This chapter contains sections titled: Background The Problem of No Best World Theistic Responses: Four Categories Works cited.

In almost all of the teaching of religion it is possible to find the message of peace and violence. Islam, as a word means peace, well-being, tranquility and surrender. The claim that Islam is a religion of peace, stems from its lexical meaning. The Torah aims to protect the peace of individuals and communities that have a different faith and relationship based on justice and empathy. The Ten Commandments is recognized as a basic summary of (...) the belief system of Jews. Christianity defined itself as a religion based on love. Christians claim that God himself is love, Jesus, apostles, the church fathers ultimately all Christians are messengers of love and the people are builders of peace. The perspective on sacred texts can affect the message that you try to deduce, with this assumption, the opposing ideas of people which are derived from Holy Scriptures can be based on their personality, family and social experience. In this study, the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam will be taken into account and by using a holistic approach, it will try to put forward a message that constitute to the theological basis that members of the same faith or different religions that can live in peace. In the introduction, a brief summary of their contribution to world peace is given. The main body of the article is organized in comparative study under three parts: religions contribution to peace in individual, family and societal life. In this scope, a measure of understanding among, first Orthodox and other Judaism branches, has been identified on message of of peace, then the same process is repeated for Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christianity. In Islam, the message of peace has been identified by individual verses as well as their application through its Prophet. (shrink)

The shift of interest from community to individuality and freedom brought by modernity challenged the central place once occupied by religion, pushing it to the outskirts of human life. All these led to an increased indifference towards any transcendental guarantor that could act in a neutral reason-governed space. In the case of Islam, such a situation is impossible to tolerate, because it would mean God’s desecration by reducing the Qur’an to the statute of a simple book like many (...) others that offer an opinion on a Supreme Being who does not decide the destiny of humanity any more, but becomes a simple matter of opinion. While Western Christianity adjusted to modernity reaching even to justify the developments which led to a dissolution of sacred, stating that they were consistent with its essence, Islam accepted modernity only to the extent of this one’s capacity to verify the realities stated by the Qur’an. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

We have sought to expound how Jan van Ruusbroec goes about representing the relationship of love between God and human beings by proceeding from God’s inner life of love. Therefore, in the first part of our paper we elucidated Ruusbroec’s view of the inner love reality of the Triune God. In the second part we explained how genuine Christian mystical life is founded within the intra-trinitarian life of love. Prior to discussing the characteristics of Ruusbroec’s trinitarian position, we dwelled upon (...) the author’s development of his idea of the Trinity from a personal perception of his relation with God, the embedding of Ruusbroec’s love-mysticism in traditional Christian faith and his repeated clarification of the Triune God from two perspectives: God’s nature and God’s essence. We found that, in his explanation of God’s nature, Ruusbroec underlines its fruitfulness as a way of demonstrating that God is one dynamic of love, without beginning or end, which ceaselessly and simultaneously consists in “flowing out” and “being flowed back”. This phenomenon, we stated, he associates with the concept, “oneness in threeness” and “threeness in oneness”. Through an exposition on the differing features of unity and the Persons of the Trinity, we came to the conclusion that the author in all of his works combines both the origin of “flowing out” and “flowing-back” with the Holy Spirit as the bond or unity of love of Father and Son. From this we concluded that none of the Persons is the principle or source of regiratio, i.e. return, to the unity. The view that God’s unity of Persons is the principle of exitus-reditus – and not only the third Person as recent scientific research has sought to demonstrate – is what we consider to be the heart of Ruusbroec’s trinitarian way of thinking. We ascertained, further, that the author not only links the unity of the Persons with fruitfulness; he believes that the same “fruitful” unity, drawing in the divine Persons on the level of God’s nature, is the “enjoying” unity on the level of God’s essence. By means of the distinction between God’s enjoying unity and the unity of God’s fruitful nature, Ruusbroec explicates the true facts of the intra-trinitarian life of love. The perception leads him to conclude that God, as a unity of Persons, is ceaselessly and simultaneously working and enjoying. In the second part, we illustrated how Ruusbroec’s trinitarian thought mirrors the basis of his mystical doctrine: the conviction that mystics are unified with the divine Persons both in working and enjoying, and that they are one reality of love with God. We explained how the author, first of all, maintains that mystics, who bear a full likeness to God’s fruitful nature, ceaselessly turn to good works and virtues, just as God, ceaselessly, through the divine Persons, flows out in love. We then avered that the likeness to God’s nature is not the result of human effort and that it arises from God’s touch within the human mind. Moreover, we showed that Ruusbroec, in accordance with his intuition that God’s fruitful unity is both out-flowing and inwarddrawing, believes that God is both impelling humans outward toward virtues and drawing them into God’s unity of love. In analogy with the first part of our argument – as far as the “return” of humans is concerned – we ascertained that our author is stressing the initiative of God’s unity of the Holy Spirit, i.e. the mutual love between the Father and the Son. We found the emphasis on God’s inward-drawing unity to be of great significance, because God’s unity of love also plays a crucial role with respect to the transition to “enjoyment” of human beings in God’s essence. We clarified how human beings, according to Ruusbroec, through the likeness to God’s nature, participate in the enjoyment of God’s essence with the divine Persons. We pointed out that the union in God’s essence is the most intimate experience, but not the end-point of the mystical life as, according to our author, contemplatives are directed, again and again, to good works. Lastly, we arrived at the conclusion that Ruusbroec considers the mystical life, like the life of God, to be ceaselessly consisting of action and enjoyment. However, it is not primarily the analogy with God’s trinitarian reality of love that Ruusbroecs stresses. Basically, he accentuates the fact that mystics ceaselessly experience unification with the divine Persons, both in working and enjoying. This means that mystics, united with the divine Persons in one enjoyment on the level of God’s essence, concurrently experience that, with the divine Persons, they also “share” in God’s “flowing” and “ebbing” on the level of God’s nature. On the basis of this we have affirmed that, according to Ruusbroec, God’s activity and enjoyment in the “Divinity Itself” is God’s activity and enjoyment in the human being, and the inverse. Moreover, we have shown how the author considers both moments to occur simultaneously, both in God and in human beings, meaning that the mystical life is continuously one reality of love with God. (shrink)

