¿It is more important to me to explain a [philosophical] principle than any other thing that I teach.¿ (Rambam, Mishna Berachot, 9:7)Illuminating Jewish Thought is a contemporary, multi-volume series that surveys the theological foundations of Jewish faith. With the approach and scope of a master educator for undergraduate and rabbinical students at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Wiederblank brings together a wide array of Jewish texts ranging from philosophical to Kabbalistic, ancient to modern, in a clear and accessible source book. In this (...) volume, the author shows the richness of the Jewish scholastic tradition relating to three fundamental yet esoteric topics: free will, the afterlife, and the messianic era. Primary sources are presented in their original language with modern English translation, enabling readers to analyze the texts independently, while the author illuminates and contextualizes these complex concepts. Altogether, Illuminating Jewish Thought reveals the bedrock on which lies the nexus of Jewish belief and practice. (shrink)

This book takes readers on a fascinating journey to the very heart of Tantra: its key teachings, foundational lineages, and transformative practices. Since the West's discovery of Tantra 100 years ago, there has been considerable fascination, speculation, and more than a little misinformation about this spiritual movement. Now, for the first time in the English language, Tantra Illuminated presents an accessible introduction to this sacred tradition that began 1,500 years ago, in the far north of India. The book uses translations (...) from primary Sanskrit sources, offers a profound look at spiritual practice, and reveals Tantra's rich history and powerful teachings. (shrink)

Views from one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin.

: Philosophers in the Indian and Western traditions have developed and defended a range of sophisticated accounts of self-awareness. Here, four of these accounts are examined, and the arguments for them are assessed. Theories of self-awareness developed in the two traditions under consideration fall into two broad categories: reflectionist or other-illumination theories and reflexivist or self-illumination theories. Having assessed the main arguments for these theories, it is argued here that while neither reflectionist nor reflexivist theories are adequate as traditionally formulated (...) and defended, the approaches examined here give important insights for the development of amore adequate contemporary account of self-awareness. (shrink)

In this publication, we will use the principal concepts of John of the Cross, the famous mystic of the XVI th century, as a framework to go over, in a non-reductionist way, three challenges in contemporary neuroscience of decision-making. Firstly, the dark night and the purgative paths will be related to discontinuity in decision-making. Secondly, the passive and active paths will be associated to brain plasticity, architecture, and levels of decision. Thirdly, the illumination, which can be felt when a solution (...) is reached, has to do with positive emotions and can be inspired by the science of love of John of the Cross. We shall lastly conclude by emphasizing the usefulness of his work to illuminate the neuroscience of decision-making. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Distinguishing Different Kinds of Egalitarianism Equality, Fairness, Luck, and Responsibility Equality of What? The Subsistence Level, Sufficiency, and Compassion Prioritarianism and the Leveling Down Objection19 Equality or Priority? Illustrating Egalitarianism's Distinct Appeal Conclusion Notes.

Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are illuminated, (...) in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a currently afoot in the historical profession. (shrink)

Illuminated Mirrors and “No Rights” concerns the peregrinations of El Greco, from Crete to Spain, and various influences acquired along the way. The primary argument is that El Greco suffered a double exile: 1/ voluntary exile from Crete; and 2/ involuntary exile from Renaissance art and its humanist biases. As such, much of the art-historical record is a confused and often-doctored record of El Greco’s manufactured persona—i.e., he is not assimilable to the usual categories of art and art history.

Many scholars interpret Chinese Aesthetics with the Kantian theory of genius because they seem to form a parallel: similar innate and spontaneous mental talents that exceed normal cognition and imagination generates beautiful arts with similar extraordinary qualities. I argue that projecting Kant’s genius to illuminate the creative power analogically, i.e., the carefree-wandering mind, is infeasible. The theory of genius assumes a critical project that stipulates a valuable way to exercise the power of judgment. Genius is only a postulated idea for (...) successfully making aesthetic judgments on artworks. In contrast, the carefree-wandering mind assumes a Daoist metaphysical-ethical theory centering on the idea of transformative self and the way to success. The carefree-wandering mind featuring Wu-Wei (無為) is the efficient cause that produces artworks with Qi-Yun (氣韵), namely, the expressive quality. Therefore, conceiving parallels between Kant and Chinese aesthetics is difficult. I conclude by proposing a potential similarity between Kant’s theory of genius and Chinese aesthetics: both draw our attention to the respective relations of each to nature. (shrink)

Takes an original approach to reading Augustine's theory of divine illumination and shows how the theory was transformed and reinterpreted in medieval ...

