narratives of Cato and of Jesus match to a high degree. Both protagonists carry out certain duties while operating in public. In most instances, they achieve great successes. From a certain point on, however, they irrevocably approach failure and ruin. This structure of story seems to form the basis both of the Gospel and of the biography of Cato, written ca. three decades later. b) Obviously, both works narrate the life of a man, his exceptional character, his extraordinary operations in public and his non-natural violent dead. In Plutarch’s version, the Younger Cato fails in the end. At first sight, also Mark’s Jesus fails to accomplish his mission. By God’s action he is turned into the saviour of the faithful however. This claimed unsurpassed relevance of the story is contrasted with the laconism of the narration. c) Both narrations are composed out of both factual and fictional elements. Thus, readers cannot separate both elements precisely in every instance. Both stories are imagined worlds designed for the in narratology so called game of fiction. As can be learned in Plutarch, authors of stories like the Life of Cato or the Gospel of Mark guarantee a certain sense of responsibility in their work. Summed up, the narratological comparison has illustrated both the close affinity and the individual specifications of both narratives. It thus helps to clarify the position- fixing of the Early Christian literature within its Graeco-Roman context. (shrink)

Der Artikel untersucht das Markusevangelium als kommunikative Handlung und fragt nach der Ausgangsfrage, auf die der Text eine Antwort ist. Die Analyse der Aussagen über die Zeit nach der im Text erzählten Zeit hinaus, der Charakterisierung der Jünger und der Erzähldynamik vom Anfang zum Schluss führt zu dem Ergebnis, dass sich das Markusevangelium der Herausforderung der Anfrage stellt, die Jesus am Kreuz hinausruft: „Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?" . Die grundlegende Antwort auf diese Frage (...) ist die markinische Rede von der Verborgenheit Gottes, seiner Herrschaft und seines Sohnes. Entsprechend möchte das Markusevangelium seine Leser auf einen Weg zu vertiefter Wahrnehmung führen, der sie erkennen lässt, dass sie nicht von Gott verlassen sind, sondern dass Gott ihnen verborgen nahe ist. Dieser Weg durch den Text wird in den drei entscheidenden Schritten beschrieben. Aufgrund der bleibenden Bedeutsamkeit seiner Ausgangsfrage erweist sich das Markusevangelium als ein auch heute noch aktueller und herausfordernder Text.The article examines the gospel of Mark as communicative act and asks for the initial question, to which the text is the answer. The analysis of the statements about the time beyond the time covered by the narrative, the characterization of the disciples and the narrative dynamics from beginning to end lead to the conclusion, that the gospel according to Mark takes up the challenge of the question, which Jesus cries on the cross: „My God, my God, why do you have forsaken me?".The fundamental answer to this challenge is the Markan emphasis on the concealment of God and his kingdom and the concealment of his son. Accordingly, the gospel of Mark wants to lead the reader on a way of deepened perception and awareness in order to recognize, that he is not forsaken by God, but that God is covertly near. This way is described in his three decisive steps. Because of the lasting significance of its initial question the gospel of Mark turns out to be of vital importance for present readers. (shrink)

This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the higher COVID-19 infection rates among South Asians in general, and Punjabis more specifically, have been represented by conservative politicians and their representatives as a consequence of cultural and religious practices. Two counter-narratives are discussed. The first substitutes the negative image of the Sikh Punjabi Canadian community with a celebratory and positive view of Sikh humanitarianism and community service. The second attributes the high numbers to class attributes such as precarious jobs, (...) poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, over-crowded housing, racism and lack of access to healthcare. We argue that the conservative explanation as well as the first counter-narrative reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of South Asian immigrants, albeit in slightly different ways. The second counter-narrative represents a discursive resistance by advancing a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. (shrink)

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within (...) everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

In the original publication of the article, on page 20, the section heading should be “Gaṅgeśa on Testimony and Epistemic Luck” instead of “Testimony and Epistemic Luck”.

This compilation analyzes the differences between the concepts of ‘social responsibility’ and ‘business ethics’, which are often erroneously interpreted to be the same. It explains that social responsibility is a characteristic but just one of the many aspects of the much wider concept of business ethics. The collection includes contributions from experts from diverse fields such as industry, academia, and non-governmental organizations, who present the theoretical underpinning of the concepts, along with real-life case studies dealing with the varied, hands-on experiences (...) of leaders from different industries. (shrink)

Man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in the lightening flash of language. Free towards, and endowed with the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of language that remains beyond his death: here alone lies redemption for the mortals. It is this affirmative question of the coming time that is pursued in this work: it occurs as and in a configuration of questions, not (...) constituting a system: question of mortality and temporality, the flash of language that reveals man - beyond any predication - his finitude, the opening where man finds himself to welcome the coming, and finally redemption in the coming itself in the existential attunement of hope. This article attempts, reading the works of Schelling, Heidegger and Benjamin, to think the gift of language as redemptive, beyond any appropriation, in the face of evil whose possibility is given to the mortal alone. (shrink)

