Filipino's love for the elderly is undeniable. However, despite the respect they have for the elderly, an increasing amount of elderly abandonment is rising in the Philippines. The drastic increase in statistics of abandonment will still grow over the years because aging is inevitable. The primary goal of this study is to dig deeper into the experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of abandoned senior citizens inside of a home for the aged to spread awareness about this certain topic. By (...) the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the study come up with the following findings: (1) The abandoned senior citizens chose to be inside the facility because they don't want to be a burden in their original homes. (2) Faith and religious works affect their psychological well-being. (3) Physical appearance does not affect their self-esteem. (4) Social support boosts their psychological well-being as well. (5) One of the biggest reasons why abandoned senior citizens left their homes is being neglected to cause them to leave and stay in home for the aged (6) Lastly, people inside the facilities accepted the fact that death is drawing closer to them but they don't want to die yet. (shrink)

A religious and philosophical treatise called Works of love was written by Kierkegaard in 1847 under Kierkegaard’s name. It’s a Christian book and not pseudonomical writing like his early writings. R. Gregor Smith notes that Kierkegaard’s study of love reaches to the heart of Christian thought. Indeed, it discusses the matter of Love in his different senses: self-love, love for the neighbour and love for God. So, it focuses on the relation between (...) the self and the others. In Works of Love, he sets up a contrast between the natural loves like erotic love (Elskov) and friendship (Venskab) on one hand, and the love for God and neighbour on the other hand. There is an evident tension between the different attitudes that Kierkegaard expresses in that writing with regard to preferential love. That why, perhaps, a great critics Løgstrup judges Works of Love to be “a brilliantly thought out system of safeguards against being forced into a close relationship with other people1”. In this article, I offer a brief account of some Kierkegaard’s key concerns about love: its’s preferential love and its being a form of self-love. I will discuss the means of preferential love which presents romantic love and friendship. This is, according to Kierkegaard, a real form of selfishness. Christian love is expressed in the Divine Commandment: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” as Matthew said (22:39), so Kierkegaard shows that “Christian love teaches us to love all people, unconditionally all” (1995, 49). That words “shall” is the “very mark of Christian love” because that love is the duty to love neighbour, any neighbour as one loves oneself. Why does Kierkegaard separate two kinds of love? Is it so different? Preferential love is excluded from the category of neighbourly love because it is understood by the poet. That is to say that preferential love is only showing by the poet way. Therefore, erotic love and friendship aren’t dismissed altogether but only as long as they are understood in the pagan way, or more clearly as a poet manner. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying (...) the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. -/- 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.] -/- « Wenn du gerade das, wodurch auch immer du gefesselt bist, erkennst, wirst du zur Freiheit gelangen. Wenn du diesen speziellen Pfad verwirklichst, gelangst du in einem Leben zur Buddhaschaft. Deswegen verhält es sich folgendermaßen : Wenn plötzlich die Geistesregung « Begierde » enststeht, dann betrachte, ohne ihr zu folgen, direkt ihre Essenz und verweile in dieser Betrachtung, ohne Ablenkungen zuzulassen. Auf diese Weise reinigt Begierde sich selbst, ohne aufgegeben zu werden, da sie ohne Grundlage und Ursprung entsteht. Das wird « Befreiung in sich selbst », « unterscheidende ursprüngliche Weisheit » oder Buddha Amitabha » genannt ». Jigden Sumgön, Licht, das die Dunkelheit durchbricht, Otter Verlag, München 2006, Seite 47, 48 . (shrink)

Nagarjuna and Quantum physics. Eastern and Western Modes of Thought. Summary. The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Emptiness’. The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing (...) can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. Reality is without foundation. Or: Reality has the wide open space as foundation. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realised that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalisation. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalisation might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. -/-. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was (...) Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva), we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna (kumarajiva) with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.]. (shrink)

Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brummer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, (...) he becomes even more vulnerable than we do, since he cannot count on the steadfastness of our love the way we can count on his steadfastness.... If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another.... Far from contradicting the value which the free will defence places upon the freedom and responsibility of human persons, the idea of a loving God necessarily entails it. In this way we can see that the free will defence is based on the love of God rather than on the supposed intrinsic value of human freedom and responsibility.1 And Peter van Inwagen recently put the same point this way. (shrink)