Although Ibn Sina’s metaphysics is heavily indebted to Aristotle’s, with regard to the substantiality of the rational soul and God, Aristotle and Ibn Sina take opposite positions: Aristotle holds that theos is a substance, while Ibn Sina denies that God is a substance; Aristotle holds that the soul is not a substance, while Ibn Sina claims that it is. In both of these regards we observe the movement toward greater abstraction in Ibn Sina. The concept of (...) God is more abstract when considered outside the categories, and the soul is understood more abstractly, not merely as the form of an organism, but as independent of any materiality. God is freed from the constraints of substantiality while the soul is freed from the constraints of corporeality. Ibn Sina argues that since God transcends the categories, God is not a substance. Another argument is that everything that falls under the categories is contingent in its existence, God, however, is necessary in His existence. Hence, God is not a substance. Ibn Sina’s main argument, however, is that a condition for being a substance is, according to Arsitotle, not to be in a subject. This condition should be understood in such a manner that it does not imply the existence of what satisfies it. The existence of a necessary being, however, is implied by such a condition. Hence, God does not have the condition, and, thus, is not a substance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Arguments for Divine Incorporeality Arguments Against Divine Incorporeality The Immanence of God Works cited.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Monasticism, Buddhist and Christian: The Korean ExperienceJames A. Wiseman OSBMonasticism, Buddhist and Christian: The Korean Experience. Edited by Sunghae Kim and James W. Heisig. Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs 38. Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. 201 pp.In order to evaluate Monasticism, Buddhist and Christian properly, one must know something about its origin. The principal editor, Sunghae Kim, is director of the Seton Interreligious Research Center in Seoul, (...) a center that regularly sponsors interreligious dialogues at a scholarly level. In addition to those dialogues, the center also organizes a series of monthly lectures for the public at large, held each year around a specific theme. The chapters of this book were, with one exception, originally given in the 1995 lecture series and later translated from Korean into English. For that reason, most of the material will already be quite familiar to specialists in the Buddhist and Christian traditions and will at times seem to offer generalizations that would be accurate enough for presentations to the general public but would need various qualifications and nuances to meet the more rigorous standards of scholars.The first two chapters are broadly introductory. In the first, Sunghae Kim gives a brief overview of the renunciatory life in six major religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). She concludes that “in terms of strict renunciation of possessions, family, and pursuit of the ego, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Daoism stand out” (p. 35), with Buddhism and Christianity in particular being characterized by highly developed forms of monasticism per se. Bernard Senécal, a Canadian Jesuit who teaches Buddhist studies at Sogang University in Seoul, wrote the following chapter, “Korean Buddhism Today and Its Encounter with Christianity,” specifically for this book. The eight chapters that follow are the heart of the book. Jaemoon Yun, the abbot of the Korean Buddhist monastery in Chung-ju, has chapters on the history of the Buddhist monastic precepts, on nonpossession and the use of property in the saṅgha, on the organizational structure of the saṅgha, and on the homeless life and the Buddhist practice of compassion. Following each of these four chapters is one by the Benedictine monk Thomas Timpte on the corresponding topic in Christian monastic life as found in the Roman Catholic Church. A short final chapter by Younghae Yun, a professor of Buddhist studies and comparative religion at Gongguk University in Kyeong-ju, highlights a few characteristics of Buddhist and Christian life. Rather than comment on material from each chapter, I [End Page 228] will discuss in this review three points that struck me as particularly interesting and/or controversial.At the beginning of the first of his four chapters, “The History and Spirit of Christian Monastic Rules,” Thomas Timpte rightly devotes several pages to clarifying terminology. The details need not concern us here, but in general monks and nuns in the Catholic Church make public profession of the “evangelical counsels” of poverty, celibacy (sometimes called chastity), and obedience; in addition, they practice some degree of enclosure (“separation from the world”) and (except for the relatively few who are hermits) live in community. Timpte notes that although there have been men and women who practiced the evangelical counsels since New Testament times, the formal institution of Christian monastic life arose in the eastern part of the Mediterranean only around the year 300. For that reason, he argues that monasticism cannot be considered central to the Church in an institutional sense, whereas monasticism was an essential part of Buddhism from the beginning, the Buddha himself and his earliest followers all having been monks. This is one of the points about which Younghae Yun disagrees with Timpte, for the Buddhist scholar claims that even though Buddhist monks and nuns, like their Christian counterparts, take vows (precepts), and in some sense live apart from society at large, such a way of life itself “is neither essential nor central” in Buddhism (p. 185). Younghae Yun bases his argument on the fact that the Buddha considered such practices as only “a means to achieve enlightenment” and that enlightenment itself is not the true raison d’être of Buddhism but is rather a way of facilitating... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prolegomena to a Comparative Reading of The Major Life of St. Francis and The Life of MilarepaMassimo A. RondolinoDifferent religious traditions in different cultures have recorded and transmitted the lives of individuals recognized as “perfected.” The particular doctrinal framework within which each of such figures is identified as “perfected” is certainly specific to the religious tradition that tells their life stories. Similarly, the social processes by which these (...) religious life writings are written, received, and circulated are appropriate to the historical and geographical contexts of their composition. Yet, narrative parallels can be detected across traditions, and the question arises whether these apparent similarities in the creation of such religious life stories across cultures, space, and time reflect actually similar doctrinal and political agendas. Could there be an underlying hagiographic process common to all these literary traditions, regardless of their compositional contexts? In other words, is the writing of spiritual lives a phenomenon that is contextual to a specific religious tradition, or is it rather a particular human response to given social and historical circumstances?I want to offer here a preliminary assessment of a study in comparative hagiology. To this end, I focus on two specific narrative traditions that pertain to two distinct religious, historical, and geographical contexts: the hagiographic writings on the medieval Christian St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and the namthars on the Tibetan Buddhist Milarepa (Mi la ras pa; ca. 1052–1135). In particular, here I make some considerations on a comparative reading of the “standard versions” of their life stories: The Major Life of St. Francis (Legenda Maior Sancti Francisci) by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–1274), and The Life of Milarepa (Mi la ras pa’i rnam thar) by Tsangnyön Heruka, the “madman” of Tsang (gTsang smyon Heruka; 1452–1507).1The composition and reception of religious life writings is famously characteristic of early and medieval Christianity, with its complex and extensively studied production of hagiographic texts. Similarly, the compilation and distribution of life narratives in a religious context also plays a crucial role in the historical and cultural development of Tibetan Buddhism, with its extensive production of namthars (rnam thar, literally “great liberation” and, therefore, “stories of great liberation”). Within these large narrative traditions, St. Francis of Assisi and Milarepa eminently stand [End Page 163] out, both within and outside their respective cultural contexts, as two among the most renowned spiritual figures in Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, respectively.2 Furthermore, both figures and their related narrative traditions have been the object of scholarly studies for nearly a century.3Indeed, the spirituality embodied by St. Francis and Milarepa has been already the focus of attempted comparisons that have essentially and consistently focused on a direct assimilation of their respective extreme asceticism and teachings of poverty and renunciation, by drawing extensively on the literary accounts of their lives.4 Yet, it is important to note that the lives of these two exceptional individuals are also almost exclusively known through the dominating perspective of a single author’s works. In fact, although one of the best-known texts on St. Francis is the anonymous Little Flowers of St. Francis (Fioretti di San Francesco, late fourteenth century), the saint’s life and deeds are primarily known through their rendering by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, general minister of the Franciscan order. Similarly, the acts and teachings of Milarepa as they are familiar to Tibetan (and Western) audiences result primarily from the work of the wandering yogin Tsangnyön Heruka.Reflecting on the apparent parallelisms between the lives and teachings of St. Francis and Milarepa, though, I wonder whether such similarities may not extend beyond the spirituality that the saint and the repa embody. In particular, I am curious as to whether the analogies between the two figures that have been already outlined by several scholars may not actually arise from similarities in the sources’ underlying compositional dynamics and, in particular, in the authors’ approaches to the interpretation and retelling of these individuals’ lives as embodiments of a particular form of spirituality. In fact, if religious life writings are a form of communication that can be found in communities that belong to different traditions, times... (shrink)

The doctrine of creation and the knowledge of nature have come into tension in modernity. Against this background, the article discusses the basic problems of a theology of nature starting from a systematic theology of religious communication. Dogmatic statements about the world as God’s creation are not about a description of nature and reality but about a reflexive account of Christian–religious communication. The object of the doctrine of creation is thus the world-related contents of the Christian religion as well as (...) the function these have in it. Thus, both the critique of the representational version of the doctrinal tradition’s conception of creation and its reflexive turn in 20th-century Protestant theology are taken up and carried forward in such a way that the belief in creation is not understood as a general qualification of the world but is related to the concrete contents of religious communication. Contribution: The article proposes a new formulation of the traditional doctrine of creation on the basis of a systematic theology of religious communication. This approach is intended to avoid a coexistence of religious belief in creation and scientific explanation of the world, as well as their being pushed into one another. By transferring the belief in creation to Christian–religious communication, the latter thematises how religious contents are created in the Christian religion. (shrink)

The realist belief in the primacy of the world and its underlying structure answers the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing.’ The world, and all things contained in it exists because of God’s creative act. Personal death in Christian philosophy continues the gift of human existence by shifting that temporal existence into eternal life. The death and resurrection of Christ lays the foundation for the possibility of eternal life, while the will of God provides an answer to (...) the why of human existence. The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the death and resurrection of Christ on the metaphysical strings of human existence. The phenomenon of human death takes place on the arms of consciousness and being’s unconcealment. The subjective correlate of human death is the irreversible loss of consciousness, while the objective correlate of human death presents as the infolding of the gift of existence, namely, of being’s unconcealment from consciousness. These correlates function as a dynamic unit to explain human death and resurrection. The attempt to justify a belief in the existence of life after death from the point of view of consciousness alone is dualistic and leads to several absurdities and confusions about the nature of the afterlife state. The explanation of the resurrection of Christ as a continuation of the dialogue between being and consciousness begun on earth avoids those absurdities while maintaining personal identity. (shrink)

Dante's metaphysics--his understanding of reality--is very different from our own. To present Dante's ideas about the cosmos, or God, or salvation, or history, or poetry within the context of post-Enlightenment presuppositions, as is usually done, is thus to capture only imperfectly the essence of those ideas. The recovery of Dante's metaphysics is essential, argues Christian Moevs, if we are to resolve what has been called "the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy." That problem is what to make (...) of the Comedy 's claim to the "status of revelation, vision, or experiential record--as something more than imaginative literature." In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and of the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. He carries this out through a detailed examination of three notoriously complex cantos of the Paradiso, read against the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition from which they arise. Moevs finds the key to the Comedy 's metaphysics and poetics in the concept of creation, which implies three fundamental insights into the nature of reality: 1) The world is radically contingent, dependent at every instant on what gives it being. 2) The relation between the world and the ground of its being is non-dualistic. 3) Human beings are radically free, unbound by the limits of nature, and thus can find all of time and space within themselves. These insights are the foundation of the pilgrim Dante's journey from the center of the world to the Empyrean which contains it. For Dante, in sum, what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is a creation or projection of conscious being, which can only be known as oneself. Moevs argues that self-knowledge is in fact the keystone of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophical tradition, and the essence of the Christian revelation in which that tradition culminates. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy. In particular, it becomes clear that poetry coincides with theology and philosophy in the poem: Dante poeta cannot be distinguished from Dante theologus. (shrink)

