The article deals with the so-called „System Althoff“, that is the network of advisers Friedrich Althoff, ministerial director of the Prussian ministry of cultural affairs, created and employed in order to administer the faculties of theology at Prussian universities. In addition to leading the process of decision making in the ministry itself, he recruited a number of theology professors from the two dominant Church parties to advise him on appointing new professors. Famously, he consulted the opponents Hermann Cremer, a “positive” (...) biblicistic Systematic professor in Greifswald, and Adolf Harnack, a Ritschlian Church Historian in Berlin, but he also counted theologians like Friedrich Loofs and Martin Kähler among his advisers. The article’s main body focusses on Althoff’s correspondence with Cremer and Harnack in order to analyse the minister’s practice of administration in depth. In a second step the paper will relate the minister’s relationship with his two most prominent theological advisers to the wider „System Althoff“ in theology. Both parts serve to show that Althoff rationalized and professionalized the process of decision making in the ministry of cultural affairs by carefully considering different professorial advises in light of the current (church) political climate. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough the importance of contextual factors is often recognised, research on emotion regulation strategies has mainly focused so far on the effectiveness of ERS across situations. I...

Mindfulness is associated with a wide range of beneficial outcomes such as well-being. However, less is known about the mechanisms underlying these benefits. Some researchers suggest that the benef...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Jewish and Christian Encounters with BuddhismHarold KasimowA thousand years hence, historians will look back at the twentieth century and remember it not for the struggle between Liberalism and Communism but for the momentous human discovery of the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism.—Arnold ToynbeeBeginning in the 1960s many American Jews and Christians have become fascinated with the Buddhist tradition and have immersed themselves in the study and practice (...) of Buddhism. In this presentation I will examine how Christian and Jewish leaders have responded to this phenomenon. Some have been quite suspicious of such interreligious and cross-cultural encounters, claiming that Buddhism is a great threat to their religions. However, others have argued that their encounters with Buddhism have led them to deeper insight into their own traditions and have helped them to become better human beings. Their practice of Buddhist meditation has been a way for them to develop sensitivity to God and greater commitment to their own traditions. Still others have converted to Buddhism; it is estimated that of the three million Buddhists in America, fully one million are converts from Christianity and Judaism.Because of the complexity and diversity within Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, I will focus on the responses of leading Orthodox Jews and Roman Catholic Christians to Theravada Buddhism and to the Zen school in Mahayana, the two forms of Buddhism to which many Americans are drawn and with which I have some personal experience. I will first examine how members of the Jewish and Christian traditions view other religions, because an individual’s perception of the encounter is shaped by how their religion views the Buddhist tradition. This will help us understand why religious authorities find this fascination with Buddhism so problematic.the jewish-buddhist encounterHistorically, Judaism has largely been interpreted by its thinkers as the only true religion. However, this does not mean that members of other faiths may not attain [End Page 21] salvation. According to the Talmudic Doctrine of the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, “the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,” that is, all human beings can attain salvation who establish courts of law and who refrain from idolatry, murder, blasphemy against God, incest, theft, and eating the limb of a live animal. Jewish authorities claim that because Christianity and Islam worship God they are not to be considered idolatrous, although some question the monotheistic nature of Christianity because of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. However, there is no question that members of Asian religions are practicing idolatrous worship, avodah zarah (“strange worship”). They are therefore in violation of the Noahide Law not to worship idols.With some exceptions, Orthodox rabbis in recent times agree with Rabbi Avigdor Miller (1908–2001) that “Buddhism, Shintoism, and all other religions of the Far East are forms of idol worship.”1 For Rabbi Miller the Torah contains all the knowledge that is necessary for Jews, and to even study another religious tradition is an affront to God. That this attitude toward the study of alien texts is common today is evident from the reaction of Rabbi Chaim Zvi Hollander to the suggestion of Rabbi Zalman Schachter that it is permissible to explore Asian forms of spirituality. Hollander charges that “Zalman Schachter’s incredible advice is a direct contradiction of the Almighty’s request that we not seek out and explore the spiritual modes of the Goyim, even if it is for the purpose of enhancing our spiritual experience in the service of our God.”2 He further states that “the practice of any religion other than Judaism is for a Jew an act of Avoda Zara.”3For Rabbis Miller and Hollander, blending Judaism with the Buddhist tradition, which is not concerned with a creator God and which rejects the idea of self, is inconceivable and more dangerous than Jews who convert to another religious tradition. However, even among the Orthodox, there are divergent views. Irving Greenberg, one of the outstanding liberal Orthodox rabbis of our generation, after meeting with the Dalai Lama wrote, “the Dalai Lama taught us a lot about Buddhism, even more about menschlichkeit... (shrink)

Abstrak: Di tengah-tengah perdebatan panjang antara realisme dan anti realisme dalam filsafat ilmu, realisme struktural (RS) diajukan sebagai gagasan yang terbaik dari keduanya. Versi epistemik RS (RSE) berpendapat bahwa kita memiliki alasan yang baik untuk percaya bahwa teori memiliki struktur yang tepat, yaitu bahwa wujud dan struktur yang dipostulatkan oleh teori betul-betul ada. Namun demikian, RSE tidak mengajukan dakuan epistemik menyangkut hakikat wujud yang melandasi struktur. Semua pengetahuan mengenai dunia fisis adalah pengetahuan tentang struktur. Dalam tulisan ini penulis memberi tinjauan (...) tentang RSE dan beberapa argumen yang menolak RSE. Belajar dari sejarah fisika zarah, penulis akan memperlihatkan bahwa struktur menunjuk ke sifat-sifat mendasar yang dimiliki oleh komponen-komponennya dan dengan demikian menyediakan jalur epistemik bagi wujud yang relasi-relasinya mendefinisikan struktur. Meski demikian, struktur matematis sebuah teori hanya memungkinkan kita membangun pengetahuan tentang wujud-wujud yang tidak teramati sebagai “objek” dan bukan objek-objek partikular. Kata-kata Kunci: Realisme, anti-realisme, realisme struktural epistemik, argumen tanpa keajaiban, meta-induksi pesimistik, wujud takteramati. Abstract: In the lengthy debate between antirealism and realism in the philosophy of science, structural realism (SR) has been suggested as “the best of both worlds.” The epistemic version of SR (ESR) holds that we have good reason to believe that our most successful scientific theories are structurally correct—that the entities and structures postulated by a theory actually exist, and yet it makes no epistemic claim about the nature of the underlying entities. All that we can know is the structure of the physical world. In this article I present an overview of ESR and a number of arguments that have been brought up against it. Drawing lessons from the history of contemporary physics, I will show that “structure” points to the fundamental properties of its constituents and thus provides an epistemic access to the nature of those entities whose relations define structure in the first place. Nevertheless, the mathematical structure of a theory enables us only to construe knowledge of an unobservable entity as “object,” and not this or that particular object. Keywords: Realism, anti-realism, epistemic structural realism, no miracle argument, pesimistic meta-induction, unobservable entity. (shrink)