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the discovery by Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson of a distinction between the fittingness of an emotion and the propriety of the same. Meanwhile, Christian theology has long been attentive to the relevance of Christian theology to the emotions. Although it seems that never so far have the twain discussions met, they should meet. A fitting emotion accurately construes a situation. Christian theology tells us something about the importance—or the lack thereof—of (...) emotional fit for the emotions involved in love. It is a desideratum for the emotions that they are fitting. But other desiderata for the emotional life sometimes overrule the desideratum of fit. Moreover, emotions sometimes have an effect on their own fittingness. As Kierkegaard shows, love construes its object as better than he presently is, but it also makes the object better. We should cultivate a disposition to loving emotions that are occasionally unfitting yet help to bring about better fit. I explain these things and consider how someone might go about cultivating loving emotions which are sometimes unfitting yet also restorative of fit. (shrink)

“Whoever does not love abides in death,” writes John in his first epistle (1Jn 3:10). This statement presents us with a paradox. Death, so we suppose, is precisely that in which one cannot 'abide.' Our first thought is to interpret this as metaphor. John is saying that a life devoid of love is a life somehow like death. But, having never died, how do we know what death is like? My paper explores these questions with the aid of (...) two philosophical interpretations of the meaning of death: Heidegger’s in Being and Time and Kierkegaard’s in The Sickness Unto Death. Having looked at these I then seek to grasp their relation to the Christian idea of agapic love as presented by John. (shrink)

The command to love one’s enemies (the ‘LE Principle’ as it shall henceforth be called) is one of the most striking and counterintuitive precepts that have arisen in the Christian tradition. However, it has received little philosophical scrutiny. This paper aims to fill that gap. I shall first answer two questions behind the two main concepts underlying the principle: a) what would count as an enemy; b) and what does it mean to love someone. Then, after clarifying (...) the relevant concepts, I shall try to examine the whether the LE Principle is consistent with two major ethical traditions in philosophy: utilitarianism and deontology. I shall conclude by affirming that despite the psychological barriers inherent in living by the LE Principle, it will be shown to be livable and morally praiseworthy. (shrink)

Contemporary Nigerian society is in its doldrums as regards the culture of violence and distrust among peoples from various ethnic groups that make-up this nation. To an extent, religio-political reasons are fueling this culture of violence and distrust. The thrust of this paper is that: Christian military chaplains are stakeholders as promoters of peace and mutual co-existence in Nigeria with regard to controlling the culture of violence and disunity. The core of this thesis remains Jesus’ convictions concerning non-resistance to (...) the evil one as documented in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 38-42, and His life as the Peace-Builder. Therefore, contemporary Nigerian context calls for Christian military chaplains to be more conscious that being messengers of peace and promoters of peaceful coexistence in our country, they have ethical responsibility to build bridges to harmony. Since Christ (God) is love, the chaplains should rediscover the poetics of testimony as a principle for building and reconstructing paths that lead to mutual co-existence in view of encouraging the reign of justice, unity, and peace in Nigeria. (shrink)

How should we respond to the humanity of others? Should we care for others’ well-being? Respect them as autonomous agents? Largely neglected is an answer we can find in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. I defend (...) a novel account of love for all that avoids serious worries about the incoherence or impossibility of loving everyone. Doing so requires countenancing a neglected form of love. Love admits as its object not just individual entities like people and groups; we can also bear a love for the Fs in general---for all the Joneses, all the philosophers, or even all the human beings. I go on to argue that while it is possible for ordinary agents like us to love all, we shouldn't. Instead, we should approximate love for all. The minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect; I derive the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-paternalism and anti-aggregation) from the ideal of loving all. (NB: This paper used to be titled "Ethics in the Shadow of Love" and has been cited as an unpublished manuscript under that title.). (shrink)

Imagine you find yourself in heaven after death, only to discover that the soul of your dearest love is suffering in hell. Would your bliss be marred by the suffering of your loved one? The “argument from love” challenges the traditional Christian conception of heaven and hell as places of perfect bliss and terrible suffering, respectively, on the grounds that no lover in heaven could be very happy if she were aware that her beloved was suffering in (...) hell. Love requires concern for the well-being of one’s beloved, thus apparently rendering heavenly bliss impossible for those who love an unreformed sinner. Here I defend a traditional conception of heaven and hell against the perplexing mismatch between the blessed souls’ love for the damned and apparent indifference to their plight. (shrink)