The merits of this sourcebook are too innumerable to list in entirety but it must be said that it has achieved an almost perfect balance among the requirements of representativeness, comprehensiveness, and structured presentation. The only traditions in religion which are not represented are Christianity and Judaism, and Eliade has made the right decision to presuppose a familiarity with this material on the part of the student so that he might present more material, within a manageable compass, (...) on religions which are less familiar to the occidental mind. There are 360 separate but moderately cross-referenced entries, and in choosing these Eliade has drawn on the primary documents, of course, most heavily. Where these are lacking, however, as is particularly the case with primitive religions, he has provided deftly selected accounts taken from anthropological studies. The selections are grouped around six main themes: I. Gods, Goddesses, and Supernatural Beings; II. Myths of Creation and Origin; III. Man and the Sacred; IV. Death, Afterlife, Eschatology; V. Specialists of the Sacred: From Medicine Men to Mystics and Founders of Religions; VI. Speculations on Man and God. Each of these sections is then subdivided into between five and ten parts, with occasional further structuration going on in some of the subparts. The book would complement any systematic study in comparative religion, and, as might be suspected, meshes beautifully with Eliade's own Patterns in Comparative Religion.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Though he specifically disavows any intention of providing an answer to the question of whether philosophy in a Christian context can have a theoretical independence from revelation and faith, Tresmontant does offer what he considers to be empirical support for the thesis that metaphysics, when it has developed within the Christian community, has been considerably shaped in its adopted form by the recognized, spiritually authoritative sources of that community. Specifically, Tresmontant reviews the pronouncements of the various Councils of (...) the Church, and to some extent Scripture, and sketches on the basis of these sources what he considers to be a continuously developing and consistently maintained metaphysical perspective on the issues of Creation, God's transcendence, the non-dualistic character of human nature and human destiny, and the completional relation that exists between faith and reason. The value of the book is difficult to assess because it is precisely when one goes beyond the sketch that the author has provided that one encounters all the objections that have been put forth to defeat a thesis such as the one offered in this book.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Reinforcement learning systems usually assume that a value function is defined over all states that can immediately give the value of a particular state or action. These values are used by a selection mechanism to decide which action to take. In contrast, when humans and animals make decisions, they collect evidence for different alternatives over time and take action only when sufficient evidence has been accumulated. We have previously developed a model of memory processing that includes semantic, (...) episodic and working memory in a comprehensive architecture. Here, we describe how this memory mechanism can support decision making when the alternatives cannot be evaluated based on immediate sensory information alone. Instead we first imagine, and then evaluate a possible future that will result from choosing one of the alternatives. Here we present an extended model that can be used as a model for decision making that depends on accumulating evidence over time, whether that information comes from the sequential attention to different sensory properties or from internal simulation of the consequences of making a particular choice. We show how the new model explains both simple immediate choices, choices that depend on multiple sensory factors and complicated selections between alternatives that require forward looking simulations based on episodic and semantic memory structures. In this framework, vicarious trial and error is explained as an internal simulation that accumulates evidence for a particular choice. We argue that a system like this forms the “missing link” between more traditional ideas of semantic and episodic memory, and the associative nature of reinforcement learning. (shrink)

The traditional Lewis–Stalnaker semantics treats all counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent as trivially or vacuously true. Many have regarded this as a serious defect of the semantics. For intuitively, it seems, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents—counterpossibles—can be non-trivially true and non-trivially false. Whereas the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then the mathematical community at the time would have been surprised" seems true, "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time (...) would have been thrilled" seems false. Many have proposed to extend the Lewis–Stalnaker semantics with impossible worlds to make room for a non-trivial or non-vacuous treatment of counterpossibles. Roughly, on the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics, we evaluate a counterfactual of the form "If A had been true, then C would have been true" by going to closest world—whether possible or impossible—in which A is true and check whether C is also true in that world. If the answer is "yes", the counterfactual is true; otherwise it is false. Since there are impossible worlds in which the mathematically impossible happens, there are impossible worlds in which Hobbes manages to square the circle. And intuitively, in the closest such impossible worlds, sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan are not thrilled—they remain sick and unmoved by the mathematical developments in Europe. If so, the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would have been thrilled" comes out false, as desired. In this paper, I will critically investigate the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics for counterpossibles. I will argue that the standard version of the extended semantics, in which impossible worlds correspond to maximal, logically inconsistent entities, fails to give the correct semantic verdicts for many counterpossibles. In light of the negative arguments, I will then outline a new version of the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics that can avoid these problems. (shrink)

The central question of this conference is whether the media can contribute to high quality social dialogue. The prospects for resolving that question positively in the “sound and fury” depend on recovering the idea of truth. At present the news media are lurching along from one crisis to another with an empty centre. We need to articulate a believable concept of truth as communication's master principle. As the norm of healing is to medicine, justice to politics, critical thinking to (...) education, craftsmanship to engineering, and stewardship to business, so truth-telling is the news profession's occupational norm. Truth-telling is the ethical framework that fundamentally reorders the media's professional culture and enables them to enrich social dialogue rather than undermine it.Historically the mainstream press has defined itself in terms of an objectivist worldview. Centred on human rationality and armed with the scientific method, the facts in news have been said to mirror reality. The aim has been true and incontrovertible accounts of a domain separate from human consciousness. In Bertrand Russell's formula, “truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact” . In the received view, truth is defined in elementary epistemological terms as accurate representation. News corresponds to context-free neutral algorithms, and ethics is equated with impartiality.The attacks on this misguided view of human knowledge had already originated in Giambattista Vico's fantasia and Wilhelm Dilthey's verstehen in the counter-Enlightenment of the 18th century. They have continued with hermeneutics, critical theory in the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, Gramsci, and in their own way, Lyotard's denial of master narratives and Derrida's sliding signifiers; until the anti-foundationalism of our own day indicates a crisis in correspondence views of truth. Institutional structures remain Enlightenment-driven, but in principle the tide has turned currently toward restricting objectivism to the territory of mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences. In reporting, objectivity has become increasingly controversial as the working press' professional standard, though it will remain entrenched in our ordinary practices of news production and dissemination until an alternative mission for the press is convincingly formulated.The demise of correspondence views of truth has created a predicament for the notion of truth altogether. However, instead of appealing to coherence versions or abandoning the concept, truth needs to be relocated in the moral sphere. Truth is a problem of axiology rather than epistemology. With the dominant scheme no longer tenable, truth should become the province of ethicists who can reconstruct it as the news media's contribution to social dialogue.When truth is articulated in terms of a moral framework, we can mold its richly textured meaning around the Hebrew emeth , the Greek aletheia . In Serbo-Croatian the true is justified as with plumbline in carpentry. In the powerful wheel imagery of the Buddhist tradition, truth is the immovable axle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa presumes that sufferings from apartheid can be healed through truthful testimony. In Ghandhi's “satyagrapha,” the power of truth through the human spirit eventually wins over force . Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics contends correctly that a truthful account lays hold of the context, motives, and presuppositions involved .Telling the truth depends on the quality of discernment so that penultimates do not gain ultimacy. Truth means, in other words, to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter” . For Henry David Thoreau – though addressing a different issue – when we are truthful, we attempt to “drive life into a corner and¼if it proves to be mean, why then to get the genuine meanness out of it and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by personal experience and be able to give a true account of the encounter” . For the former secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, “the most dangerous of all moral dilemmas is when we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth be victorious” . In the Talmud, the liar's punishment is that no one believes him.Augustine , professor of rhetoric at Milan and later Bishop of Hippo, illustrates a non-correspondence view of truth. His rhetorical theory is a major contribution to the philosophy of communication, contradicting the highly secular and linear view of the ancient Greeks. As with Aristotle, rhetoric entails reasoned judgement for Augustine; however, he “break[s] away from Graeco-Roman rhetoric, moving instead toward ¼rhetoric as aletheiac act” . Rhetoric for him is not knowledge-producing or opinion-producing but truth-producing . The Epistolae Doctrina Christiana scourges the value-neutral, technical language of “word merchants” without wisdom.Truth is not fundamentally a prescriptive statement. The aletheiac act in Augustine “tends to be more relational than propositional, a dialogically interpersonal, sacramentally charitable act rather than a statement¼taking into account and being motivated by [the cardinal virtues] faith, hope, and charity” . The truth for him does not merely make things clear, but motivates us to belief and action. In truthful communication for Augustine, “it is not enough to seek to move men's minds, merely for the sake of power; instead, the power to move is to be used to lead men to truth”. (shrink)

A consideration of monotheism. The term ordinarily suggests belief in one God and derives from the Greek monos meaning “one” and theos meaning “god.” In the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the one god is regarded as supreme lord and creator of the universe, almighty, all-knowing, and all-good. Traditionally, Christianity has taught that God revealed himself to our first parents, Adam and Eve, as the one true God in Genesis. The Old Testament reveals a jealous God who (...) forbids the worship of strange and multifarious gods. God's chosen people, the Jews, are destined to prepare the way for the coming of the universal religion available not just to a privileged few. (shrink)

In recent years, researchers have paid special attention to religiosity and the practice of religious beliefs. If people put religiosity at the forefront of their affairs and maintain the roots of religion in various aspects of work and family life, they will see God present and watchful in doing all things, and the result of such a vision will be the successful performance of deeds and walking the path of perfection. Having a heartfelt belief in the value of work and (...) adhering to it will result in a greater desire to work. Religiosity is a variable that can be related to job variables. In addition, it can play an important role in the behaviours of employees. In Islam, work is a virtue and is necessary to balance the personal and social life of the individual. Given the importance of this issue, the present study aimed to evaluate the relationship between Islamic religiosity and job satisfaction of Muslim teachers in Malaysia. In total, 2200 Muslim teachers of Kuala Lumpur and Penang were selected for the study by simple random sampling. Data were collected by using standard questionnaires and analysed by Pearson's correlation coefficient in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). According to the results, there was a significant and positive relationship between teachers' Islamic religiosity and job satisfaction as P = 0.784 and T = 0.000 which was less than the Sig level of 0.05. CONTRIBUTION: According to Islamic teachings, working for a Muslim is like worship. Based on the findings of this research, teachers with higher Islamic religiosity enjoy higher job satisfaction. (shrink)

Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong's superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical (...) philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume. (shrink)

Nūr Muḥammad is one of the teachings in Sufism that studies the beginning of the creation of the universe. The Sufis discussed Nūr Muḥammad through God's tajallī (manifestation), and they believed that only Insan Kamil (Perfect Humans) possessed the perfection of His tajallī. This Sufi theory can be comprehended through the dhawqi approach. This research will deal with Nūr Muḥammad's theory of Sufism through the perspective of Tijaniyah Tarekat. The data for this study was obtained through library (...) research utilizing a documentary technique. The collected data will be analyzed using the descriptive analysis method. This study finds that the Tijaniyah Tarekat is a Sufism institution that bases its teachings and practices on the concept of Nūr Muḥammad in the form of ṣalawāt al-fātiḥ and ṣalawāt jawharah al-kamāl. This Tarekat's elucidation of Nūr Muḥammad is also built on and consistent with the explication of authoritative Sufis in Islam's intellectual and spiritual tradition. (shrink)

The reflection on the preconditions and evolution of science has played a decisive role in the development of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy, contributing to its functional and thus inherently pluralistic and holistic view of knowledge. To present Cassirer's conception of physics as an open symbolic formation enables us to reveal and study the radical features of his epistemological model: (1) the fundamental process of generating sense-units and meaning in its constitutive character for each attempt of objectification, (2) its driving and structuring (...) dynamics that touches and transforms all elements of knowledge, the a priori included, (3) the strategies of justification that allow maintaining the claim of truthfulness in spite the fact that Cassirer's open model integrates contingency and transitoriness as an inherent part of knowledge. It thus becomes clear that Cassirer's term 'symbol' cannot be reduced to its habitual representational acceptation, for its key theoretical function is to overcome the inconsistencies of dualistic epistemological models. It is this re-orientation, a kind of 'second Copernican revolution', that allows Cassirer to go beyond traditional dichotomies and to propose a larger frame in which to appreciate the diversity of human understanding. (shrink)

This volume explores the philosophical issues involved in the idea of petitionary prayer, where this is conceived as an activity designed to influence the action of the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God of traditional theism. Theists have always recognized various logical and moral limits to divine action in the world, but do these limits leave any space among God's reasons for petitionary prayer to make a difference? Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation develops a new account of the conditions required (...) for a petitionary prayer to be answered by employing the notion of contrastive explanation. With careful attention to recent developments in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, Scott A. Davison surveys the contemporary literature on this question. He considers questions about human freedom and responsibility in relation to different views of divine providence, along with the puzzles inherent in Christian teachings concerning petitionary prayer. Davison develops new challenges to the coherence of the idea of answered petitionary prayer based upon the nature of divine freedom, the limits of human knowledge, and the nature of those good things that require a recipient's permission before they can be given. He proposes new defences, building upon careful analysis of the shortcomings of previous proposals and clarifying the issues for future debate. (shrink)

That "The Classics of Western Spirituality" should regard the man Dante hailed as "beyond the human in contemplation," and St. Bonaventure believed to be the medieval rival of the greatest patristic contemplative worthy of a special volume is not surprising. Richard of St. Victor’s masterful analysis of the ascent of the mind to God in contemplative prayer and meditation, emphasizing the individual’s relationship to other individuals as the paradigm of how the Three Divine Persons are related in their inner (...) life of love, is at the same time of psychological interest for anyone attempting to identify and classify the various mystical states medieval philosophers felt were necessary to characterize their spiritual growth. Since the bulk of the present translation is devoted to Richard’s two major attempts to systematize the discipline needed to attain contemplation, known more generally as Benjamin Minor and Benjamin Major, one might wonder why the work is being reviewed in the present journal. But while the major interest of this volume will undoubtedly be for those interested in ascetic theology, for the influence of Richard on subsequent writers from St. Bonaventure to St. Teresa of Avila is profound, nevertheless the relatively short third portion of the work is of sufficient philosophical importance to merit at least a brief note, namely bk. 3 of The Trinity. One would hardly expect a work of this sort to come from the pen of a mystic, for what Richard sets out to do is nothing short of a purely rational or metaphysical analysis of the "Athanasian Creed," which was recited almost daily by the Canons of the Abbey of St. Victor during the twelfth century. Because the inner nature and life of the Trinity, unlike creation or the salvation history of God’s intervention in the affairs of man, is a necessary consequence of what medieval thinkers believed God to be, rather than what he chose to do, Richard was convinced that with sufficient ingenuity one could theorize fruitfully as to why God must possess the various attributes we believe him to have and which are set forth in the aforesaid "creed," which stresses both the unity of God, the divine nature and all the divine attributes, while continually reminding its confessor of the trinity of "persons." In the Anselmian tradition of "faith seeking understanding" Richard seeks "necessary reasons" why God should not only be one but three. Most medieval thinkers have considered the trinitarian character of the divine nature to be the most profound of all the mysteries of the Christian faith. While reason may at best refute objections to a trinity of persons in one divine nature, it can hardly be expected to provide positive support for the doctrine. Richard, on the contrary, believed that St. Anselm had found the key to the "divine processions" in the fact that God is perfect love, with all that this implies. It is obvious the experience of "love" as an interpersonal sharing of the deepest kind, something St. Paul enjoined upon the Christians of the "Church of Corinth," is a far cry from what Sartre seemed to have reached in writing L'etre et néant or what that term connotes to our age, but it is not unknown to contemporary psychologists. Duns Scotus described the "perfect lover" in a Richardian sense as "Perfecte diligens vult dilectum condiligi!" It is especially in bk. 3 of The Trinity that Richard argues that a personal nature that is "summum bonum" must contain more than one person, and need contain no more than three. For the philosopher of religion interested in Richard’s metaphysical analysis of the Godhead, it would be profitable to preface the reading of Zinn’s fine translation of bk. 3 with the selections from bk. 1.—A.B.W. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 116-118 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics Richard Bett. Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 264. Cloth, $60.00. Charles Brittain. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xii (...) + 406. Cloth, $60.00. These two books demonstrate once again that the ancient skeptics could indeed live their skepticism. In recent decades Myles Burnyeat, Benson Mates, and too many others have retailed the old canard that the skeptic cannot live his skepticism, but here we have two branches of ancient skepticism that sound quite liveable. Both books are subtle and brilliant examples of the genre of reconstructing philosophy from meager and fragmentary evidence.Bett's book follows up on the case he made in his 1997 translation of Sextus Empiricus's Against the Ethicists for three stages in ancient Pyrrhonism. The first is that of Pyrrho (ca. 360-ca. 270 B.C.), a dogmatist who held what Bett labels the indeterminacy thesis: we do not know anything because the world is indeterminate and thus we cannot know it. The second is a similarly dogmatic stage under Aenesidemus (first century B.C.), also followed by Sextus in Against the Ethicists. The third is the more thoroughly skeptical suspension of judgment of the mature Sextus of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (second century A.D.). Bett points out that it would indeed be odd if Pyrrhonism had not evolved in any way in five hundred years. What was unique throughout the tradition was the connection drawn between indeterminacy or suspension of judgment and the goal of ataraxia or tranquility (179, 220).Bett tries to avoid reading later concerns back into the earlier materials, and reevaluates the later materials based on his new reading of the earlier. He argues that Pyrrho's indeterminacy thesis was a metaphysical claim, not an epistemological one. One benefit of [End Page 116] understanding Pyrrho this way is that he does not make a self-refuting exception to his epistemological skepticism for his own claims. Rather, he can just admit to being a kind of dogmatist. Then, Pyrrho's ethical dogmatism is also perfectly consistent. Bett draws a picture of Pyrrho's practical life that rejects the walking-off-of-cliffs apocrypha, but accepts evidence of a quasi-Cynic, anti-theoretical lifestyle. Pyrrho's rejection of social norms puts him at odds with Sextus's later use of laws and customs as guides to behavior. There are still further questions here: why was Pyrrho in particular such a hero to philosophers, if most (or at least many) people are resolutely non-theoretical?Bett points out that Pyrrho gives us no reason to think that the abandonment of theories and opinions must always lead to tranquility (81). But in another connection, he recognizes that temperament may be decisive (111), and that may be the deciding factor here, too. There is no answer to people who say that abandoning theories makes them nervous: the Pyrrhonians simply say that it makes them tranquil. Irreducible differences in temperament may also explain why Pyrrho did not bother with theoretical controversy and Sextus revelled in it.Among other points, Bett discourages all but the most general case for an influence from India on Pyrrho. Bett's thumbnail comparisons between Pyrrho and each of Aristotle, Plato, the Eleatics, Xenophanes, and others show that Pyrrho's philosophy was not at all extraordinary for its time and place. Most philosophers expected claims about nature to be invariable and without qualification (118). Bett says this is odd by modern standards (197), but even today scientific laws are said to apply to all times and all places.The title of Bett's book will mislead some readers. If you are a specialist and your world revolves around ancient philosophy, you will be satisfied that Pyrrho's "legacy" includes Aenesidemus and ends... (shrink)

