Panpsychism has become a highly attractive position in the philosophy of mind. On panpsychism, both the physical and the mental are inseparable and fundamental features of reality. Panentheism has also become immensely popular in the philosophy of religion. Panentheism strives for a higher reconciliation of an atheistic pantheism, on which the universe itself is causa sui, and the ontological dualism of necessarily existing, eternal creator and contingent, finite creation. Historically and systematically, panpsychism and panentheism often went together as essential parts (...) of an all-embracing metaphysical theory of Being. The present collection of essays analyses the relation between panpsychism and panentheism and provides critical reflections on the significance of panpsychistic and panentheistic thinking for recent debates in philosophy and theology. (shrink)

We do not believe that logic is the sole answer to deep and intriguing questions about human behaviour, but we think that it might be a useful tool in simulating and understanding it to a certain degree and in specifically restricted areas of application. We do not aim to resolve the question of what rational behaviour in games with mistaken and changing beliefs is. Rather, we develop a formal and abstract framework that allows us to reason about behaviour in games (...) with mistaken and changing beliefs leaving aside normative questions concerning whether the agents are behaving “rationally”; we focus on what agents do in a game. In this paper, we are not concerned with the reasoning process of the economic agent; rather, our intended application is artificial agents, e.g., autonomous agents interacting with a human user or with each other as part of a computer game or in a virtual world. We give a story of mistaken beliefs that is a typical example of the situation in which we should want our formal setting to be applied. Then we give the definitions for our formal system and how to use this setting to get a backward induction solution. We then apply our semantics to the story related earlier and give an analysis of it. Our final section contains a discussion of related work and future projects. We discuss the advantages of our approach over existing approaches and indicate how it can be connected to the existing literature. (shrink)

Although 'most contemporary analytic philosophers [endorse] a physicalist picture of the world' (A. Newen; V. Hoffmann; M. Esfeld, 'Preface to Mental Causation, Externalism and Self-Knowledge', Erkenntnis , 67 (2007), p. 147), it is unclear what exactly the physicalist thesis states. The response that physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical does not solve the problem but is a precise statement of the problem because 'the claim is hopelessly vague' (G. Hellman; F. Thompson, 'Physicalism: Ontology, Determination, and Reduction', Journal of (...) Philosophy , 72 (1975), p. 552). I argue that physicalism in fact should be the thesis that every existing particular essentially exemplifies properties the exemplification of which does not conceptually entail the existence of conscious beings. Physicalism thus is a purely philosophical thesis with no intrinsic relation to physics. 1. (shrink)

Bu araştırmada özellikle Batılı bir manevi uygulama olan lectio divina'nın ana unsurlarından bahsedilmeye çalışılmıştır. Kutsal Kitap dışında okumaya çok fazla önem verilmeyen erken dönem Hıristiyan manastırcılığının ortaya çıktığı çöl keşişliğinden yerleşik manastır düzenine geçiş sürecinde birçok yeni uygulamalar ortaya çıkmıştır. Okuma alışkanlığı da yerleşik manastırlara geçildikten sonra manastırın vazgeçilmez unsurlarından biri haline gelmiştir. Bu terimin manastır literatürüne girmesi ise onu bir tür manastır disiplini olarak günlük manastır takvimine dahil eden Aziz Benedikt'e kadar uzanmaktadır. Manastırlarda uygulanan lectio uygulaması, bu okuma (...) eyleminin içeriğinin ne olduğu, süresinin ne kadar olduğu ve nasıl tatbik edilmesi gerektiği gibi birtakım soruları da beraberinde getirmiştir. Bununla ilgili olarak, özellikle Aziz Benedikt'in de çağdaşı olan Cassiodorus'un manastır literatürüne yaptığı katkılar ve manastır okulu ideali önem arz etmektedir. Ayrıca çalışmada, lectio ile doğrudan ilişkili olması ve bilginin muhafazasının sağlanıp sonraki nesillere aktarılması açısından önemli bir yeri bulunan manastır kopyalama faaliyetleri hakkında da bilgi verilmiştir. Buradan hareketle, manastır kütüphanelerinde okunan Kutsal Kitap ve dini eserlerin dışında kalan pagan literatürüne dair, erken dönemden 12. yüzyıla kadar manastır önde gelenleri tarafından yapılan yorumlar incelenmeye çalışılmıştır. Lectio divina, Roma Katolik Kilisesi'ne bağlı olan manastırlar arasında popülerlik kazanmış ve 12. yüzyıla gelindiğinde II. Guigo tarafından bugün bilinen hali olan dört aşamalı okuma sürecine dönüşmüştür. Bu dört aşamalı sürecin detayları ise son bölümde verilmeye çalışılmış ve sonuç bölümünde yapılan değerlendirmeler ile araştırma sonlandırılmıştır. (shrink)

