Ancient and medieval dialecticians: the lengthening shadow of Plato.--Traveller on the royal way: Martin Luther on simul justus et peccator.--Musician in the concert of God's joy: Jacob Boehme on ground and unground.--Prodigy between finite and infinite: Pascal's dialectic of grandeur and misery.--Thinker of the thoughts of God: Hegel and the dialectic of movement.--Venturer at the brinks: Kierkegaard and the dialectic of the suffering self.--Walker on the narrow ridge: Karl Barth and the dialectic of the human and divine.--Bridge-builder beyond the boundaries: (...) Tillich's dialectic of estrangement and reconciliation.--Wanderer in the forest: Heidegger on the being of beings.--Man suspended in mid-air: Rudolph Bultmann on the believer as free for the future.--Struggler under the twofold verdict of God: Werner Elert and the dialectic of law and gospel.--Epilog.--Selected bibliography (p. 159). (shrink)

This volume, dedicated to Rudolph Bultmann, contains the text of a lecture held in 1927 and that of a letter addressed to the participants in a colloquium held at Drew University in 1964. Separated by thirty-seven years and the workings of the "turn" in Heidegger's thought, the texts are profoundly different. In "Phenomenology and Theology", seeking to delineate the notion of Theology as a science, Heidegger says that Theology is a "positive" science in the somewhat Wolffian sense that (...) its subject matter is a "posit," an "existent" being: God. Christian theology is centered on the positing of Christ and concerns "Christianliness", which is the existentiell posture of belief in the "Crucifixion." As such, Christian Theology concerns a specific "Way of Being" and to this extent is subordinate to Philosophy, which deals with the more radical realm of Being itself. Theology seeks to explicate "believing existence" but Philosophy provides the categories with which Existenz itself is to be understood. Philosophy is ontological-existential; Theology is ontico-existentiell. The whole discussion is determined by the terms of Being and Time, § 3. The second text, "The Problem of a Non-Objectifying Thought and Language in Contemporary Theology," holds out to Theology the ideal of a thinking which is neither ontic nor ontological, neither existentiell nor existential, but altogether beyond the realm of concepts. Once again Theology is directed to follow the lead of a more radical undertaking now no longer called Philosophy but simply Thought.--J. D. C. (shrink)

The philosopher Hans Jonas penned several essays illustrating how modern thought represents a revolutionary overturning of previously held religious beliefs. The new paradigms of thought toppled prior worldviews of Christianity. Thus, modernity represents a crisis for religious belief. Yet, Jonas contends that modern thought may paradoxically provide the occasion for a deeper encounter with God. This paper will examine Jonas’s discussions on both the challenge and opportunity which modern thought presents to Christianity. First, I will address Jonas’s understanding of how (...) modern science transformed the Christian, God-centered view of the universe, showing, instead, a world following from impersonal laws. Second, I look briefly at Jonas’s understanding of how Rudolph Bultmann responded to this crisis by attempting to “de-mythologize” belief. Third, I will show how Jonas argues that the challenge of modern science to Christian cosmology allows the believer the opportunity for a closer connection to God, moving beyond beliefs and into relationship. (shrink)

Six essays loosely organized around varieties of interpretation and the cultural and social situations that elicit interpretation. The first essay, "Interpretation and Its Occasions," treats the nature of interpretation and its relation to the world of external reality; the pervasiveness of interpretation, even in the sciences, in contemporary intellectual life; and the necessity of interpretation in our pluralistic world. In "Style as Interpretation," Mazzeo views style, broadly defined, not so much as an esthetic matter, but as a reflection of the (...) ways people view reality. "New Wine in Old Bottles: Reflections on Historicity and the Problem of Allegory" and "The Platonic Debate over Myth, Truth, and Virtue" are "case histories" of interpretations designed to "save the texts" of the Bible and classical literature, when interpreters have recurrently found elements of these texts repugnant to their moral or philosophical ideas. "Interpretation, Humanistic Culture, and Cultural Change" draws parallels between biological and cultural evolution and focuses on the role of interpretation as a mediator between old meanings and new, between stability and innovation in a culture. In his final essay, "Myth and Science in the Theology of Rudolph Bultmann," Mazzeo discusses "the most ambitious and instructive interpretive effort of our time," Bultmann’s efforts to demythologize the Bible. (shrink)