The great American philosopher, Charles Peirce, calls his pragmatism a continuation of Jesus' teaching, "Ye may know them by their fruit," and labels his cosmology a doctrine of "Christian Love." Nonetheless, I have found Peirce's understanding of Christianity to be surprisingly unpragmatic. Peirce's pragmatism itself displays an unpragmatic side and the tension between his pragmatic and unpragmatic tendencies reappears in his philosophic theology. I am not certain what a consistently pragmatic Christian theology would look like, but I (...) know pragmatism is the rule rather than the exception in rabbinic Judaism, that is the classical, post-Biblical Judaism of the Talmud. In this paper, therefore, I evaluate Peirce's pragmatism and his Christian theology from the perspective of the rabbis. (shrink)

Istvan Hont’s classic work on the theoretical links between the seventeenth-century natural jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century Scottish political economists remains a popular trope among intellectual and economic historians of various stamps. Despite this, a common criticism levelled at Hont remains his relative lack of engagement with the relationship between religion and economics in the early modern period. This paper challenges this aspect of Hont’s narrative by drawing attention to an alternative, albeit complementary, assessment of the (...) natural jurisprudential heritage of eighteenth-century British political economy. Specifically, the article attempts to map on to Hont’s thesis the Christian Stoic interpretation of Grotius and Pufendorf which has gained greater currency in recent years. In doing so, the paper argues that Grotius and Pufendorf’s contributions to the ‘unsocial sociability’ debate do not necessarily lead directly to the Scottish school of political economists, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it contends that a reconsideration of Grotius and Pufendorf as neo-Stoic theorists, particularly via scrutiny of their respective adaptations of the traditional Stoic theory of oikeiosis, steers us towards the heart of the early English ‘clerical’ Enlightenment. (shrink)

Kierkegaard faces an apparent dilemma. On the one hand, he concurs with the biblical injunction: we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. He takes this to imply that self-love and neighbor-love should be roughly symmetrical, similar in kind as well as degree. On the other hand, he recommends relating to others and to ourselves in disparate ways. We should be lenient, charitable, and forgiving when interacting with neighbors; the opposite when dealing with ourselves. The goal of (...) my paper is to solve this puzzle. I first consider addressing it by appealing to Gene Outka’s idea that equal love does not entail identical treatment. After rejecting this solution, I offer my own: Asymmetry between the two loves is not a moral ideal for Kierkegaard but a rehabilitative strategy. He recommends being more latitudinarian with others than with ourselves to correct against a common tendency toward the opposite extreme. (shrink)

There is an ethics of blaming the person who deserves blame. The Christian scriptures imply the following no-vengeance condition: a person should not vengefully overtly blame a wrongdoer even if she gives the wrongdoer the exact negative treatment that he deserves. I explicate and defend this novel condition and argue that it demands a revolution in our blaming practices. First, I explain the no-vengeance condition. Second, I argue that the no-vengeance condition is often violated. The most common species of (...) blame involves anger; anger conceptually includes a desire for vengeance; and there are many pleasures in payback. Third, I clarify that it is possible to blame non-vengefully in anger and highlight three good uses for anger in non-vengeful blame. Fourth, I offer two reasons that justify the divine command prohibiting vengeance, and I note that the Christian God is merely sufficient to make non-vengeance morally obligatory. Fifth, I defend the no-vengeance condition against four biblical objections. (shrink)

I consider the implications of two globally influential love-centred value systems for how to respond to painful memories that are a consequence of large-scale social conflict. More specifically, I articulate a moral-philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan worldview of ubuntu, and consider what it entails for responding to such trauma. According to this ethic, one should strive to become a real person, which one can do insofar as one honours those capable of communal (or broadly loving) relationships, ones of identity (...) and solidarity with others. I compare the implications of this ubuntu ethic with those of prominent Christian principles such as the golden rule and the commandment to love one's neighbour, noting some similarities between them, but emphasizing differences. Salient topics addressed are reconciliation with others, reconciliation to one's situation, punishment and forgiveness. (shrink)

