John Caiazza's essay raises important controversial issues regarding the contemporary debates between science and religion. His arguments are largely presented in a dichotomous and rather adversarial mode with which I strongly disagree. Unable to present a detailed counterargument in this brief reflection, I ask, What is being spoken about, and who is speaking? What is meant by science and religion here? Neither term can be taken as a unified, essentialist category; both comprise many historical layers, possess numerous internal complexities, and (...) invite a diversity of interpretations. I refer to the science of China, India, and the ancient Near East, all of which have fed into modern science, so that the sciences cannot be restricted to those of the modern West. Nor can religion be limited to the religious beliefs and practices of Western Christianity. I discuss the position/location/context of the author‐ Caiazza's as well as my own‐ after introducing Hans‐Georg Gadamer's idea of the “fusion of horizons,” which provides a rich vein for enhancing the debate between science and religion. To expand the respective horizons of their dialogue it will be important to move away from an adversarial, exclusionary spirit to a more collaborative and communicative framework that allows for the development of new ideals, new questions, new ways of knowing, and an ethical and socially responsible stance more centered on human needs and concerns. We may have to build an altogether new Athens and Jerusalem for this. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 105-112 [Access article in PDF] A Response to Reflections on Buddhist and Christian Religious Practices Ursula King University of Bristol I appreciate the opportunity to respond to these essays of personal reflections, comparing Buddhist religious practices with some Christian examples. The different essays are rich in detail, engaging and challenging; they explore new vistas but also point to larger horizons that remain to (...) be explored. Each contribution is so different; each can be read in multiple ways, and further questions can be asked about all of them. Although each contributor has chosen a specific focus, a particular way of interpreting Buddhist religious experience and practice, for me a common thread connects them all. The overarching question, implicitly present even when not explicitly formulated, seems to concern what religious and spiritual practices are really all about.What is the nature and content, and even more, what is the purpose of religious practice? Can very different practices be compared across different religious traditions? Is it legitimate to compare Buddhist and Christian religious practices, even when they occur in very different contexts and are undergirded by different histories and systems of thought? Is the purpose of all religious practice always spiritual growth and transformation, or is the ultimate goal (if there is such a goal) utterly different and distinct from all such strivings?There can be no doubt that both external and internal religious practices can be compared at some level, that certain common patterns, shared meanings, and significance, can be discerned in a wide variety of religions. It is these commonalities that phenomenological approaches to the study of religions have extensively explored and classified, but theological, philosophical, and spiritual comparisons are more difficult to delineate. Yet they do exist and have been investigated by many Eastern and Western thinkers. The religious practitioner, who may or may not be a scholar, more often than not remains unaware of the myriad of subtle scholarly distinctions that inhabit a long-trained rational mind. For such a practitioner the strength of spiritual commitment and the practical help in the business of daily living seems to count most when assessing the benefits or otherwise of religious practice. Somehow I find it impossible to capture the ultimate significance of religious practices, whether Buddhist [End Page 105] or Christian, within the limits of ordinary language. We always seem to deal with preliminaries, with passing realities rather than abiding truth and ultimate wisdom. Yet we all know of the paradox that there is no other way to the Ultimate than through the Ordinary. It is through the manifold religious practices, however routine and repetitive, that spiritual experience patiently plots its path and weaves its pattern in order to arrive at some eventual destination or be engraced by the gratuitous joy of sudden transformation.These essays by academic colleagues and friends appealed to my spiritual imagination, and some passages moved me deeply. Their Buddhist insights are enriching and thought-provoking, their references to numerous Christian parallels—whether perceived in meditation, prayer, confession, almsgiving, asceticism, vows, gestures, use of religious texts, or reference to the need for community—sometimes drew my attention to links not seen before, comparisons not encountered earlier. From a Christian perspective I also recognized that some comparisons are only made in passing, so that several comments on Christian religious practices are not as developed as one might expect from an insider's point of view.All religious traditions, not just Buddhism and Christianity, involve movement, process, and transformation. Each faith tradition, grown over so many centuries and practiced in different societies and cultures by so many different individuals, possesses an ocean of riches that none of us can receive fully. There are major directions and patterns, there are mainstream and marginal practices, but no one would be able to follow them all, nor even want to practice them all, and some may even need to be discarded as obsolete or spiritually unhelpful.There exists always an excess of spiritual and ritual resources, an abundance of means whereby to find spiritual advance and fulfillment, just as there... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 61-66 [Access article in PDF] Retracing Buddhist Encounters Ursula King University of Bristol My aim is a modest one—to retrace earlier experiences of encounters with Buddhism and share my thoughts with others. I am not writing as a "dual practitioner," nor do I philosophize about "double belonging," its possibility or impossibility. Neither do I intend to write in an academic, objectifying mode of (...) thought. It is not even about my ongoing personal journey, as journeys seem to imply participation in a continuing process. What I am going to describe are more unconnected encounters, years apart, rather than an ongoing journey, perhaps more like Grace Burford's "postcards" than any of the other accounts submitted.I first caught a glimpse, no more, of Buddhist thought in my early teens, in one of my school history books, and was both puzzled and intrigued to see Buddhism described as "more of a philosophy than a religion." What could that possibly mean, and how could I find out more about this so very different religious thought from the East of which our teacher spoke so highly? Later I learned more, but not much, in comparative religion classes and philosophy of religion courses during my university studies in the fifties and sixties, and from reading Henri de Lubac's book on the Amida Buddha and his study on the encounter between Buddhism and the West, a pioneering but little known work written in 1952, just before the expansion of Buddhism into the West really took off. I also saw Buddhist monks and rituals in some of the documentary films (with Arnold Toynbee as a narrator) I used in a world religions class taught almost forty years ago. But none of this really prepared me for meeting Buddhist people and Buddhist culture in Asian lands, all unpredictably more diverse and appealing than any description found in Western books.When I lived with my family in New Delhi from 1965 to 1970, I met a Buddhist monk from Cambodia who had founded a vihara outside New Delhi open to people of all faiths, and it is there that I first encountered and took part in Buddhist meditation, worship, and festivals, but what attracted me most and left an indelible impression were the profoundly moving spirit of wisdom and compassion and acts of loving kindness that I experienced again and again and that moved me deeply to the core. Such experiences are so alive and vivid, so rich in texture and memory traces that they can feed thoughts and attitudes for the rest of one's life, but they are never fully captured in clever intellectual and philosophical abstractions, however [End Page 61] powerful the argument in which they are clothed. It is for this reason that I always value and cherish the richness of lived experience and participation, even in its often contradictory and profoundly ambivalent nature, more than any finely honed intellectual points concerning profoundly metaphysical insights about ultimate reality or absolute truth claims. In this sense I am perhaps more a practitioner realizing the relational, contingent nature of any and all positions rather than an absolutist thinker wanting to defend one system of thought over another.Soon my personal contacts with Buddhists in India grew through meeting different Tibetan monks, and some Tibetan nuns too, and through visits to the newly founded Tibet House in New Delhi. But most of all I was deeply touched by an early visit to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, probably in March 1966, in the company of an American Sacred Heart nun, Mother Adele Fiske from Manhattan College, who was fitting in this visit while officially undertaking research on the Ambedkhar Buddhists, the leatherworker converts from an outcaste background, some of whom I also met on different occasions. The personal visit to the Dalai Lama in an intimate setting was a high point of my life, as (with the help of an interpreter) we spent about an hour and a half discussing the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit in comparison to the Buddhist idea of prajnaparamita, of ultimate wisdom. I wished I... (shrink)