This textbook will give students a clear understanding of the connection between faith and reason. Illuminating Faith gives students a clear and accessible introduction to some of the major ways faith and the relationship between faith and reason have been understood within Western Christianity. In twenty-six short and easy to digest units it covers different accounts of faith beginning with Scripture, moving through the history of Christian thought, and ending with contemporary views. Along the way it explores some of the (...) decisive theological and philosophy accounts of faith, such as faith seeking understanding, faith and supernatural virtue, faith and skepticism, and faith and science. Yet it also includes significant issues and movements not typically covered in introductory texts, such as documents from church councils, faith as knowledge, assent, and trust in the Protestant scholastics, faith and the heart in pietism, secularized accounts of faith, faith after Auschwitz, and faith and liberation. The goal of each unit is to introduce students to topical issues surrounding the nature of faith, to provide historical background for each topic, and to generate further discussion and reflection on the nature of faith. The result is a well balanced and unique introduction to various understandings of faith. Designed specifically with classroom use in mind, Illuminating Faith includes a glossary of words, an update-to-date bibliography, and each chapter ends with questions for discussion as well as suggestions for relevant reading material. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to explain how the concept of Illumination came to be a source of skepticism in the modern West. In ancient and medieval Christian thought it was essentially tied not only to Plato’s philosophy, but especially to Augustine’s invention of the notion that the soul is an inner chamber containing all his knowledge, but also the locus of his encounter with God. The concept of the soul or mind as an inner chamber re-emerged in early (...) modern western philosophy, but it was no longer open to illumination, John Locke having made revelation into an entirely distinct category of knowledge. The set of ocular metaphors of which illumination is a part still has an important place in ordinary language, but can no longer provide for a philosophical theory of knowledge. Thus, different complex metaphors need to be employed. Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of human reason begins with social practices, and can be described as an extensive thesis reflecting the metaphor Knowing as Doing. With his incorporation of Thomas Aquinas into his account of tradition-constituted rationality, it is suggested that interesting parallels might be found with the work of Mulla Sadra. (shrink)

This book provides readers with an introduction to epistemology within the Buddhist intellectual tradition. It is designed to be accessible to those whose primary background is in the “Western” tradition of philosophy and who have little or no previous exposure to Buddhist philosophical writings. The book examines many of the most important topics in the field of epistemology, topics that are central both to contemporary discussions of epistemology and to the classical Buddhist tradition of epistemology in India and Tibet. Among (...) the topics discussed are Buddhist accounts of: the nature of knowledge episodes, the defining conditions of perceptual knowledge and of inferential knowledge, the status of testimonial knowledge, and skeptical criticisms of the entire project of epistemology. The book seeks to put the field of Buddhist epistemology in conversation with contemporary debates in philosophy. It shows that many of the arguments and debates occurring within classical Buddhist epistemological treatises coincide with the arguments and disagreements found in contemporary epistemology. The book shows, for example, how Buddhist epistemologists developed an anti-luck epistemology—one that is linked to a sensitivity requirement for knowledge. Likewise, the book explores the question of how the study of Buddhist epistemology can be of relevance to contemporary debates about the value of contributions from experimental epistemology, and to broader debates concerning the use of philosophical intuitions about knowledge. (shrink)