Research for this study was served by the hypothesis that the Christian’s lifestyle and witness in a postmodern world will depend on the definition and practice of worship and spirituality. The Old Testament reveals a spirituality that has ‘Yahweh’ involved in all aspects of life. Awareness and experience of the presence of God is linked to obedience to God. New Testament spirituality implies imitation of Christ and an effort to obey Christ's twofold command: to love God and neighbor (...) as self. Christian exhortation (contemplation/meditation) and adoration never take place in isolation from the world because God is active in the world. Adoration leads to action in the world which, in turn, leads to adoration of God. All work done and all life lived for God's sake is, in essence, worship. Being a Christian implies living a life of sacrifice, making a gift of your life to God. As the Christian strives with the Spirit's guidance and empowerment to love God with his/her heart, soul, mind, body - and his/her neighbor as him/her self, in a moment by moment way; as he/she worships God with adoration and action; then he/she is living a true Biblical Christian life and experiencing and practicing true Biblical worship and spirituality. For the postmodernist, religious relativism is incompatible with the objective truth claims of Christianity and the words ‘Christian’ and ‘Church’ mean either empty tradition or abusive totalizing metannarrative. To maintain its identity and practice effective and relevant ministry, the Church should reflect an internal unity in desire, in life, in purpose, and in love. The Church must be the incarnate and engaged love and glory of God to a world that judges Christian truth claims by the lifestyle and witness of Christians. A praxis-orientated apologetic of an incarnational engaged worship and spirituality will demonstrate Christians truth claims. This gives Christianity integrity, credibility, and intelligibility to postmodernists that seek an experiential spirituality in the postmodern era of deconstruction. Evangelism is founded in who God is and what God has done for humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian’s demonstrate the Gospel as they love their God and their neighbor with devotion and conduct. They proclaim God’s love with plausibility when they reveal God’s love in action as a visual aid for Gods truth. As Christian worship and spirituality produce the actions that give voice to the nature and will of God, Jesus Christ will ‘rise again’ in the postmodern world through an incarnational and engaged Christian faith. Point summary: i. Authentic Biblical Christian worship is a lifestyle that takes place in an interdependent rhythm of both adoration (joyful praise of God) and action (obedient service to God). ii. Holistic spirituality is the lived moment by moment experience of Christian belief in both general and specialized forms (the Christian faith), and the reaction that the Christian’s belief system arouses in religious consciousness and practice moment by moment (the Christian faith). iii. Biblical worship and spirituality is thus conformity of heart and life with the confession and character of Jesus Christ. It is living life in the coram Deo (the presence of God) in obedience to His will out of gratitude for salvation. iv. Worship, spirituality, and the Christian faith become equivalent terms for each other and as defined in i-iii above reflect an incarnational engaged approach to evangelism. v. Worship and spirituality as a praxis-orientated apologetic presented as an incarnational engaged approach (that tells God’s story and your story) in a postmodern world, will be a more effective method of evangelism than rational apologetics and program/method based evangelism. -/- . (shrink)

John Wesley insisted that love is the “sum of all” in real Methodism, Christianity, and True Religion. This “sum” includes “God is love,” the two love commandments, and all beliefs, affections, and good works that are derived from, express, and nurture love to God, neighbors, and every creature God has made. Wesley expressly rejected Biblical doctrines and practices that are unloving such as predestination, God hated Esau, and the many malicious and vengeful imprecatory Psalms. Wesley’s example (...) encourages us to reconsider LGBTQ issues in light of “What would be the most loving thing to do?,” and to reject such unloving and unethical Biblical commandments as putting to death all people who work on the Sabbath, all practicing male homosexuals, and both the male and female partners involved in adultery. What else? Taking Wesley very seriously might require changes in the curriculum of Wesleyan divinity schools, and in the contents of Wesleyan preaching. (shrink)

Graham Greene's novels are often read with no reference to his Roman Catholic Faith. Particularly, in India there is little knowledge among both students and scholars about the primacy and the nature of the Roman Catholic Faith. They miss the point that the Roman Faith is a deeply Mysterious Faith. The term "Mystery" is used here in the Catholic sense of that Faith's 'Mysteries'. The essay and the long endnotes try to rectify the errors which creep in when Greene is (...) decontextualized from his Faith by logical positivists. In the name of the 'death of the author' religious relativists contaminated with the heresies of modernism misinterpret Greene. 'Heresies of Modernism' will be alien to those whose academic limits do not go beyond staid woke-seminars. -/- The essay is discursive in nature, but on purpose. It sees Greene's works through the lens of the Suffering Servant and Paul's Hymn to Love. It has to be kept in mind that Greene is a Roman Catholic writer who knew his Church's teachings well. Christianity is not a homogenous term. "Religious" in the essay often means those who are lead consecrated lives within the Catholic Church as distinct from diocesan clergy. (shrink)

This essay analyzes two diverse interpretations of Christian love in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Josiah Royce. Through the comparison of these two positions, I attempt to show not only the embeddedness of a conception of love in an entire theological vision but its usefulness as a lens for examining that position. I argue that Kierkegaard's interpretation of love tends to foster social inequality, a tendency rooted in his basic ontology. The Roycean view of (...) class='Hi'>love, resting upon a radically different ontology, avoids such problematic ethical implications. (shrink)