Contemporary debates concerning a universal theory about the praxis of love in human society and culture can benefit greatly from the works of two twentieth‐century thinkers, the French paleontologist and religious writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian‐American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin. Although from very different personal and disciplinary backgrounds, they share amazingly similar views on the power of love as transformative energy for transcending the individual self and for creating radically new, collaborative, and cooperative ways of acting that (...) will transform whole societies, indeed the planet. Traditionally, ideas of love have been associated with religion, but these two thinkers advocate systematic scientific research on the production and application of “love‐energy” for the change of culture, social institutions, and human beings. The article is organized in five parts: (1) altruism, science and love: what is love energy? (2) Teilhard's understanding of the phenomenon of love; (3) Sorokin's approach to creative, altruistic love; (4) comparison of Teilhard's and Sorokin's ideas; and (5) performing works of love. As far as I am aware, this is the first article comparing the remarkable parallels as well as distinctive differences between Sorokin's and Teilhard's ideas on love as the highest form of human energy. (shrink)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , eminent Jesuit scientist and religious write, was one of the great Christian mystics of the twentieth century. Yet scholars of mysticism rarely discuss his works or typology of mysticism. I argue that the little studied, early Writings in Time or War, together with his late autobiographical essays, provide the hermeneutical key for understanding Teilhard's pan‐christic mysticism. My paper examines especially the experiential and cosmic dimensions of his pan‐christic mysticism of union and communion with Christ through (...) all things. This mysticism belongs to the kataphatic rather than apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism. It is deeply rooted in, and in full continuity with, the catholic tradition but through introducing innovative elements, it is at the same time also thoroughly transformative. I show this in relation to Teilhard's understanding of the Spiritual Exercises and, in particular, to that of the “Sacred Heart” whose meaning he greatly extended by understanding it in a universal, cosmic sense. He so frequently used the metaphors of fire and heart—well known, traditional images of Christian mysticism—that I describe Teilhard's mysticism as a fire and heart mysticism. I also discuss the significance of his typology of mysticism in relation to the comparative study of mysticism. (shrink)