Günther Bornkamm, a chief disciple of Rudolph Bultmann, has gathered together a number of his expository articles in this volume. The chapters deal generally with themes familiar to Bultmann's aficionados, concentrating heavily on Paul's Epistle to the Romans and other letters of Paul. The chapters are headed "God's Word and Man's Word in the New Testament," "Christ and the World in the Early Christian Message," "Faith and Reason in Paul," "The Revelation of God's Wrath," "Baptism and New (...) Life in Paul," "Sin, Law and Death," "The Praise of God," "On Understanding the Christ-hymn," "Lord's Supper and Church in Paul," "On the Understanding of Worship," "The More Excellent Way." The translations of the articles are admirable, and were completed by Paul L. Hammer.--W. A. J. (shrink)

In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge as Regius Professor of Modern History in 1895, Lord Acton urged that the historian deliver moral judgments on the figures of his research. Acton declaimed: I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on (...) wrong.1 In 1902, the year after Acton died, the president of the American Historical Association, Henry Lea, in dubious celebration of his British colleague, responded to the exordium with a contrary claim about the historian’s obligation, namely to render the facts of history objectively without subjective moralizing. Referring to Acton’s lecture, Lea declared: I must confess that to me all this seems to be based on false premises and to lead to unfortunate conclusions as to the objects and purposes of history, however much it may serve to give point and piquancy to a narrative, to stimulate the interests of the casual reader by heightening lights and deepening shadows, and to subserve the purpose of propagating the opinions of the writer.2 As our colleague Peter Novick has detailed in his great account of the American historical profession, by the turn of the century historians in the United States had begun their quest for scientific status, which for most seemed to preclude the leakage of moral opinion into the objective recovery of the past—at least in an overt way. Peter also catalogues the stumbling failures of this noble dream, when political partisanship and rampant nationalism sullied the ideal.3 Historians in our own time continue to be wary of rendering explicit moral pronouncements, thinking it a derogation of their obligations. On occasion, some historians have been moved to embrace the opposite attitude, especially when considering the horrendous events of the twentieth century—the Holocaust, for instance.. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of moral emotions from an attributional point of view, guided by the metaphors of man as a naïve scientist (Heider, 1958) and as a moral judge (Weiner, 2006). The theoretical analysis focuses on three concepts: (a) The distinction between the actor and the observer, (b) the functional quality of moral emotions, and (c) the perceived controllability of the causes of events. Moral emotions are identified (admiration, anger, awe, contempt, disgust, elevation, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, indignation, (...) jealousy, pity, pride, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, respect, schadenfreude, scorn, shame, and sympathy). A classification of these moral emotions is suggested and the empirical evidence briefly summarized. In discussing our results, we identify unresolved issues awaiting further analyses and research. (shrink)

This section discusses mostly some unsolved problems. . . .I hope that some mathematicians who are interested in a classification of sets of real numbers, in particular sets with Lebesgue measure zero, will read it and try to find solutions for the problems here outlined.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Poverty has continued to be an enormous challenge for Africa. Immoral political decisions and tactics have led to the continued suffering of the landless poor in the city of Harare. With no consideration for the dignity of people, the government of Zimbabwe through Operation Murambatsvina demolished shelters belonging to the poor in the city a decade and half ago. To this day, most of the victims of this destruction still lack adequate accommodation. The majority urban poor have been excluded from (...) the community and inhabit shanty towns around Harare. Deprived of justice, the poor are alienated from their right to land, nourishment and dignified life. This complete disregard for life and African community values ought to be challenged. Ubuntu moral theory presents necessary guiding principles for human progress that achieves genuine harmony and equality among all people. In light of the experiences of deadly but preventable poverty in Harare, the will-to-live for all requires confirmation. Every human being is endowed with irrevocable intrinsic worth. The elimination of poverty requires practical philosophical resolutions that are driven by sincere respect for human life. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 35, Issue 1, pp 168 - 190 While there is ample evidence for the popularity and influence up to the mid-eighteenth century of Grotius’s demonstration of the exclusive truth of the Christian religion, a fresh look at the reasons for the discontinuation of this line of apologetics can be attempted. In Germany in the late 1770s, G. E. Lessing claimed that all available arguments of Christian apologetics would ‘evaporate’ when analysed from a critical philosophical perspective. This did (...) not simply refer to the issue of the historicity of biblical narratives. Since rabbinic Judaism as well as Islam belonged to the targets of the apologetic tradition, it turns out that the concept of the plurality of religions which had found its expression in Boccaccio’s work in the ‘parable of the three rings’ only to be rejected, e.g., by Campanella, acquired a new significance in debates about the truth of natural and revealed religion. (shrink)