Misogynistic tendencies are not strange, rather this attitude pervades various strata of our existence. They are vocally audible and visibly present within the political, economic, social, cultural and religious spheres of our societies. Misogyny is an extreme hatred against women by men, and women against women. The purview of this paper is to explore misogyny in Christianity, analyze the origin and extent of misogyny within Christianity and how it has affected the position of women within the church. This paper discovered (...) that misogyny in Christianity is traced to its roots, during the period of the early church fathers and that misogyny has affected negatively the ecclesiastical positions assigned to women in most churches. Misogyny has negative implications for Christian ethics which focuses on love, not hatred. The paper adopts the historical and survey methods of data collection and used the qualitative methods to analyze the data collected. One of the recommendations made in this paper is that churches and religious organizations must shun misogynistic attitude as it is against Christian ethics and teachings. The APA style of documentation is applied to this work. -/- . (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the concept of love —understood in the broad and Christian-inspired sense of love as agape-charis love— in relation to the animes Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. I first comment on the character of Piccolo —and how his friendship with Son Gohan— leads to him losing all his original villainous traits. I argue that the evolution of the character of Piccolo through his friendship with Son Gohan illustrates the (...) philosophical claim that a loving and giving of oneself to the other —far from being a sign of weakness— is a courageous and self-affirming exercise. The result may move the individual to an inner transformative experience that leads to the enjoyment of a renewed and authentic life that is worth living. I then argue that Son Goku’s respectful attitude towards his opponents is ultimately a loving attitude. Last, I argue that it is the inspiring and loving example of Son Goku that ultimately explains why characters such as Vegeta —who are at first presented as villains— end up losing their villainous traits after fighting against Son Goku. (shrink)

Augustine’s accounts of his so-called mystical experiences in conf. 7.10.16, 17.23, and 9.10.24 are puzzling. The primary problem is that, although in all three accounts he claims to have seen “that which is,” we have no satisfactory account of what “that which is” is supposed to be. I shall be arguing that, contrary to a common interpretation, Augustine’s intellectual “seeing” of “being” in Books 7 and 9 was not a vision of the Christian God as a whole, nor of (...) one of the divine persons, each of whom is equally God, according to Augustine. This becomes clear when we attend to the fact that Augustine is appropriating a specific meaning of “that which is” or “being” used by Plotinus in his account of the lover of Beauty. This resolution, however, leads to a second question. Is there anything distinctively Christian about any, or all, of Augustine’s ascents? On the one hand, it would be odd if there were not, given that the Confessions are addressed to the Christian God. On the other hand, upon close inspection we find that the allegedly specific “Christian” characteristics that modern commentators have identified in the ascents of conf. 7 and 9 also occur in the Neoplatonists. I will argue that there is in fact one important difference between Augustine and the Neoplatonists here that has not been pointed out in these prior interpretations. (shrink)

The problem of evil is one of the most significant challenges to theism and Christianity in particular, asking why there seems to be so much evil if an omnibenevolent (all good), loving God exists. The problem of evil, as posed by many atheists and agnostics today, (following Epicurus) often asserts that the following premises cannot all be true: 1. God exists, and is omnipotent (all-powerful) 2. God exists, and is omnibenevolent (all-good) 3. God exists, and is omniscient (all-knowing) 4. Evil (...) exists Christian thinkers over the past two thousand years have given various responses to the problem of evil in the form of various theodicies, or attempts to explain why evil exists (or appears to exist) given the existence of an Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent God. This document serves as a brief overview of different theodicies offered by Christian thinkers throughout history. (shrink)

In recent decades, P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) has had an enormous influence on philosophical views of moral responsibility. Many contemporary views follow Strawson in centering questions of responsibility on the appropriateness of certain attitudes in our interpersonal relations, especially attitudes of blame and anger, rather than on the abstract nature of free will. Strawson’s influence has in many ways been beneficial, but the prevailing Strawsonian views have taken on some of the more dubious tendencies of contemporary moral (...) philosophy. Among them is the tendency to think of our ethical relations narrowly in terms of the sort of the respect that we owe friends and strangers alike, while neglecting attitudes of concern and understanding. This tendency distorts our views of our ethical relations and how we should respond to one another’s wrongful conduct. To correct those distortions, I retrieve insights from older traditions of ethical thought—especially Platonic, Stoic, and Christian traditions—which give love and understanding a central place in our ethical relations, along with respect. These traditions, which have profoundly shaped the development of Western ethical thought, are unduly neglected in contemporary moral philosophy. By joining the insights of these traditions with the insights of Strawsonian views of responsibility, I believe we can articulate a more complete and compelling view of ethical life and responsibility. (shrink)