In the profession of nursing, whiteness continues to be deeply rooted because of the uncritical recognition of the white racial domination evident within the ranks of nursing leadership. White privilege is exerted in its ascendency and policy-making within the nursing discipline and in the Eurocentric agenda that commands nursing pedagogy. While attention to antiracism has recently increased, antiracism pedagogy in nursing education is nascent. Pedagogical approaches in the nursing profession are essential. Because it encompasses the strategies used to transmit the (...) science in how nurses practice and teach, which has predominantly been informed using a Eurocentric lens. This paper presents a literature review on antiracist pedagogy in nursing education, discussing how nurse educators can integrate antiracism pedagogy in nursing education, highlighting examples presented by the authors. Key terms related to antiracism are reviewed. The resultant themes from the literature review include resistance to antiracist pedagogy, managing emotional responses, and supporting transformative learning using an antiracist approach. The primary implementation of Eurocentric pedagogical approaches whiteness pervasive in nursing education must be uprooted. Antiracist and other antioppressive learning approaches must be embraced to understand the insidiousness of racial inequities and its power in sustaining structural oppression in nursing academia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contemporary IlluminationsReading Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day through Three Twenty-First-Century PoemsTheresa M. DipasqualeIn his contribution to the 2017 volume John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Judith Scherer Herz, Jonathan F. S. Post explores "a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts" that unfolds between Stephen Edgar's 2008 poem "Nocturnal" and Donne's "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day."1 Post's essay illuminates what Calvin (...) Bedient, in the same volume, calls the "great glacier-gloom" of Donne's "Nocturnall," its devastated "solemnity."2 In doing so, Post renders largely moot many questions that have preoccupied critics of Donne's poem: whether or how this poem reflects Donne's experience; whether the woman lamented by the speaker is a fiction or a historical person lamented by the poet; and if the latter, whether the poem mourns the 1617 death of John Donne's wife, Anne More Donne; the 1627 death of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or the Countess' near-fatal illness in 1612–13.3 These biographical and historical questions are not without value, but they draw the critic's attention away from more compelling questions regarding the "I" of the poem—a persona who claims not to be a person at all, but an inscription, a grave, "A quintessence" derived or "expresse[d]/... even from nothingnesse."4In this article, I widen and intensify the pool of light cast on Donne's "Nocturnall" by Post's presentist and intertextual analysis of Edgar's poem, examining three of the many other twenty-first-century poems that tap into Donne's poem, allude to it, quote it, adopt its structure, or respond to the anguish it expresses.5 Each of the three I discuss is [End Page 1] luminous in its own right but also a potent critical response to Donne's five-stanza poem. Each teaches something different about Donne's lyric. The poets whose work I consider—Liz Lochhead, Jay Wright, and Meena Alexander—all address twenty-first-century concerns; they grapple with questions and sorrows beyond the scope of Donne's conscious imagining yet latent in his poem. Each picks up where critics leave off when they "assume," as Alison R. Rieke notes, "that the speaker... is a husband or lover, possibly Donne, who experiences grief upon his wife's or mistress' death."6 Each takes up the challenge that Donne's persona issues when it denies that it is either "a man" (30) or any other living thing.In the first stanza of "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," this anti-persona observes that "all" other things around it are "Dead and enterr'd" and "yet" that "all these seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph" (8–9). If it is an incised text rather than a human being, the poem's "mee" can no more speak than laugh; it is as silent as the grave it marks or as the dead flesh interred there. Indeed, it goes on to claim that it is "every dead thing" and that love's alchemical "art" has "expresse[d] / A quintessence even from" this mass of nonliving objects, this "nothingnesse" (12, 14–15). Struggling to define its anti-essential essence, it declares itself a mass burial site: "I, by loves limbecke, am the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). An epitaph, dead things, nothingness, a grave: all these are silent. And yet, in Donne's poem, they strenuously assert their nonbeing; they pulse with a paradoxically audible sense of self. After "Compar'd with mee" in the final line of the opening stanza, the reader encounters sixteen additional instances of the first-person singular in the poem's forty-five lines: "my" appears once, "mee" five times, and "I" eleven times. And the "I" issues a directive to readers: commanding, in the opening line of stanza 2, "Study me then, you who shall lovers bee" (10). But those who obey this order, making themselves students of the poem's inscribed nothingness, find themselves dismissed in the poem's final stanza. Having insisted that its "Sunne" will never "renew... (shrink)

This paper explores two different but intimately linked concepts. First, there is "reciprocal illumination," or the relation of interdependence of the object of knowledge and its subject. Second is the "irreversibility" which characterizes the process of applying constitutive rules, which causes institutional facts to become facts, and to be even stricter and more epistemologically constant than brute facts.

Jonathan Stoltz’s Illuminating the Mind: An Introduction to Buddhist Epistemology is an excellent book that will be valuable to those familiar with analytic epistemology but unfamiliar with, and curious about, Indian philosophical traditions. It is also a valuable book for those seeking to teach Buddhist epistemology to advanced philosophy students. Philosophers interested in cross-cultural philosophical methodology will also find this book an interesting case study.With respect to cross-cultural methodology, Stoltz aims to demonstrate the philosophical legitimacy of Buddhist epistemology to a (...) “Western” audience by presenting the epistemological themes and arguments of various Buddhist thinkers in terms he thinks... (shrink)

Victor Fan's dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies. From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu's work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold's 2018 existential thriller Transit, Cinema Illuminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.