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This does not mean jettisoning Christianity's deepest convictions in order to make it conform to Judaism. Rather, Richard Harries develops the work of recent Jewish scholarship to discern resonances between central Christian and Jewish beliefs. This thought-provoking book offers fresh approaches to contentious and sensitive issues. A key chapter on the nature of forgiveness is sympathetic to the Jewish charge that Christians talk (...) much too easily about forgiveness. Another chapter on suffering in Judaism and Christianity rejects the usual stereotypes and argues for important common ground, for example in the idea that God suffers in the suffering of his people. There are also chapters on the state of Israel and the place of Jerusalem in Christian and Jewish thought. Richard Harries argues that the basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity but with humanity. These, like other religions, are different, distinctive voices in response to God's primal affirmation of human life, which for Christians is achieved and given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the light of this the author maintains - controversially - that Christians should not be trying to convert Jews to Christianity. Rather Jews and Christians should stand together and build on the great amount they have in common to work together for a better world. (shrink)

Spatial, physical, and semantic magnitude dimensions can influence action decisions in human cognitive processing and interact with each other. For example, in the SNARC effect, semantic numerical magnitude facilitates left-hand or right-hand responding dependent on the small or large magnitude of number symbols. SNARC-like interactions of numerical magnitudes with the radial spatial dimension (depth) were postulated from early on. Usually, the SNARC effect in any direction is investigated using fronto-parallel computer monitors for presentation of stimuli. In such 2D setups, however, (...) the metaphorical and literal interpretation of the radial depth axis with seemingly close / far stimuli or responses are not distinct. Hence, it is difficult to draw clear conclusions with respect to the contribution of different spatial mappings to the SNARC effect. In order to disentangle the different mappings in a natural way, we studied parametrical interactions between semantic numerical magnitude, horizontal directional responses, and perceptual distance by means of stereoscopic depth in an immersive virtual reality (VR). Two VR experiments show horizontal SNARC effects across all spatial displacements in traditional latency measures and kinematic response parameters. No indications of a SNARC effect along the depth axis, as it would be predicted by a direct mapping account, were observed, but the results show a non-linear relationship between horizontal SNARC slopes and physical distance. Steepest SNARC slopes were observed for digits presented close to the hands. We conclude that spatial-numerical processing is susceptible to effector-based processes but relatively resilient to task-irrelevant variations of radial-spatial magnitudes. (shrink)

: The modern era may be deemed as that of scientific and technologicaldevelopment but peace and harmony among the people remain elusive. Thetwo world wars, Palestinian problem, bombing of world twin towers, invasionof Muslim countries by Americans and allied forces, and the continuous bloodshedding of humanity in one form or another in different parts of the world, allthese horrifying phenomena prove lack of political will on the part of UnitedNations. Had religions in the strife-torn regions played their crucial role, (...) therewould never have occurred bloodshed of the humanity. Judaism, Christianity,and Islam account for the big majority in the world today and have so manythings in common, especially essential human values guided by two universalprinciples, unity of God and unity of man. The Ten Commandments in theTorah, confirmation of the Mosaic Law in the Bible, and reconfirmation of theMosaic and Biblical instructions in the Qur’an still hold the significance forcreating peace and harmony among people of the three creeds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 275-276 [Access article in PDF] Zbigniew Janowski. Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes' Quest for Certitude. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002. Pp. 181. Cloth, $30.00. Janowski begins this original and erudite work by saying that although "the Meditations have never [before] been interpreted as a theodicy... insofar as theodicy is concerned with examining the relationship between the existence of evil on the one hand and (...) God's omnipotence and benevolence on the other, Descartes's question 'How would the goodness of God not preclude the possibility that nature is deceptive?' is in perfect conformity with, and continues the long tradition of, Christian apologetics" (13). This is not to deny Descartes's primary role in replacing God's causal role in nature with mechanistic science, and his separating religious truth from that of reason. But Descartes also is profoundly concerned with problems of error, evil, God's role in our sins, and Absolute Truth. Janowski is concerned "to show how Descartes' philosophy is derived from the early-seventeenth-century debates over divine and human freedom" by concentrating on the "incongruity between the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent Creator and man's imperfect nature [and] the nature and scope of human freedom" (19). He presents "the problem of error... as the problem of evil; the problem of human will... as the problem of human freedom, and the quest for Certitude... as theodicy, that is, as the vindication of God's goodness and omnipotence" (19-20). His ground for this is his interpretation of Cartesianism as "a kind of epistemological Augustinianism" (20).The view of basic Christian theology is that God is omnipotent and benevolent, and that all his creations are good, so evil is merely the absence of good. According to Descartes, free will makes both error and evil possible. But Augustine says that after the Fall of Man, free will is corrupt and can incline only to evil. So the only good man can do is by way of God's grace, which man cannot resist, for man is not really free to choose between good and evil. But here, Descartes is in disagreement with Augustine. Again, theodicy concerns the problem of the apparent discrepancy between the power of the creator and the imperfections of creation. And the problem is that Descartes's God is an all-powerful being that is absolutely unlimited and creates everything including logical, moral, and legal principles. Descartes's God is not constrained by the principles of non-contradiction (as opposed to St. Thomas's God, who is so constrained). Descartes's argument is that only God is immutable, nothing created is immutable, so no principle created by God, not the Ten Commandments, not the principle of non-contradiction, is immutable.This doctrine of indifferently created eternal truths allies Descartes with the Molinists who argue that God is indifferent in the sense of all powerful, and that humans have a freedom of indifference in that even given grace, they can decide to do either good or evil. This is in opposition to Augustinians and Jansenists who believe that human will corrupted by the Fall of Man can choose only evil until God gives one grace, after which one can choose only good—which, in either case, rules out any notion of freedom of choice between good and evil by an indifferent free will. Descartes believes that we can choose evil even when God gives us grace to choose good. Descartes does follow Augustine in asserting that for God, knowing and willing are the same, in opposition to St. Thomas. But for humans, knowing and willing are separate, and so humans can both err and sin.Descartes's theodicy is that everything depends on God—physics, mathematics, morals, and law. Without God there would be only nihilism. A great difficulty with this doctrine of eternal truths, however, is that it "makes the nature of God completely incomprehensible to man" (102). This is the doctrine of the Hidden God. But in a backhanded way, it saves Descartes's position. He argues that... (shrink)

The erosion of traditional work roles which had been male biased has led to the increase of women in the workplace. Although a welcomed development, it has an attendant problem – a vacuum in the homestead. Consequently, families are filling this vacuum by employing various hands to handle the house chores in the absence of parents. Being part of the society and mostly affected by female personnel, many Christian parents are now faced with the issue of relating properly (...) with their ‘servants’ and vice versa. In fact, there are many cases of maltreatment of these helps and pampering their own children while the helps are overstretched, on the one hand, and cases of outrageous and negative behaviours on the part of the ‘servants’. This article is aimed at giving a biblical guideline on domestic workers and masters relationship via a socio-rhetorical reading of Ephesians 6:5–9. It examines the Graeco-Roman household codes between servants and masters and provides a comparative analysis of these ethical codes with the Nigerian situation to emphasise the contemporary relevance of the passage.Contributions: The article holds that rather than being treated as domestic workers, these servants should be treated as part of the family. They should be sent to school, properly clothed, and fed and treated equally with the children of the home. They are human beings created and loved by God before whom we are all equals. (shrink)

After suggesting that religion may be defined rather generally as "positive concern," and after stipulating that the essence of worship consists in some form of "earnest dedication," Robins discusses the relationship between religion, magic, and morality. Thereafter he traces the history of Judaism and Christianity in order to cast some light on our religious inheritance. The author emphasizes the purely natural origin of religion, the questionable authenticity of the Bible, the mythological status of the God-man Jesus, and the (...) pragmatic value of believing in the Trinity. The author apparently takes the view that religion is primarily a manifestation of our deepest natural needs as well as an embodiment of our highest human aspirations, and that in the evolutionary process alteration of religious doctrines is indeed necessary if religion is to be humanly meaningful. The institutional embodiment of religious ideas is looked upon as more dangerous than necessary, given the threat of authoritarianism and the consequent loss of individuality and responsibility. In the chapter on mysticism Robins maintains that mysticism, like religion, is largely a matter of feeling; in the chapter on immortality he opts for the notion of "social immortality" in lieu of personal immortality. The book is conversational in tone, pragmatic in its final evaluation of religious experience, and is seemingly aimed at a popular audience rather than a scholarly few interested in depth, consistency, and refinement of expression.—R. A. (shrink)