Contemporary debates concerning a universal theory about the praxis of love in human society and culture can benefit greatly from the works of two twentieth‐century thinkers, the French paleontologist and religious writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian‐American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin. Although from very different personal and disciplinary backgrounds, they share amazingly similar views on the power of love as transformative energy for transcending the individual self and for creating radically new, collaborative, and cooperative ways of acting that (...) will transform whole societies, indeed the planet. Traditionally, ideas of love have been associated with religion, but these two thinkers advocate systematic scientific research on the production and application of “love‐energy” for the change of culture, social institutions, and human beings. The article is organized in five parts: (1) altruism, science and love: what is love energy? (2) Teilhard's understanding of the phenomenon of love; (3) Sorokin's approach to creative, altruistic love; (4) comparison of Teilhard's and Sorokin's ideas; and (5) performing works of love. As far as I am aware, this is the first article comparing the remarkable parallels as well as distinctive differences between Sorokin's and Teilhard's ideas on love as the highest form of human energy. (shrink)

References to Eastern religions are found throughout Teilhard's work. Often considered to be mainly negative, these need to be critically reassessed within the wider context of Teilhard's experience and thought. Primarily interested in the renewal of Christianity (criticized more sharply than Eastern religions), he emphasized the living branches of religion and the need for a gradual convergence toward a religion of action in order to bring about a global transformation of life and thought. He spoke of the “road of the (...) West” or a “new mysticism” which, however, cannot come into existence without the contribution of Eastern religions. (shrink)

This new edition accords more attention to women's voices from the third world and to the urgent ethical and environmental concerns being addressed by women. It also provides a greatly expanded bibliography and a new Epilogue.

Nineteen newly-transliterated letters between Ferdinand Christian Baur and his friend Ludwig Friedrich Heyd are presented. Seventeen of them were written by Baur, and two by Heyd in the period between 10th February 1836 and 16th January 1842. A further sixteen earlier letters were already published by Carl Egbert Hester in 1993. The correspondence between the two close friends cover a broad range of subjects, predominantly historical, as well as family, scientific, political themes and particularly university politics. The key personal topic (...) is the death of Baur’s wife in 1839 and the consequences of this for their children. The scientific themes concern firstly Baur’s efforts to assist Heyd in his research into the history of Württemberg, and to promote these works to publishers. Secondly, the letters document the reaction of the two to David Friedrich Strauß’s work “Das Leben Jesu”, and how their views changed during this correspondence. The central political themes of the letters relate primarily to appointments within Tübingen University, and in particular to previously unknown attacks on Baur’s own position there. Further discussions concern two politically arranged festivals; the Buchhändlerfest of 1840, and the 25th coronation anniversary of King Wilhelm I. of Württemberg in 1841, at which Baur gave a courageous speech on the political situation in Württemberg. Of particular interest in the letters previously transliterated by Hester are two topics, firstly the “Polish Petition” regarding the political situation in Poland in the 1830s, and secondly regarding the constitution of Tübingen University. To better understand the significance of these private letters and their openness, a short biography of Heyd is included. (shrink)

This article examines the treatment of the concepts of sovereignty and obedience in early modern Europe. It explores the conflicting conceptions of the people's right of resistance to the king as they developed in the political upheavals following the Reformation. It describes Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza's more differentiated and coherent concept of sovereignty and their discussion of civil rights. It also discusses the understanding of sovereignty and obedience that was developed by Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, and Christian Wolff (...) based on the radical ideas of Hobbes and Spinoza. (shrink)

Using Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as an inspirational backdrop, a novel whose story unfolds on a genderless planet that nevertheless relies on reproductive sex for the sake of generativity, this paper tackles the sex/gender debate, its entanglements with procreation, and its consequences for transgender pregnancies. More specifically, I analyze three issues that pose barriers to thinking about a more inclusive reproductive ethics: state-sanctioned sterilization, non-reproductive futurism, and access to assisted reproductive technology.