The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his literary output. What Lowry stresses in his intertextual allusion is the perilous illumination that the eponymous lighthouse keeper experiences. The article contends that the condition of the lighthouse keeper anticipates that of the Lowry protagonist (...) who in “Through the Panama” fears death by his own book, or, to take Lowry’s other phrase, being “Joyced in his own petard.” Basing her analysis on Mieke Bal’s idea of a participatory exhibition where the viewer decides how to approach a video installation, and can do so by engaging with a single detail, Filipczak treats Lowry’s text as a multimodal work where such a detail may give rise to a reassessment of the reading experience. Since the allusion to the Polish text has only elicited fragmentary responses among the Lowry critics, Filipczak decides to fill in the gap by providing her interpretation of the lighthouse keeper’s perilous illumination mentioned by Lowry in the margins of his work, and by analyzing it in the context of major Romantic texts, notably the epic poem Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz whose words trigger the lighthouse keeper’s experience, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose text is quoted in the margins of “Through the Panama.” This choice allows to throw a different light on Lowry’s work which is also inhabited by echoes of futurist attitude to the machine and the Kafkaesque fear of being locked in one of the many locks of the canal “as if in experience.”. (shrink)

When people in Sweden are sentenced and handed over to forensic psychiatric care (FPC), the authorities have overall responsibility for their health recovery. How nursing staff construct gender through their relations in this context affects their understanding of health promotion activities. The aim of this study was to illuminate, using a gender perspective, the understanding of nursing staff with respect to health promotion activities for patients. Four focus group interviews were conducted with nursing staff in two FPC clinics in Sweden. (...) The study has a qualitative inductive design with an ethnographic approach. This study sheds new light on FPC in which its dual goals of protecting society and providing care are viewed from a gender perspective. When relationships within the nursing staff group and the nurse–patient relationship are justified by the goal of protecting society, gender becomes invisible. This might cause patients' individual conditions and needs for certain types of activities to go unnoticed. One of the implications of ignoring gender relations in nursing staff health promotion activities is that it risks contributing to gender stereotypes which impact on the nurse–patient relationship and the quality of care. (shrink)

This essay addresses the subject of animal representation via an historical account of the place of the animal in visual culture. It emphasizes the relationship between the animal as a visual image and the technology that produces this image. It explores three examples in a period covering c. 1895 to the 1930s, in Britain, that analyze the relations between animal representation, technology, and the public domain. These are film, zoo display, and slaughterhouse practice. The overall goal of the essay is (...) to move away from emphasis on the textual, metaphorical animal, which reduces the animal to a mere icon, to achieve a more integrated view of the effects of the presence of the animals and the power of its imagery in human history."[s]i l'animal a le temps, s'il est «constitué» par un «temps»" ["[w]hether the animal has time, whether the animal is 'constituted' by a 'time.'"]. (shrink)

Return to the ordinary as extraordinary has become the signature motif for the Emersonian perfectionism of Stanley Cavell in contemporary American philosophy. In this article I develop Cavell's notion of “the ordinary” as an intercultural theme for exploring aspects of traditional Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism and Chan Buddhism. I further use Cavell's philosophy of the ordinary to examine Sino-Japanese thought as found in the Zen tradition of Japan and its reformulation by Nishida Kitarô in modern Japanese philosophy. It will be (...) seen how for both Cavell and Sino-Japanese philosophy, perfection is achieved not by transcendence of the ordinary, but through continuous return to and affirmation of the ordinary as extraordinary. I thus endeavor to illuminate the quotidian as articulated by Cavell, Chinese philosophy, and the Sino-Japanese tradition. (shrink)

Return to the ordinary as extraordinary has become the signature motif for the Emersonian perfectionism of Stanley Cavell in contemporary American philosophy. In this article I develop Cavell’s notion of “the ordinary” as an intercultural theme for exploring aspects of traditional Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism and Chan Buddhism. I further use Cavell’s philosophy of the ordinary to examine Sino-Japanese thought as found in the Zen tradition of Japan and its reformulation by Nishida Kitarô in modern Japanese philosophy. It will be (...) seen how for both Cavell and Sino-Japanese philosophy, perfection is achieved not by transcendence of the ordinary, but through continuous return to and affirmation of the ordinary as extraordinary. I thus endeavor to illuminate the quotidian as articulated by Cavell, Chinese philosophy, and the Sino-Japanese tradition. (shrink)