In this article, the subject of Jesus and the Gospel is discussed according to the Qurʾān. This study focuses on the position of Jesus and the nature of the Gospel from the perspective of the Qurʾān about the perception of Jesus and the Gospel in the Christian belief. The issue of Jesus and the Gospel has been the subject of different understandings and discussions between Muslims and Christians from the first periods of Islamic history until today. There are serious confusions (...) around them both within the Christian world and Islamic world. Even if there are common points between the information contained in the New Testament and in the Qurʾān on these issues, this information does not agree with each other. While Jesus and the Gospel described in the Qurʾān are not independent and not detached from the historical process of divine revelation; Jesus, which was placed in a superior position in Christianity, and the Gospels written by different writers on different dates after Jesus, do not integrate with this historical process. As for the Islamic world, it can be said that the perception of Jesus and the Gospel is not directly shaped by the Qurʾān, but rather by narratives and common beliefs. In this article where concept analyses are intense, the Qurʾān, the Bible, TDV (Türkiye Religious Foundation) Encyclopaedia of Islam, dictionaries, commentary resources and studies on Jesus and the Bible were mainly referred to. According to the Qurʾān, all the messengers called rasūl and nabī are human prophets chosen by Allah and none of them are angel or superhuman. Allah is the only God and there is no god but Him. According to the Qurʾān, it is not possible for God to adopt a wife or son. Allah is not the third of the three that finds its expression in the Christian belief in the form of the trinity: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Rūḥ al-Quds). According to the Qurʾān, every understanding that deifies Jesus and carries him to a position above human is a deviation from the right path. The deification of Jesus, who was born of Mary without a father, has been a belief formed over time. It is stated in the Qurʾān that Jesus is a messenger of Allah and a word He informed Mary, like the other prophets. What is meant by the word of God is that Allah heralds Mary with a child whose name is Christ, Jesus and the son of Mary. While it is said in the Qurʾān that Jesus is the word of God, it is not meant that the word is embodied and transformed into Jesus; however, it is meant that Jesus was created and brought to life with a word that came from Allah. The fact that Jesus is the word of God can also mean that he will speak to people in the name of Allah when he is in the cradle and then with the words that were revealed to him, and he will notify the way of the Lord in his message. As his birth is a miracle, his talking to people while in the cradle is also a miracle. Allah put His words in the mouth of Jesus like as He put them in the mouth of Prophet Muḥammad, and He also revealed the Gospel to Jesus. Thus, the words of God and the messenger who speak in the name of Allah became synonymous. Because when he speaks in the name of Allah, the words coming out of his mouth are not the words of Jesus himself, but the words of God. All prophets, including Jesus, are a single ummah sent on Islam. The essence of the books they brought from Allah is one. Although there are some differences in details arising from history, culture and social conditions, there is no difference between them in terms of the basic principles, norms and decrees brought from Allah in matters of faith, worship, morality and law, and especially the principle of unification. According to the Qurʾān, the Bible is the name of the divine book that Allah sent down to Jesus who was held responsible for His message, and that confirms the previous books. Contrary to the common belief among Muslims, the Qurʾān does not abolish the Gospel sent down to Jesus, but endorses it. In fact, all the books that God sent through the prophets confirm each other in terms of their essence, as well as the basic principles and provisions they contain. Allah taught Jesus the book, the wisdom, the Torah and the Bible, and sent him to confirm the Torah. He also sent down the Qurʾān to Prophet Muḥammad as confirming the Torah and the Bible. The purpose of these books sent down by Allah is to provide guidance and light to humanity. It is emphasized in the Qurʾān that all the prophets are actually one ummah, and that God who sent them is the true Lord of the people and that worship should be done only to Him. The verse in the Qurʾān "The only religion in the sight of Allah is Islam" should be understood in this context. In this respect, the common understanding among the scholars who study in the Islamic tradition that Qurʾān abrogated the divine books sent to humanity before, which is incompatible with the Qurʾān and turned into a common belief, should be reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

In a quest for greater coherence between parochial identities, culture and Christianity, there exists an African consciousness which seeks to indigenise and decolonise Christianity. Africans are profoundly religious people who view their faith as part of their way of life, as strengthening their cultures and providing a moral compass for daily living. In efforts to transform society, the Christian religion has played a significant role in the path to African development. Christianity in Africa dates to the very inception of the (...) church. Africans consequently played a crucial role in establishing the doctrines and theology of the early church. While African Traditional religion (ATR) is paramount, it is the purpose of this article to suggest that the Christian faith has and continuous to play a significant role on the African continent in its development. While there are many indigenous African beliefs, these have been to a large extent supported by Christianity in a quest to systematize novel knowledge and promote peace and tolerance across the continent. Many Africans have sought facets of Christianity that are similar to their religious and personal practices and continue to do so. Thus, while there exist numerous similarities and also differences between Christianity and ATR, it is imperative to preserve old-style regional distinctiveness and Christianity as the unifying rudiments in nation building endeavours and in efforts to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. Africans can and should come to comprehend the Triune Godhead as being consistent with their own spiritual consciousness and existential veracities. Indigenization of Christianity requires enculturation and essentially an understanding that it is indeed ecumenical and also embraces diversity and fundamentally requires viewing Holy Scriptures and the truths they propound as being applicable to any context and cultural milieu across the ages. Christians after all espouse a faith in the Ekklesia or body of Christ for all its people who are the Laos of God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:80 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Gilson often contrasts the God of Aquinas, who is esse, with the God of Augustine, who is essentia. This difference in terminology is taken as emphasizing the essentialist character of Augustine's thought. However, Professor Anderson maintains that essentia should not be regarded as equivalent to the Thomistic notion of essence. F,ssentia is derived, according to Augustine, from esse and is most equivalent to the (...) Thomistic ens. Hence, according to Anderson, Augustine was not ignoring or slighting the factor of existence when he referred to God as essentia. Once again, Anderson's point is valid only if we grant that esse meant "to exisff' for Augustine and could not be interpreted as meaning "to be unchangeable." That there is any doubt that esse meant "to exist" for Augustine seems to be ruled out by Anderson (p. 40). One of Anderson's most interesting theses is the suggestion that the Augustinian distinction between being and non-being is substantially the same as the Thomistie distinction between essence and existence. For Augustine God alone is esse itself, while all creatures are limited by non-esse, i.e., they share in both esse and non-esse. Similarly, for Aquinas only God is esse itself, while all creatures merely possess esse. It is evident that for both philosophers the distinction between what is esse itself and what is not csse itself provides an important way of distinguishing between God and creatures. How much more alike the two distinctions are will depend on how the notion of esse is interpreted by Augustine and Aquinas. One problem is bound to arise: If for Aquinas the "proportionality" of being is to be found in the relationship between esse and essentia in ens, while for Augustine essentia ---- ens, then either Augustine does not have a Thomistic notion of the analogy of being or it must be shown what Augustine 's equivalent for the Thomistic essentia would be. Non-being does not seem adequate for such a role. A good portion of Professor Anderson's essay is devoted to discussing Augustinian metaphysics precisely in the areas in which Gilson claims that Augustine's essentialism creates problems for Augustine the Christian. These include the problems of proving the existence of God, creation and the nature of participation. It is pointed out that many of Augustine's remarks which have frequently been supposed to be of Neoplatonic inspiration are in fact based upon Scripture as far as the Saint is concerned. Although I find some portions of his essay obscure, on the whole I should say that Professor Anderson's study is quite exciting and a considerable challenge to those who are tempted to draw striking contrasts between the "essentialism" of Augustine and the "existentialism" of Aquinas. BRUCE GARSIDE McGiU University Eight Philosophers o] the Italian Renaissance. By Paul Oskar Kristeller. (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1964.Pp. ix -~ 194.$5.00.) The eight chapters constituting the main body of this volume, devoted in succession to Petrarch, Valla, Ficino, Pieo, Pomponazzi, Telesio, Patrizi, and Bruno, are based on the Arensberg Lectures which were delivered by Professor Kristeller in 1961 at Stanford University. Footnotes and bibliographical references have been added, and as an appendix there is included an essay on "The Medieval Antecedents of Renaissance Humanism" which, though delivered as a lecture on several occasions, is here printed for the first time. The purpose of the series of eight lectures, as Kristeller indicates in his short preface, was "to give a brief survey of Italian thought during the Renaissance period". The aspects of Italian Renaissance thought, represented by the authors selected for discussion, are those traditionally described as humanism, Florentine Platonism, Paduan Aristotelianism, and speculative philosophies of nature. As representatives of the humanist movement Petrarch and Valla are selected, not merely because of their prominence but in order to make clear that Renaissance humanism cannot be identified with preference for a particular philosophical tradition. Petrarch preferred Plato to Aristotle, Augustine to Aquinas, and Cicero and Seneca to the Epicureans, whereas Valla preferred the Epicurean philosophy to that of the Stoics or Platonists, and appealed to Quintilian more than to Cicero in his proposals for a reform of... (shrink)

