This article presents important ideas in Raimon Panikkar’s notion of ecosophy, thus entering more deeply into the wisdom of the oikos. The aim is to highlight the originality of our author’s ecosophical proposal, fruit of a fertile intercultural and inter-religious dialogue. Although the author did not develop systematically the notion of ecosophy, the ontology of his mature years, expressed in the notion of the rhythm of being, can bring us closer to a new understanding of this wisdom, manifested in (...) a becoming in which the divine, the human and the cosmic each have a part. The article will show that Panikkar’s notion of ecosophy sets us in the contemplative life and the wisdom of interindependence. (shrink)

It is more than a century since what we call the ‘history of religions’ was discovered and has been studied. But only recently have we realized that the ‘geography of religions’ is just as important. East and West are essential geopolitical categories, determined by cultural, historical and even religious differences: an Indian and a Swedish Catholic (both of them members of a minority) display notable religious differences, as great as those that separate an Indonesian from a Saudi Muslim (both members (...) of a majority). The ‘geography of religions’ cannot be ignored. Differences exist but simplifications must be avoided: we have to go beyond the cliché according to which the Orient is mystical and the West pragmatic. Logical thought is no more eastern than western. There is scholastic philosophy in the East as well as the West, magic and rationalism are found everywhere. But as human beings are intrinsically earthbound beings, even though they are more than ‘of this world’, East and West are categories that are not only geographical and historical but also anthropological. There is an East and a West in each of us. That is why it is possible for us to understand each other. (shrink)

In this paper we address our efforts to extend the well-known connection in equational logic between equational theories and fully invariant congruences to other–possibly infinitary–logics. In the special case of algebras, this problem has been formerly treated by H. J. Hoehnke [10] and R. W. Quackenbush [14]. Here we show that the connection extends at least up to the universal fragment of logic. Namely, we establish that the concept of universal theory matches the abstract notion of fully invariant system. We (...) also prove that, inside this wide group of theories, the ones which are strict universal Horn correspond to fully invariant closure systems, whereas those which are universal atomic can be characterized as principal fully invariant systems. (shrink)

This paper is a continuation of [27], where we provide the background and the basic tools for studying the structural properties of classes of models over languages without equality. In the context of such languages, it is natural to make distinction between two kinds of classes, the so-called abstract classes, which correspond to those closed under isomorphic copies in the presence of equality, and the reduced classes, i.e., those obtained by factoring structures by their largest congruences. The generic problem described (...) in [27] is to investigate under what conditions this reduction process does not alter the metatheory of a class. Here we focus our attention on a concrete aspect of this generic problem that we import from universal algebra, namely the existence and description of free models. As in [27], we can find here again the basic notion of protoalgebraicity, which was originally introduced in [7] as the weakest condition to guarantee that the reduction process behaves reasonably well from an algebraic point of view. Our concern, however, takes us to handle a further notion, that of semialgebraicity, which corresponds to the notion of equivalential logic of [18]; semialgebraicity turns out to be the property which ensures that freeness is fully preserved by the reduction process. (shrink)

Esta aula inaugural, proferida por Raimon Panikkar no Institut Superior de Ciènces Religioses de Vic, em 2002, analisa o problema da irrelevância a que está condenada a teologia nos dias atuais, a marginalização do teólogo e das faculdades de teologia. O texto procura investigar as causas desta lamentável situação e se pergunta pela possibilidade de mudança deste quadro. Organizada a reflexão nestes três pontos, o escrito diagnostica um desvio da rota evangélica como uma das possíveis causas da perda de (...) relevância da teologia. Investigando a interna relação entre filosofia e teologia, o presente texto desvela os distintos aspectos deste matrimônio. Por um lado, chama-se atenção para a confusão entre os domínios de cada disciplina, por outro, reafirma-se a necessidade de um urgente reenlace entre alma e corpo, filosofia e teologia, respectivamente. Além de abandonar o divórcio com a filosofia, para ressuscitar, a teologia cristã, como expressão da religião da Palavra, deve fazer-se cada vez mais ouvinte do Mistério, abrir-se ao símbolo, evitando converter a fé em uma ideologia. Palavras-chave:Teologia; Filosofia; Cristianismo. ABSTRACT The Aula Magna delivered by Raimon Panikkar in the Superior Institute of Religious Science in Vic, in 2002, analyses the problem of irrelevance to which the theology of the present times, the marginalization of the theologian and the faculties of theology are condemned. The text tries to investigate the causes of this lamentable situation and asks about the possibility of changing this state of affairs. Organized as a reflection on these three points, the text diagnoses the straying from the evangelical pathway as one of the possible causes of this loss of relevance of theology. Investigating the internal relationship between philosophy and theology, the present text reveals the distinct aspects of this union. On one side, it calls attention to the confusion of the dominion of each discipline and on the other; it reaffirms the necessity of an urgent reuniting of the body and the soul, philosophy and theology respectively. Besides abandoning the divorce from philosophy, in order to resurrect Christian theology as an expression of the religion of the Word, it must also become increasingly the listener to the Mystery, opening itself to the symbol, avoiding the conversion of faith into ideology. Key words: Theology; Philosophy; Christianity. (shrink)