Throughout 1994 remarkable progress was made with molecular and genetic studies on signal transduction pathways of photomorphogenesis, the lightdependent development of plants. Analysis of Arabidopsis DET and COP genes suggests that they are involved in suppression of photomorphogenic development in the dark and that this is then reversed by light. Studies with COP1 indicate that this is achieved by redistribution of COP1 from the nucleus, in the dark, to the cytosol in the light(1). Overexpression of COP1 in the light, however, (...) was able to partially suppress photomorphogenic development, confirming its role as a light‐inactivatable repressor(2). Evidence also suggests that some of the COP gene products may interact directly to form a large complex(3). (shrink)

In early 2020, many instructors and students in a university setting experienced an abrupt shift to digitally-mediated teaching and learning replacing in-person seminars due to the COVID-19 pandemi...

We all get caught up or stuck in patterns that can be unhelpful and create more suffering for ourselves and others. In yoga philosophy, these patterns are known as the five kleshas-and we're encouraged to work through them in our practice to benefit ourselves and the world. Illuminating our true nature is a wise, practical guide to help us develop a deeper understanding of the kleshas and how they hijack us emotionally. Michelle Johnson also offers us the good news: you (...) can find freedom with an action plan to work through them one-by-one using the tools of asana, pranayama, mudra, mantra, journaling prompts, and meditation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThomas Aquinas argues that the agent intellect's function is to abstract an intelligible species from a phantasm. However, insofar as he claims that the intelligible species is not present in the phantasm, it is unclear how the agent intellect accomplishes this task. In this paper I explore two models of abstraction – the extraction model and the production model – suggesting that each fails to capture Aquinas’ understanding of abstraction. I then offer my own interpretation of the function of the (...) agent intellect – the illumination model – by employing Aquinas’ comparison of the agent intellect to light. I argue that the agent intellect neither extracts nor produces an intelligible species, but rather makes the nature that is already present in the object intelligible by actualizing its passive power of intelligibility. This involves the co-actualization of partner powers in the intellect and in the intelligible object, and ultimately makes it possible to cognize a particular, material object in a universal way. (shrink)

The paper aims to relocate Bonaventure within the paradigm shift towards the Aristotelian conception of philosophy, which also had a deep impact on theology.But the standard narratives of a mere antagonism overlook to what extend the meeting of both the Aristotelian and the Augustinian tradition led to a mutualinfluence and transformation. This is especially true in epistemological matters, as I will show in this paper dealing with the central question of the foundation ofknowledge and its certainty. The paper focusses on (...) three topics: the rationes aeternae, illumination and exemplarism, and analysis (reductio) vis-à-vis the question of the first known. While Bonaventure’s claim for a foundation of our understanding based on natural reasoning goes beyond the Aristotelian standard model, he also displays the critical attitude of the Augustinian epistemology with respect to natural human understanding, which reveals the boundaries of philosophical wisdom. His epistemological criticism leads to a fundamental critique of a metaphysics of the Aristotelian type from the point of view of an exemplaristic metaphysics, which goes hand in hand with a renewed concept of a sapientia christiana. (shrink)

The past seven centuries of scholarly attention to and debate over the Roman de la Rose bear strong witness to the fact that the allegorical figure Faus Semblant presents us with an interpretive crux—one of many such in the poem—that we are not likely to resolve in the coming centuries. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a character who so embodies paradox—a profane friar who is openly honest about his intent to deceive—should be so difficult to pin down; (...) it is his singular talent, after all, to dissemble and confuse. The last century has seen a significant increase in criticism centered upon Faus Semblant that seeks to understand what he signifies within the larger allegory of the poem and how he relates to Jean de Meun's purported satire and antifraternalism. But this struggle to understand and explain the character began centuries earlier and, like him, has taken many forms. As early as the thirteenth century, the passage of Jean's poem in which Faus Semblant explains his craft and guile had begun to attract a diverse group of revisers: scribes, who added or deleted passages in order to shape a reading of the poem or avoid offending readers; remanieurs, such as Gui de Mori, who substantially rewrote the passage in efforts to reshape the poem into a more cohesive form; readers, whose marginal inscriptions and notae often accompany the passage; and illustrators , as images of Faus Semblant are frequently included in illuminated copies of Rose manuscripts. Even Jean himself seemed to feel the need to gloss and contain Faus Semblant, offering an apology and clarification in lines 15213–30. (shrink)