This first full-length study of the Arabic reception of Plato's Timaeus considers the role of Galen of Pergamum in shaping medieval perceptions of the text as transgressing disciplinary norms. It argues that Galen appealed to the entangled cosmological scheme of the dialogue, where different relations connect the body, soul, and cosmos, to expand the boundaries of medicine in his pursuit for epistemic authority – the right to define and explain natural reality. Aileen Das situates Galen's work on disciplinary boundaries in (...) the context of medicine's ancient rivalry with philosophy, whose professionals were long seen as superior knowers of the cosmos vis-à-vis doctors. Her case studies show how Galen and four of the most important Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers in the Arabic Middle Ages creatively interpreted key doctrines from the Timaeus to reimagine medicine and philosophy as well as their own intellectual identities. (shrink)

The virtual world has become an important form of our life. While technology is making the life easier at the same time it is taking away the life from us. Here, the question arises, is this an alternate for good or for worse? This study will investigate the concept of virtual reality by exploring the Husserlian probe for imagination. Furthermore, the study attempts to analyse the virtualization of the real world and how the shift from the real to virtual has (...) affected the life of human being. Moreover, the review will target to investigate the meaning of the lifeworld. In the end the study attempts to explore how by following Husserlian phenomenology that saves space for value one could attain a meaningful life. (shrink)

We read with interest Dominic Wilkinson’s article “Frailty Triage: Is Rationing Intensive Medical Treatment on the Grounds of Frailty Ethical?” on the utility of the Clinical Frailty Score in...

Conversion is a critical part of Evangelical theology and missiology. It has been defined as a crisis experience or a decision at a specific point in time. However, there is always an aspect of development, a process, involved. Increasingly, the phenomenon of conversion of those from non-Christian backgrounds, for example from other world religions, indicates that how they become followers of Christ is often characterised by a gradual journey, sometimes accompanied by visions and dreams. This paper looks at the phenomenon (...) of conversion through a historical and missiological lens to explain and understand the dynamics of the conversion. (shrink)

If the dominant ethico-philosophical thinking of responsibility in the West is founded upon, or tied to a certain figure of death, it is because this ethical notion of responsibility is also a certain econo-onto-thanatology. Here the notion of the gift to the other is always already inscribed within a certain economic equivalence of value, or an economic determination of temporality as the geometric figure of the circle, or a certain economy of the experiences of abandonment and mourning, through which the (...) event-character of the gift, its excess and its infinite surplus is economised, reduced, repressed, or even annulled. Reading Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this econo-onto-thanatology, and relating him to Schelling, Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard, this article attempts to reveal this very complex relationship of the ethical notion of responsibility and the gift with death, in order to think anew – in the spirit of Derrida – a responsibility in relation to mourning and abandonment, and in relation to a death that does not figure in any figuration of self-figuration and self-presence, but – to speak with Maurice Blanchot – as interminable, incessant worklessness, as endless ruination and abandonment of itself. This impossible aporia of the notion of responsibility is itself a dis-figuring of death, which is also an aporia of an instant which escapes, in its event character, the geometric figure of time as circle. (shrink)

How do senior business executives rank their preferences for various ethical principles? And how strongly do the executives believe in these principles? Also, how do these preference rankings relate to the way the executives see the future (wherein business decisions play out)? Research on these questions may provide us with an appreciation of the complexities of ethical behavior in management beyond the traditional issues concerning ethical decision-making in business. Based on a survey of 585 vice presidents of U.S. businesses it (...) was found that: (1) there is a distinct set of principles of ethical conduct that is considered favorable as opposed to another set considered unfavorable among a comprehensive list of 14 ethical principles; (2) the executives believed overwhelmingly that their own individual ethical preferences are better than those of other executives; (3) the strength of their preferences for ethical principles is associated with whether the executives are relatively near-future oriented or more distant-future oriented; and (4), there are very few significant differences in terms of gender, age, education level, private/public education, prestigious/other schools, business/non-business academic backgrounds, and length of job experience. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

The Book In Inter-Disciplinary In Character But Basically He Has Viewed The Concept Of Dharma From A Theological-Ethical Perspective. It Is An Attempt To Do Indian/Asian Theology And Ethics.

A ‘companions in guilt’ strategy against moral error theory aims to show that the latter proves too much: if sound, it supports an implausible error-theoretic conclusion in other areas such as epistemic or practical reasoning. Christopher Cowie [2016 Cowie, C. 2016. Good News for Moral Error Theorists: A Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94/1: 115–30.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] has recently produced what he claims is a ‘master argument’ against (...) all such strategies. The essence of his argument is that CG arguments cannot work because they are afflicted by internal incoherence or inconsistency. I argue, first, that Cowie's master argument does not succeed. Beyond this, I argue that there is no good reason to think that any such argument—one that purports to identify an internal incoherence in CG arguments—can succeed. Second, I argue that the main substantive area of disagreement between error theorists and CG theorists essentially concerns the conceptual profile of epistemic reasons—specifically, whether they are strongly categorical—not the ontological question of whether such reasons exist. I then develop an argument in favour of the CG theorist's position by considering the moral error theorist's arguments in support of the conceptual claim that moral reasons are strongly categorical. These include, notably, criticisms made by Joyce [2011] and Olson [2014] of Finlay's [2008] ‘end relational’ view of morality, according to which moral reasons are relative to some end or standard, hence not strongly categorical. Examining these criticisms, I argue that, based on what moral error theorists have said regarding the conceptual profile of moral reasons, there is a strong case to be made that moral reasons are strongly categorical if and only if epistemic reasons are. (shrink)