This second volume of Raimon Panikkar's Opera Omnia offers Panikkar's reflections on religion in our era as well as in many other historical epochs. Because no particular religion can claim to exhaust the universal range of human experience, Panikkar argues that in a globalized world, a kind of religious pluralism is a necessary reality, and dialogue between different religions, cultures, and worldviews is an imperative of our time. The first section of this volume expands on the concept of religion (...) from different viewpoints and develops some of the most universal aspects of religiosity. The second deals with comparative religion and with the religious philosophy of encounter, while the third section includes more specific topics, among which are the body and medicine, because religion reconnects not just humanity to God, but also the spirit to the body. Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) made pioneering contributions to interreligious dialogue, comparative theology, and the phenomenology of religion while bridging different religions and cultures (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism), and advanced the global conversation between the so-called sacred and secular worlds. These diverse contributions were tied together in a unifying vision he called his cosmotheandric intuition, the deep interconnection of the Divine, the Cosmic, and the Human. (Publisher). (shrink)

Explores the notion of "sacred secularity," a non-dualistic concept of reality in which everything is interrelated.

Antonio Argandoña, Norbert Bilbeny, Victòria Camps, Miquel Calsina, Àngel Castiñeira, Cristian Palazzi, Ferran Requejo, Raimon Ribera, Begoña Román, Ferran Sàez, Miquel Seguró, Francesc Torralba, Josep Maria Vallès, Rosamund Thomas Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics 2012 3(3):9-16.

Panikkar, Raimon. La religión, el mundo y el cuerpo. Trads. Antoni Martínez Riu, Julio Trebolle Barrera y Martín Molinero. Barcelona: Herder, 2014. 156 pp.

Central to Raimon Panikkar’s work is the acclaimed Cosmotheandric epigram, according to which reality has three interrelated and irreducible dimensions, the human, the cosmos, and the divine. The paper examines this thesis and examines related concepts, such as ‘sacred secularity’ in Panikkar’s thinking. The overall pluralistic thesis allows for dialogue, communication and conversations across cultures. Panikkar considers that a new mythos may be emerging that places value on actions in this world and on temporality. Related to the above is (...) Ken Wilber’s ‘Integral Theory’ that underscores the stages of development of consciousness and worldviews, especially with regard to spirituality. Different perspectives on the divine and atheism are said to arise at each level of development. Wilber’s principal thesis is that religions and spiritualities have continuing and future potentials as ‘conveyor-belts’ of human development in three movements of the Spirit : art, religion and science. A brief discussion will follow on ‘participative spirituality’ and Nondual Śaiva Tantra, and their relation to contemporary atheism. The paper argues that rich space and forum for dialogue are opened between the discourses explored here with global a/theism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010):Life and LegacyJ. Abraham Vélez de CeaThe interreligious theologian, intercultural philosopher, and pluralist mystic Raimon Panikkar died in Tavertet, Barcelona, on 26 August 2010. He was ninety-one. A pioneer of interreligious dialogue and comparative theology, Panikkar claimed to be at the same time yet without contradiction a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu, and a secular man.Panikkar's multiple religious belonging was not a matter of choice (...) and shallow eclecticism but rather a matter of personal experience and profound spiritual growth. His distinction between eclecticism and syncretism might be helpful to understand the complex nature of his religious identity. Eclecticism "is an uncritical mixture of religious traditions and an agreement among them obtained by chopping off all possible discrepancies in favor of an amorphous common denominator." On the contrary, syncretism "is allowing for a possible assimilation of elements by virtue of which these elements cease to be foreign bodies so that organic growth within each tradition is possible, and the mutual fecundation of religious traditions becomes a genuine option."1Another point I would like to clarify is that Panikkar's multiple religious belonging was not a question of being primarily Christian and secondarily something else, as if truth could be quantified. Panikkar objected to this "modern" way of thinking. I remember a conversation with him about this issue in which he compared these attempts to quantify religious identity to those who try to understand the Trinity as being either one or three. He said that if you begin counting you miss the point, and then he added in a defiant tone: "I am 100 percent Christian, 100 percent Hindu, 100 percent Buddhist, and 100 percent secular." When I insisted and told him that for many people multiple religious belonging is just not possible, Panikkar replied: "Well, it is my experience; I cannot help it."Panikkar's multiple religious belonging was often misunderstood and cost him the distrust of both Christians and Hindus. For instance, in 1966, Panikkar applied for a chair in Hindu philosophy at the prestigious Banaras Hindu University. Though [End Page 215] everybody agreed he was by far the most competent candidate, he was not offered the position because for many conservative Hindus Panikkar was not Hindu enough.Similarly, many conservative Catholics today would say that Panikkar went too far with his distinction between Christ and the historical Jesus; for them Panikkar was not Christian enough. However, this would be unfair. As I understand Panikkar, he was not trying to undermine any Christian claim. Quite the contrary, he was challenging what he perceived as a tribal Christology and a reduction of Christianity to a two-thousand-year-old sect. Time will tell, like it did with great thinkers such as Nāgārjuna (ca. 150-250), Śaṅ-kara (788-820), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), and Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1327), who were also criticized at first by their respective traditions. Perhaps Panikkar was simply ahead of his time, and what today seems controversial to some will become the norm in the future; it would not be the first time.Panikkar was an embodiment of interreligious dialogue, and his theology was the result of such dialogue. He was born in Barcelona on 3 November 1918. His mother was a Catholic from Catalonia, and his father was a Hindu from Kerala, India. After studying philosophy and natural sciences in Barcelona, Madrid, and Bonn, he joined the recently created Opus Dei in 1940. It should be clarified that in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war and compared to the pre-Vatican II National Catholicism of Franco's regime, Opus Dei was a progressive Catholic organization for laypeople interested in sanctifying their professional work.Panikkar was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946 and became the chaplain of a student dormitory in Madrid (Colegio Mayor la Moncloa). That very year he earned his first doctorate, in philosophy, with a dissertation titled El concepto de naturaleza: Análisis histórico y metafísico de un concepto (Complutense University of Madrid, 1946, published in 1951). He was offered a position at the Complutense University but decided to continue with his pastoral work in Madrid, Barcelona... (shrink)