Among the most outstanding discoveries of the last century is one that is not quite as momentous as the theory of relativity or cybernetics. It may even still be enigmatic. It has no one single author, it is not expressed in a single formula, conception, or invention. Nonetheless it is worth all the others combined.

On the one hand, arguably, I am neither this nor that. Arguably, neither is God this or that – so, am I God? Otherwise it seems that I must be this and God must be that. On the other hand, the being of the universe is not something of which I could plausibly be construed as the ultimate cause. That is God's creative act. Because I do not create the universe, I am not God. So I am God and I (...) am not God. Here's a solution: God is One but also Three, I am but one. (shrink)

Benedikt Stattler was born on January 30, 1728 in Kötzting in Bavaria. In 1745 he entered the Society of Jesus, to which he remained loyal in spirit and in deed until his death, in spite of its suppression in 1773 by Clement XIV From 1760 until 1781 he taught philosophy and theology in Staubing, Solothurn, Innsbruck and Ingolstadt, where the famous J. M. Sailer, Bishop of Regensburg, was his pupil. He died in Munich in 1797. Stattler, then, lived and (...) worked at the very height of the so-called Aufklarungszeit, a fact which had the deepest repercussions on his whole career. He was a zealous man and truly apostolic. Perhaps, if anything he was over-zealous and was in fact carried much too far in his spirit of accommodation and flexibility when faced with the rationalist enemies of the Church and Christianity. He was filled with the idea that they should be met on their own ground in order to win them for the Church. And in order to do that he decided that he must break with tradition. Modern modes of thinking must be used if there is to be even the possibility of discussion with present-day thinkers, was his principle. Accordingly he brushed aside Aristotle, St. Thomas and all the Scholastics and made his own the philosophy of Christian Wolff. For him that was the only way of preserving the Christian and Catholic faith and of safeguarding Christian morality, the Christian way of life. Filled with that idea he wrote indefatigably. Many of his works, however, very early fell foul of the Roman authorities and were put on the Index of forbidden books. And in fact, as Dr. Scholz rightly points out over and over again, Stattler became a victim of the Aufklärung which he sought to Christianize and he himself became a rationalist and, in morals, and out-and-out subjectivist. (shrink)

Abstract G.A. Cohen has produced an influential criticism of libertarian?ism that posits joint ownership of everything in the world other than labor, with each joint owner having a veto right over any potential use of the world. According to Cohen, in that world rationality would require that wealth be divided equally, with no differential accorded to talent, ability, or effort. A closer examination shows that Cohen's argument rests on two central errors of reasoning and does not support his egalitarian conclusions, (...) even granting his assumption of joint ownership. That assumption was rejected by Locke, Pufendorf and other writers on property for reasons that Cohen does not rebut. (shrink)

This article examines the main aspects of Husserl's phenomenology, which are analyzed in "Appearance and Sense" by Gustav Shpet: the relation between sense and comprehension and between noesis and noema. Shpet emphasizes the hermeneutical theme of "comprehension" as a resolutive dimension to solve aspects not clarified by Husserl. Shpet's critical enquiry, in the course of his subsequent observation, converge into an hermeneutical logic. Shpet identifies the centrality of language as a form of thinking, through the recovery of Humbodt's meaning of (...) the "inner form". (shrink)