According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity (...) of this principle is a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is the reconstruction of ancient Greek and ancient Roman models of religiosity as anthropological invariants that determine the patterns of thinking and being of subsequent eras. Theoretical basis. The author applied the statement of Protagoras that "Man is the measure of all things" to the reconstruction of the religious sphere of culture. I proceed from the fact that each historical community has a set of inherent ideas about the principles of reality, which (...) found unique "universes of meanings". The historical space acquires anthropological properties that determine the specific mythology of the respective societies, as well as their spiritual successors. In particular, the religious models of ancient Greece and ancient Rome had a huge influence on formation of the worldview of the Christian civilization of the West. Originality. Multiplicity of the Olympic mythology contributed to the diversity of the expression forms of the Greek genius, which manifested itself in different fields of cultural activity, not reducible to political, philosophical or religious unity. The poverty of Roman mythology was compensated by a clear awareness of the unity of the community, which for all historical vicissitudes had always remained an unchanging ideal, and which was conceived as a reflection of the unity of the heavens. These two approaches to the divine predetermined the formation of two interacting, but conceptually different anthropological paradigms of Antiquity. Conclusions. Western concepts of divinity are invariants of two basic theological concepts – "Greek" and "Roman". These are ideal types, so these two tendencies can co-exist in one society. The Roman trend continued to be realized by the anti-Roman religion, which took Roman forms and Roman name. Iconoclasm was a Byzantine version of the Reformation, promoted by the Isaurian emperors and failed due to the strong Hellenistic naturalistic lobby. Modern "Romans" are trying to get rid of the last elements of religious naturalism, and modern "Greeks" are trying to preserve the Hellenic elements in Christianity. Patterns can be transformed, but the observational view will still be able to identify their lineage. The developed model allows a deeper understanding of the culture of both ancient societies, as well as the outlook of Western man. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine a few potential problems when inquiring into the ethics of medieval Christian and Islamic mystical traditions: First, there are terminological and methodological worries about defining mysticism and doing comparative philosophy in general. Second, assuming that the Divine represents the highest Good in such traditions, and given the apophaticism on the part of many mystics in both religions, there is a question of whether or not such traditions can provide a coherent theory of value. Finally, (...) the antinomian tendencies and emphasis on passivity of some mystics might lead one to wonder whether their prescriptive exhortations can constitute a coherent theory of right action. We tackle each of these concerns in turn and discuss how they might be addressed, in an attempt to show how medieval mysticism, as a fundamentally practical enterprise, deserves more attention from practical and moral philosophy than it has thus far received. (shrink)

Jerry Walls has recently argued that no Christian theist should be a compatibilist because, on compatibilism, it is “all but impossible to maintain... the perfect goodness of God.” More specifically, he contends that Christian compatibilism involves God in manipulation that undermines human moral responsibility, that such manipulation makes God morally culpable for evil human actions, that Christian compatibilism exacerbates the problem of evil in a way that Christian libertarianism does not, and that (...) Christian compatibilism entails universalism. In this paper, we argue that Walls is mistaken on all counts. (shrink)

In his argument for the possibility of knowledge of spatial objects, in the Transcendental Deduction of the B-version of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes a crucial distinction between space as “form of intuition” and space as “formal intuition.” The traditional interpretation regards the distinction between the two notions as reflecting a distinction between indeterminate space and determinations of space by the understanding, respectively. By contrast, a recent influential reading has argued that the two notions can be (...) fused into one and that space as such is first generated by the understanding through an act of synthesis of the imagination. Against this reading, this article argues that a key characteristic of space as a form of intuition is its nonconceptual unity, which defines the properties of space and is as such necessarily independent of determination by the understanding through the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. The conceptual unity that the understanding prescribes to the manifold in intuition, by means of the categories, defines the formal intuition. Furthermore, this article argues that it is the sui generis, nonconceptual unity of space, when takenas a unity for the understanding by means of conceptual determination, that first enables geometric knowledge and knowledge of spatially located particulars. (shrink)

Traditional Christianity holds that God is a singular way, not dependent on the conceptual machinations of humans. I argue that God can be plural ways, different in different human conceptual schemes, all the while holding to traditional Christianity. In short, I provide a framework for an ontological pluralism that extends not just to the world being various ways but to God being various ways.

Traditional Christianity holds that God is a singular way, not dependent on the conceptual machinations of humans. I argue that God can be plural ways, different in different human conceptual schemes, all the while holding to traditional Christianity. In short, I provide a framework for an ontological pluralism that extends not just to the world being various ways but to God being various ways.

Defining ‘presentism’ in a way that saves it from being trivially false yet metaphysically substantively distinct from eternalism is no mean feat, as the first part of this collection testifies. In Wuthrich (forthcoming), I have offered an attempt to achieve just this, arguing that this is best done in the context of modern spacetime theories. Here, I shall refrain from going through all the motions again and simply state the characterization of an ersatzist version of presentism as (...) it has emerged from considerations there. Any acceptable formulation of presentism should remain neutral among competing spacetime theories in order to enable the present project of assessing the compatibility of presentism with various theories of modern physics, including both spacetime theories and theories of physical processes situated in a spatiotemporal setting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religious Voices in Public PlacesTimothy A Beach-VerheyReligious Voices in Public Places Edited by Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 330 pp. $53.91Religious Voices in Public Places grew out of a conference at the University of Leeds in 2003. It makes an important contribution to continuing debates about religion and contemporary liberalism. Acknowledging that John Rawls provides the paradigmatic model for articulating modern (...) liberal ideals, the authors take [End Page 203] his work as a starting point; yet through critical engagement with his work, they move the discussion about liberal ideals forward in new directions. Although they recognize that the United States has long stood as the classical instance of a liberal polity, they widen their attention to other liberal nations that have different ways of relating to the religious sphere.The book is helpfully divided into four parts dealing with philosophical views, theological views, public policy issues, and national contexts. Each section investigates the proper role of religious voices in an increasingly global and pluralistic political environment. While the authors bring different perspectives to this principle concern, they all tend to agree that religious voices contribute to public discourse and that liberal democracy does not require their exclusion. “Indeed,” as Linda Hogan writes in the introduction, “running throughout the volume is an affinity for approaches that believe that the route to a durable political culture lies in serious and systematic engagement with different, and even opposing, comprehensive doctrines” (7).The essays in the section on philosophical views engage critically with John Rawls. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Raymond Plant each argue that Rawls’s version of public reason requires a degree of moral consensus that is both unrealistic and illiberal. Rawls’s view of public reason, they argue, stacks the deck in favor of particular (liberal) assumptions, making its ideals of freedom and equality a sham. In turn, Maureen Junker-Kenny looks for a more adequate conception of public reasoning in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. In the section on theological views, Luke Bretherton, P. Travis Kroeker, and Robert Gascoigne mine the Christian tradition for resources that engage pluralistic societies in ways that neither retreat into particularistic enclaves nor jettison Christianity’s distinctive faith for the sake of intelligibility. In their various ways, they call into question the prevailing view that religious convictions are a threat to a pluralistic society that values freedom, equality, and solidarity. In the section on public policy, Nigel Biggar, Paul Weithman, and Linda Hogan examine these questions through the lens of physician-assisted suicide, religion in public education, and international human rights; they make cogent arguments for including religious perspectives, in all their complexity and multiplicity, in the political life and public discourse of liberal democratic societies. The last section, on particular national contexts, makes it clear that there is more than one way for liberal societies to deal with religious voices. Peter Sedgwick examines the role of the Anglican Church in English public life; Brian Stiltner and Steven Michels study the role of religion in US political campaigns; and Jocelyne Cesari compares the way different liberal democratic polities in the West have responded to the expanding role of Islam in their societies.This fine volume of essays demonstrates that the discussion about religion and public life is moving beyond the stale binary categories of secular liberalism [End Page 204] and religious traditionalism. These essays exemplify and contribute to the more interesting discussion that is beginning to take place as we leave behind simplistic models in favor of more nuanced, rich, and realistic assessments of public discourse and political decision making in an increasingly diverse yet interdependent social environment. Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan are to be thanked and commended for bringing this volume to fruition.Timothy A Beach-VerheyFaison Presbyterian ChurchCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 287-292 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of (...) Taoist Mysticism. By Harold D. Roth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xv + 275 pp. Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China. By Livia Kohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xii + 281 pp. Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong. By Bartholomew P. M. Tsui. Hong Kong: Chinese Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 1991. 207 pp. Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China. By Kenneth Dean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii + 406 pp. Buddhism in China has many forms: sometimes functioning as a foreign object provoking attraction, rivalry, or persecution, and at other times being so integrated that it epitomized or completed Chinese culture. Although the elite monastic community maintained its distinctive Buddhist identity throughout its history, the story of the various forms of popular appropriation of Buddhist elements beyond the monastic [End Page 287] walls is just beginning to be studied. Probably the most important arena where Buddhism became part of Chinese culture is its mixture with Daoist practice, but only in the 1990s have Daoist studies evolved to the point where the Buddhist presence can be traced and evaluated. The four books listed above are among a shelf-full of new studies on Daoism that offer resources for exploring the complex relationships among Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese culture.The study of the Inner Training by Harold Roth clarifies a core practice within early Daoism that was later integrated--usually without acknowledgment--as a central practice by both Confucianists and Buddhists, especially Ch'an. In contrast, the definitive study by Livia Kohn of the Xiaodao lun shows a carefully constructed Buddhist attack on Daoist scriptures. During the last millennium, the two most influential integrations of the three religions--Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism--were achieved by Wang Chong-yang (1113-1170) and Lin Zhao-en (1517-1598). Bartholomew Tsui offers an important field study of the liturgical practices of the contemporary followers of Wang as embodied in Hong Kong temples of Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, while Kenneth Dean provides a massive field report of over one thousand temples of the Xiajiao movement in contemporary Fujian Province that revere the teachings of Lin Zhao-en as Lord of the Three-in-One. All four books provide rich materials for reflecting on interreligious encounter in China.The archaeological discovery of lost Chinese texts has made clear that the Lao-tzu is no earlier than the beginning of the third century b.C.E. and did not exist at the time of Confucius. Harold Roth's book argues that earlier than the book of Lao-tzu there was a movement of internal cultivation that was first expressed in two fourth-century b.C.E. texts, the first seven chapters of Chuang-tzu and a text found among the seventy-six texts in the Kuan-tzu that Roth calls Inner Training. Roth proposes that this latter text constitutes the "original Tao" in the sense that it is the core practice embodied in those thinkers who were grouped together by later historians. Roth observes that the earliest identification of a Daoist school (daojia) by Ssu-ma T'an about 110 b.C.E. emphasized techniques or practices, "not the philosophies that developed along with them and that support them.... Techniques must be seen as a way to define pre... (shrink)