This year we celebrate Raimon Panikkar’s centenary; one of the most important Spanish thinkers and, undoubtedly, one of those who had the widest international repercussion, together with the other three big philosophers of the 20th century: Unamuno, Ortega and Zubiri. The present work explores the relationship between his thinking and Xabier Zubiri’s, a well-known thinker in the History of Spanish Philosophy, and that of Amor Ruibal, a Galician thinker not so wellknown outside specialized circles. This connection among the three (...) thinkers lies particularly in a conception of reality marked by the relation, reaching its culmination in the Catalan-Hindu thinker: The cosmotheandric perspective of Raimon Panikkar, Zubiri’s respectivity and radical relativity, and the ontological relativity or universal correlationism of Amor Ruibal. (shrink)

Raimon Panikkar: A Companion to his Life and Thought is a guide to the life, work and thought of Raimon Panikkar, a self-professed Buddhist-Christian-Hindu philosopher and theologian. A man of deep and wide learning and an extremely prolific author, Panikkar is equally at home in various religious and cultural traditions and embodies in himself the ideals of intercultural, intrareligious, and interreligious dialogues. This book explicates Panikkar’s basic vision of life as the harmonious rhythm of divinity, humanity, and the (...) cosmos, which he terms "cosmotheandrism," and shows how it permeates and illumines his articulations of the central Christian doctrines. Given the complexity and difficulty of Panikkar’s thought this book is a welcome companion for a course on Panikkar and for a general reader who wishes to understand one of the most profound and orginal thinkers of our time. (shrink)

Con motivo del centenario de su nacimiento, nos adentraremos en la compleja vida y pensamiento del filósofo catalán Raimon Panikkar, una de las principales figuras en el ámbito del diálogo interreligoso. Analizaremos su relación, a veces ambigua, con las diversas tradiciones religiosas que adoptó, examinando su cristología y comparando su ontología de inspiración budista con la del budismo Theravāda. Para concluir, nos gustaría sugerir la posibilidad de una aproximación _homeomórfica _al acto de crear filosofía.

Raimon Panikkar is one of the most sophisticated and most profound among contemporary pluralists of religion. His pluralism is radical because it is rooted in the very nature of things, in the pluralism of being itself, beyond all perspectivalism and indeed beyond truth and falsity taken as intellectual categories. I discuss several issues regarding his position. Is he indeed a pluralist or a monist in disguise? Does he do justice to the uniqueness of each religion? Is he not prematurely (...) introducing the eschatological ideal of the harmony of opposites into the historical world where opposites often produce bloody conflicts? (shrink)

https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/article/view/v52-vega.