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used for the development of this scale, using the GRID approach. This method consists of obtaining ratings of emotion terms on a set of meaning facets which represent five components of (...) the emotion process. The aims here were to determine the dimensionality of the GRID features when applied to aesthetic emotions and compare it to published results for emotion terms in general, and to examine the internal organization of the domain of aesthetic emotion terms in order to identify salient clusters of these items based on the similarity of their feature profiles on the GRID. Exploratory Principal Component Analyses suggest a four-dimensional structure of the semantic space consisting of valence, power, arousal, and novelty, converging with earlier GRID studies on large sets of standard emotion terms. Using cluster analyses, 15 clusters of aesthetic emotion terms with similar GRID feature profiles were identified, revealing the internal organization of the aesthetic emotion terms domain and meaningful subgroups of aesthetic emotions. While replication for further languages is required, these findings provide a solid basis for further research and methodological development in the realm of aesthetic emotions. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I ask why Aristotle thinks that ethical virtue (rather than mere self-control) is required for practical wisdom. I argue that a satisfactory answer will need to explain why being prone to bad appetites implies a failing of the rational part of the soul. I go on to claim that the self-controlled person does suffer from such a rational failing: a failure to take a specifically rational kind of pleasure in fine action. However, this still leaves a (...) problem: could there not be someone who (unlike the self-controlled person) took the right kind of pleasure in fine action, but who failed to be virtuous on account of bad appetites? If so, would such a person be practically wise but not virtuous? I end with some suggestions about how Aristotle might answer this. (shrink)

Versucht man die philosophische Entwicklung von Hermann Cohen zu überblicken, so sticht ins Auge, dass er genuin rationalistischen Überzeugungen immer näher rückt. Welche Bedeutung dabei der Philosophie von Leibniz für die Entwicklung einer rein idealistischen Urteilslogik zukommt, ist bekannt. Ich denke aber darüber hinausgehend, dass Cohens Ansatz im Verlauf der Jahre ganz zentralen erkenntnistheoretischen Grundintuitionen des klassischen Rationalismus immer näher kommt.

What is the relation between time and change? Does time depend on the mind? Is the present always the same or is it always different? Aristotle tackles these questions in the Physics. In the first book in English exclusively devoted to this discussion, Ursula Coope argues that Aristotle sees time as a universal order within which all changes are related to each other. This interpretation enables her to explain two striking Aristotelian claims: that the now is like a moving (...) thing, and that time depends for its existence on the mind. (shrink)

This paper explores the impact of the concepts of identity and difference on demented persons (especially on persons with Alzheimer's disease). The diagnosis of dementia is often synonymous with the assertion that demented individuals are no longer capable of making reasonable decisions. But rationality is an important aspect of characterizing a person's identity. Hence, this prevailing image of dementia as a loss of self and a change of identity leads to the situation that demented persons represent difference and otherness. Here, (...) the brain and the mind act as the source for difference. The paper discusses several identity concepts with regard to demented persons and the relationship between identity and difference in dementia. This analysis is accompanied by an examination of the current biopolitics of dementia and ageing as biopolitics constitutes the socio‐political‐medical understanding of dementia. Challenges and possibilities for dementia care will be explored in the context of this complex relationship between theoretical concepts and political, medical, and health‐care practices. (shrink)

Ursula Coope presents a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of the Neoplatonists. She explores their understanding of freedom and responsibility: an entity is free to the extent that it is wholly in control of itself, self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing - which only a non-bodily thing can be.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Account of Change in Physics III.1–3 Some Problems for This Account of Change Notes Bibliography.

What is the relation between time and change? Does time depend on the mind? Is the present always the same or is it always different? Aristotle tackles these questions in the Physics. In the first book in English exclusively devoted to this discussion, Ursula Coope argues that Aristotle sees time as a universal order within which all changes are related to each other. This interpretation enables her to explain two striking Aristotelian claims: that the now is like a moving (...) thing, and that time depends for its existence on the mind. (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in (...) Dreams scale was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream. (shrink)

In Physics, Aristotle starts his positive account of the infinite by raising a problem: “[I]f one supposes it not to exist, many impossible things result, and equally if one supposes it to exist.” His views on time, extended magnitudes, and number imply that there must be some sense in which the infinite exists, for he holds that time has no beginning or end, magnitudes are infinitely divisible, and there is no highest number. In Aristotle's view, a plurality cannot escape having (...) bounds if all of its members exist at once. Two interesting, and contrasting, interpretations of Aristotle's account can be found in the work of Jaako Hintikka and of Jonathan Lear. Hintikka tries to explain the sense in which the infinite is actually, and the sense in which its being is like the being of a day or a contest. Lear focuses on the sense in which the infinite is only potential, and emphasizes that an infinite, unlike a day or a contest, is always incomplete. (shrink)