Though al-Ghazalı is often superficially compared to Descartes, Ghazalı’s epistemological project echoes—in consonance or dissonance—Augustine’s, warranting a clear exploration of the depths of these echoes. For both Augustine and Ghazalı the epistemological and theological quest starts with an interior turn, and divine illumination provides the tools for and content of knowledge. Both recount skeptical leanings resolved by divine illumination; both employ philosophy as a tool in theological disputes; both see knowledge as dynamic and transformative; and both assert that God’s direct (...) illumination is a necessary precursor to and a final capstone upon knowledge. Ghazalı’s use of illumination is more circumscribed and specified than Augustine’s. I argue that Ghazalı and Augustine take similar approaches to the role of divine illumination and the importance of interiority or the subjective grasp on knowledge, but despite these differences, Ghazalı and Augustine deal distinctly with the question of authority and certitude of knowledge. (shrink)

Even though considerable resources have been allocated to the study of obesity, there is no consensus on its definition, causes, or solutions. Amidst ongoing debates over understandings of obesity, Obesity Canada (OC) was established to enhance the quality of life of Canadians with obesity through the advancement of anti-discrimination, policy change, and obesity prevention and treatment. Drawing upon a transdisciplinary social justice framework, we use critical thematic analysis to examine the OC website, which is the organization’s primary knowledge mobilization platform. (...) We will address the following research question: To what extent does OC serve social justice goals that promote the best interests of larger people? We argue that the social justice potential of OC ultimately falls short and conclude with some recommendations on how the site content could be enhanced with social justice principles. (shrink)

Even though considerable resources have been allocated to the study of obesity, there is no consensus on its definition, causes, or solutions. Amidst ongoing debates over understandings of obesity,...

This article focuses on the political 'effect' that Arendt wished to achieve with her 'old-fashioned storytelling'. It is argued that she inherited her concept of the 'redemptive power of narrative' (Benhabib) from Walter Benjamin. The close relationship of the two intuitively suggests an affinity between Arendt's concept of a 'fragmented past' and her 'storytelling' and Benjamin's conception of history and narrative. An attempt is made here to determine the amplitude and the meaning of this proximity. An account is provided of (...) Benjamin's and Arendt's shared belief that the past is fragmented and that only fragmented writing, mainly in the form of 'stories', had the capacity to be faithful to its 'ruins'. It is argued that for both Arendt and Benjamin, the purpose of this writing form was not to commemorate the dead, but to show their absence - their invisibility. It is suggested that Arendt and Benjamin held a similar conviction: that stories had the capacity to save the world. Key Words: Arendt • Benjamin • catastrophe • experience • fragmented past • imagination • remembrance • revelation • standpoint of the defeated • storytelling. (shrink)

Few medieval pilgrims' guides were written in English; even fewer were illuminated. This chapter examines Oxford, Queen's College, MS 357, a manuscript made in England in the late fifteenth century, which possesses both qualities. The manuscript contains a variety of texts written in Latin and English including pilgrims' guides, prayers to be said at holy sites in Palestine, travellers' tales, and descriptions of miracles that have taken place at shrines. It is also exuberantly illuminated. The miniatures begin with an Annunciation (...) and end with Christ in Judgment. These two images form the parentheses around the others in the manuscript, which depict sites in the Holy Land. The miniatures and decoration unite the disparate texts, turning them into a scale model of salvation history and providing a prompt to virtual pilgrimage. (shrink)