Este artículo se dirige a contrastar las metafísicas de Raimon Panikkar y Fernando Inciarte. Al examinar, en las dos primeras partes, sus formas de contestar a la pregunta metafísica fundamental por_ lo que es_, encontramos las respuestas aparentemente contrapuestas de una _metafísica_ de la _sustancia_ y una metafísica del sistema basada en la _intuición cosmoteándrica_ que tiene como categoría clave la _relación_. En la tercera parte se relacionan ambos planteamientos para indagar qué papel juega la noción de sistema en (...) ellos y determinar finalmente que el pensamiento de la sustancia no está tan lejos del pensamiento de sistema como puede parecer. (shrink)

The present article explores the epistemological conditions of intercultural encounters. Based on an analysis of Raimon Panikkar's intercultural hermeneutics, we argue that intercultural encounters cannot take place adequately when they are based on purely rhetorical rationality or rational persuasion. We point to the limitations of grounding intercultural relationships on dialectical dialogue and, therefore, of educating them by simply enhancing discursive capacities. We underline the need for other epistemological conditions that should be fostered in order to move forward on the (...) path to actual interculturality. These can be summarised by what Panikkar calls "conversion", an epistemic framework of love—personal relationality, that goes beyond objectifying rationality—for the communication between (culturally different) subjects. We conclude that the culturally diverse human condition refers to being encountered and being understood on a level that is not merely logical or linguistic. What can be understood of a person with another cultural background goes beyond what can be comprehended by logical rationality or captured by veritative judgements about objects. In other words, in intercultural encounters, ontological, rather than merely logical truth is at stake, which means that the presence of the other can lead to experiences of meaning: it reveals a being that calls for conversion. Conversion demands an ontic action on the part of the subject, not merely an epistemological one, that cancels the violence that rational persuasion might entail. (shrink)

Resumen La cuestión de la relación entre ciencia y fe ha adquirido nuevo vigor en los comienzos del siglo, cuando, tras años de especialización y separación fragmentaria de los saberes, que conducían a la esquizofrenia cultural del cognoscente, se empieza a percibir de manera cada vez más nítida la necesidad de su integración para dar cuenta de la multidimensionalidad de lo real. Tras poner de manifiesto la aparente tensión entre cultura y trascendencia como realidades que conviven en el ser humano, (...) se rastrea la posibilidad que Panikkar propone de una ciencia que, sin eliminarse a sí misma, sin cancelar la mediación que ella misma constituye ni despojarse de sus maneras y métodos propios, sin siquiera abandonar el plano de la pura inmanencia, reconoce en él lo divino: la infinita trascendencia del cuerpo -su carácter siempre abierto al misterio- y su infinita inmanencia -su profundidad insondable-. Esto tiene lugar en la forma concreta que el autor propone de una teofisica, de modo que con ella no ocurre algo semejante a lo que Wittgenstein indica respecto a la escalera de la que, una vez arriba -lograda la significación de lo Absoluto- puedo desprenderme, sino que, en ella, la escalera -la dimensión física- se conserva y se supera.The issue of the relationship between science and faith has acquired greater relevance since the beginning of the century, time in which, after years of specialization and fragmentation of human knowledge, which have led to a cultural schizophrenia of the knower, there is a growing awareness of the need to integrate both to account for a multidimensional reality. After noticing the apparent tension between culture and the divine as realities that coexist in human beings, it is examined Panikkar’s proposal of a science that, without eliminating itself, without cancelling the mediation that it constitutes, nor divesting itself from its own methods, not even without abandoning immanence, recognizes in itself the divine: the infinite transcendence of the body -its character always open to mystery- and its infinite immanence -its unfathomable depth-. This corresponds to the author’s theophysics, so that, in it, it does not happen something similar to what Wittgenstein indicates about the ladder of which one can get rid once up -when the significance of the divine has been attained-, but in it the ladder -the physical dimension- is preserved and surpassed. (shrink)

Cross-fertilizing roots and routes calls for new practices of seeking, being, and Self-realization. Raimon Panikkar embodied such a vocation and praxis of being and becoming. Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966–1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest, and poet. It was (...) also that combination of personae that made him at times difficult to understand. He was a formidable scholar with doctorates in philosophy, theology, and chemistry and an acquaintance with the worlds of learning and religious reflection in more than a dozen languages. This stupendous productivity, sustained over some sixty-five years, was made possible by great discipline, dedication, and focus. He was a classic Jnana Yogi. (shrink)