Alfred Müller-Armack was one of the very important policy-makers who initiated the West-German economic recovery after WWII. He devised the underlying economic program of the so-called “German Miracle”, which was not a miracle at all. It was the outcome of a rigorous rule transformation from the bankrupt central planning of the Nazi- regime to a market economic order based on the principles of classical liberalism combined with a social safety net for all who suffered from the terrible consequences of war (...) destruction. He called his program “Social Market Economy”, thereby expressing that the risky game of the market needs a social safety net to make his program acceptable for the majority of the German citizens.Müller-Armack was not only the Head of the Central Policy Unit at the Federal Economic Ministry under Ludwig Erhard for twelve years but also a well-known university teacher of economics. In the tradition of Max Weber he combined this subject with the theory of economic sociology, and especially, the sociology of religion. In this respect he was an early author in the field which nowadays is named “cultural economics”. His publications on the impact of religious beliefs of greek-orthodox societies on the economic performance of South-East European countries are still of great interest for the present debates about the economic consequences of Islam.Alfred Müller-Armack fut l’un des très importants politiciens qui initièrent l’économie de l’ Allemagne de l’Ouest après la 2ème Guerre Mondiale. Il conçut dans ses grandes lignes le programme économique du soi disant « Miracle Allemand ». Ce fut le résultat d’une règle rigoureuse de transformation à partir de la faillite de la planification centrale du régime Nazi vers un ordre marchand fondé sur les principes du libéralisme classique combiné à un filet de sécurité sociale pour tous ceux qui avaient souffert des conséquences terribles des destructions de la guerre. Il appela son programme « Economie sociale de marché », exprimant ainsi que le jeu risqué du marché nécessite un filet de sécurité sociale pour rendre son programme acceptable par la majorité des citoyens allemands. Müller-Armack n’était pas seulement le chef de l’unité politique centrale au ministère fédéral de l’économie sous la direction de Ludwig Erhard pendant 12 ans, mais également un professeur très réputé d’économie à l’université. Dans la tradition de Max Weber, il associe ses sujets avec la théorie économique de la sociologie et plus particulièrement, la sociologie de la religion. Dans cette mesure, il fut un pionnier dans le champ de ce que l’on appelle aujourd’hui « l’économie de la culture ». Ses publications sur l’impact des croyances religieuses des sociétés grecques orthodoxes sur la performance économique des pays du Sud-Est Européen restent d’un grand intérêt pour les débats actuels au sujet des conséquences économiques de l’Islam. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present an argument against Husserl’s analysis of picture consciousness. Husserl’s analysis of picture consciousness (as it can be found primarily in the recently translated volume Husserliana 23) moves from a theory of depiction in general to a theory of perceptual imagination. Though, I think that Husserl’s thesis that picture consciousness is different from depictive and linguistic consciousness is legitimate, and that Husserl’s phenomenology avoids the errors of linguistic theories, such as Goodman’s, I (...) submit that his overall theory is unacceptable, especially when it is applied to works of art. Regarding art, the main problem of Husserl’s theory is the assumption that pictures are constituted primarily as a conflict between perception/physical picture thing and imagination/picture object. Against this mentalist claim, I maintain, from a hermeneutic point of view, that pictures are the result of perceptual formations [Bildungen]. I then claim that Husserl’s theory fails, since it does not take into account what I call “plastic perception” [Bildliches Sehen], which plays a prominent role not only within the German tradition of art education but also within German art itself. In this connection, “plastic thinking” [Bildliches Denken] was prominent especially in Klee, in Kandinsky, and in Beuys, as well as in the overall doctrine of the Bauhaus. Ultimately, I argue that Husserl’s notion of picture consciousness and general perceptive imaginary consciousness must be replaced with a more dynamic model of the perception of pictures and art work that takes into account (a) the constructive and plastic moment, (b) the social dimension and (c) the genetic dimension of what it means to see something in something (Wollheim). (shrink)

Thoughts and theoretical reflections about “governance” in Islamic society, whether theorizing about the desired structure of government or describing the characteristics of an ideal ruler, is one of the most important topics studied in the field of political thought and philosophy in Islam, to which great names such as Farabi, etc. are connected. In this context, this research, through a comparative approach, seeks to examine and analyze the views of Farabi and Sohrawardi about the ideal ruler from the perspective (...) of a judicial approach. Based on such an approach, a philosopher like Farabi considers the different ways of connecting to the active intellect as the separation of the theoretical intellect from matter and the connection to the active intellect, and a divine sage like Sohrawardi also speaks of the separation of the theoretical intellect and the separation of the power of imagination, which is manifested in a prophet. In the eyes of both thinkers, human reason has the ability to overcome material existence. This type of excellence is a condition for achieving complete metaphysical knowledge and theoretical perfection. The ultimate happiness is the achievement of the active intellect. “The Absolute First Leader” and “Quṭb (Imam or pole)” have both achieved this position. Introduction The ideal government and ruler, in the system of Islamic philosophy, are based on the approach of philosophers to wisdom and their opinions and ruling foundations. The philosophers’ approach to wisdom and intellect in the system of Islamic philosophy has changed and developed from Farabi to Sohrawardi and later. Based on this change in the method and approach to wisdom of the sages, philosophical issues and topics including the issue of government and the ideal ruler, have also undergone changes and transformations. Despite the significant evolution of Islamic philosophy in the two Peripatetic and Illuminative systems, it seems that the ideal ruler in Sohrawardi’s philosophy, which he refers to as “the pole/Imam (quṭb),” is compatible with the first leader of al-Farabi’s utopia. The problem of this research is to investigate the characteristic features of “Qutb” and “First Leader/Philosopher” in the Peripatetic and Illuminative systems of philosophy based on Sohrawardi and Farabi’s approach to wisdom and its types. “Qutb” in Sohrawardi’s thought In the wisdom of enlightenment, the perfect human being and the “Qutb” to whom the position of caliph belongs, is perfect in intuitive and argumentative wisdom, and in other words, he is both adept in reflection and adept in discussion. In Sohrawardi’s thought, the rulers must know wisdom as well be practical wayfarers, that is, they must possess a combination of theoretical and practical wisdom. On the one hand, Sohrawardi’s theory is influenced and consistent with Plato’s theory, both of which emphasize the “ruling sage,” and on the other hand, it is influenced by the Iranian tradition and the benefit of the ideal kings from wisdom and intellect, and “Khurra-yi Kiani”1 and the approval of God, which is in the interpretation Religious and close to Sufism and Shiism, it is interpreted as Qutb and divine sage. A Qutb or an Imam is one who is connected with the active intellect, receives grace from the higher realm, and spreads goodness, prosperity, knowledge, justice, and virtue among religions with a divine plan. “The First Leader” in Farabi’s thought The First Leader is someone who does not need the guidance of another human being; rather, all sciences and knowledge are obtained by him in esse and he is able to infer appropriate actions and behavior from general reasoning. He can also best guide others to perform these meritorious deeds; the same actions and actions that bring a person to happiness. These abilities are realized in people of great and outstanding nature by connecting to the active intellect. Such a person, in fact, in the eyes of the ancients, is a king and ruler and worthy of revelation. The rule of such a person is the first rule and his leadership is the first leadership, and the rule of others that is through his rule will be the subordinate rule, and people under the rule of this leader and leader are virtuous people, the chosen ones, and the fortunate ones. Conclusion In examining and comparing the two viewpoints, it should be said that a philosopher like Farabi considers the different ways of connecting to the active intellect to be the separation of the theoretical intellect from matter and the connection to the active intellect, and a Godly sage like Sohrawardi also speaks of the separation of the theoretical intellect and the power of imagination, which manifests itself in a prophet, where we witness detachment from matter and the ability to remove the soul from the body. In the eyes of both thinkers, human reason has the ability to overcome material existence. This type of excellence is a condition for achieving complete metaphysical knowledge and theoretical perfection. The ultimate happiness is the achievement of the active intellect.”First Leader”and “Qutb” have both achieved this position. Based on this, the complete transcendence of material existence is possible for certain people. (shrink)

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working definition (...) of a global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)