We argue that introspection reveals a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience that hitherto has been largely unappreciated in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science: conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We call this phenomenon chromatic illumination. We begin with a phenomenological case study, involving an experience of joke-understanding (...) in which the conscious aspect of chromatic illumination is especially vivid. Then we offer an account of the prototypical causal role of conscious intentional states, and we offer a contrasting account of the somewhat different prototypical causal role of conscious chromatic-illumination features of conscious intentional states. Finally, we describe the specific kind of physical-to-mental supervenience situation that needs to obtain in order for a chromatically illuminated conscious intentional state to figure as a supervenient mental cause that exerts both kinds of prototypical, content-appropriate, reasons-guidance vis-a-vis one’s cognition and behavior. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays exclusively devoted to knowledge from non-knowledge and related issues. It features original contributions from some of the most prominent and up-and-coming scholars working in contemporary epistemology. There is a nascent literature in epistemology about the possibility of inferential knowledge based on premises that are, for one reason or another, not known. The essays in this book explore if and how epistemology can accommodate cases where knowledge is generated from something other than knowledge. Can (...) reasoning from false beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from unjustified beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from gettiered beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from propositions one does not even believe generate knowledge? The contributors to this book tackle these and other questions head-on. Together, they advance the debate about knowledge from non-knowledge in novel and interesting directions. Illuminating Errors will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of KnowledgeSteven P. MarroneLydia Schumacher. Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. xiii + 250. Cloth, $119.95.Lydia Schumacher has written an ambitious book. Among the many things she tries to accomplish in the volume, three stand out to this reviewer. First of all, she proposes to reexamine (...) Augustine’s theory of knowledge. She argues that Augustine’s philosophy is grounded in theology. For his theory of knowledge this means, by Schumacher’s reading, that the aim of cognition is to enable the human being to regain its original status as “image of God,” which latter state is manifested in knowing God and making God known. It is the mental, and by extension ethical, process of becoming God’s image that Schumacher says we should, in the Augustinian context, take the phrase ‘divine illumination’ to signify. For Augustine, Schumacher insists, this process is an entirely internal phenomenon constituted by a self-correcting series of intellectual reflections on the part of the mind. In holding to this view, Schumacher emphatically rejects the understanding, common in scholarship, that “divine illumination” for Augustine had to do with mental reference to what she labels an “extrinsic” standard such as the eternal ideas in God’s mind. [End Page 293]Second, Schumacher argues that the Augustinian project, epitomized in his theory of knowledge, was carried out by most of the thinkers of the Latin Middle Ages, particularly by Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. These latter two individuals are therefore divine illumi-nationists of the first order. What historians often designate as an Augustinian current, evident in the high Middle Ages among scholastics from the Franciscan Order, represented instead a deviation, a turn to an entirely novel theological-philosophical project. Here, mind’s work was conceived of as “the immediate and totalized knowledge of an individual essence.” And for this, recourse to an extrinsic standard filled the bill. Consequently, high-medieval Franciscans were the actual propounders of the theory of knowledge Schumacher tells us has wrongly been associated with divine illumination. Moreover, this Franciscan current of thought, once severed from its original theological underpinnings, provided the historical inspiration for modern philosophy, thereby acting as a kind of catalyst for the modernist philosophical problems—as Schumacher receives them—of rationalism and fideism, skepticism as well.Third, Schumacher sounds the call for a contemporary return to the authentic Augustinian project. By starting philosophy, as she claims Augustine did, with theological assumptions, she wants to fashion a “faith-based concept of knowledge” and with it, most importantly, to escape the modernist dilemma of the incompatibility of faith and reason. Grounding philosophy in theology—Christian theology, she maintains—will restore a lost integrity to our procedures of thinking, ultimately redeeming philosophy itself.How much of this program has Schumacher managed to achieve? Since this reviewer is marked out as the key spokesperson for the interpretation of both divine illumination and the history of medieval thought against which Schumacher inveighs, perhaps he should not be the one to answer the question. Still, the reader forewarned, I lay out my opinion. With regard to her first goal, Schumacher makes good on her promise to render Augustine as a theologian bent on working from his assumptions to designate a process whereby philosophy and mankind can be simultaneously restored. She is not so convincing in her attempt to equate this program with divine illumination. For Schumacher, the process of divine illumination is correlative to the idea of God as source of the mind’s power to act. Yet Augustine often plainly associates what he describes as illumination with turning to God and conceding his ideas an important role in the mental processes of judgment and concept formation. It is hard to see how one can honestly exclude this extrinsic element of what Augustine intended.Regarding her second goal, Schumacher does an excellent job of reminding us how Augustinian were almost all medieval scholastics, Thomas included, and warning us not to take the high-scholastic recourse to Aristotle as a sign of opposition to Augustinian modes of thought... (shrink)