This article presents the problem of the family from the Christian perspective and its role in the postmodern society, but also the most serious problems affecting its functionality. As social form, the family is the environment of existence and training ordained by God for man. It has been instituted since the beginning of the creation of the first people, yet by Christ, by the Holy Mystery of Marriage, has been sanctified the union of love between a man and (...) a woman. As time has gone by, under the impulse of the fundamental freedoms and rights specific of man, recognized especially by the modern society, serious abnormalities have appeared, affecting the integrity of the family, such as: sexual immorality as plague of the matrimonial life, divorce, abortion, the so-called “families” of same-sex people. The contemporary man adheres without due consideration to all these, without taking into account their consequences. Certainly, the Christian Orthodox norms bring along with their application the remedy as well, namely life in Christ, which means full humanization. (shrink)

The new Christian humanism is not about concepts and theories. It is a mystical experience of the centrality of Jesus Christ, of His face of mercy, of love given and delivered. Love is the gift that we must accept and respond to with love, especially with an ethic of love that makes us stand in solidarity with nature, with each other, and with the poor in a special way. We are a gift that is communicated. (...) We must use the resources of science, technology, and educational advances without fear, but always looking at human beings as the goal of our action. Everything is summarized in an integral ethic of loving care, in which women are experts and especially women religious in the church . (shrink)

For among most contemporaries, the concept of Eros seems to have nothing to do with Christianity. Sifting through the psychoanalysis of sexual fantasy, theologically it says nothing. Our study gives reasons showing that for theologians since the dawn of the Christian era, Eros-love plays a fundamental role.. The connotations of this concept, however, are different from those of today, when its sensory meaning is more restricted to sexuality. Greek theologians of the first centuries after Christ, taught the concept (...) of Plato enshrined as a unifying enthusiasm, the attraction of inferior to superior states, as “hungry and thirsty” for something continuously higher, developing, and enriching the connotation. The work of Dionysius Areopagite, the Idea of Good, leads us step by step up the ascent of the erotically chaste, and is identified with the One-God, who is the very source of love. Consequently, Eros-love originates from God, Eros- love being not only an ascending but firstly a descending love, which calls for a reciprocal communion. (shrink)

This contribution discusses Leibniz’s views on key Christian doctrines which were surrounded, in the early modern period, by particularly lively debates. The first section delves into his defence of the Trinity and the Incarnation against the charge of contradiction, and his exploration of metaphysical models capacious enough to accommodate these mysteries. The second section focuses on the resurrection and the Eucharist with special regard to their connections with Leibniz’s metaphysics of bodies. The third section investigates Leibniz’s position on predestination, (...) grace, salvation, and damnation. It comes to the conclusion that salvation, for Leibniz, does not ultimately depend on believing a set of true doctrines, but on a practical attitude: the love of God above all things. Leibniz’s theology is thus fundamentally a theology of love which is ultimately practical, and tries to be both universalist and Christian. (shrink)

Gregory the Great depicts himself as a contemplative who, as bishop of Rome, was compelled to become an administrator and pastor. His theological response to this existential tension illuminates the vexed questions of his relationships to predecessors and of his legacy. Gregory develops Augustine’s thought in such a way as to satisfy John Cassian’s position that contemplative vision is grounded in the soul’s likeness to the unity of Father and Son. For Augustine, “mercy” lovingly lifts the neighbor toward life in (...) God. Imitating God’s own love for humankind, this mercy likens the Christian to God’s essential goodness and, by this likeness, prepares him or her for the vision of God, which Augustine expects not now but only in the next life. For Augustine, the exercise of mercy can—when useful—involve a shared affection or understanding. Gregory makes this shared affection essential to the neighborly love that he calls “compassion.” In this affective fellowship, Gregory finds a human translation of the passionless unity of Father and Son—so that, for Gregory, compassion becomes the immediate basis for and consequence of seeing God—even in this life. Compassion does not degrade; rather, it retrenches the perfection of contemplation. Reconciling compassionate activity and contemplative vision, this creative renegotiation of Augustine and Cassian both answered Gregory’s own aspirations and gave to the tumultuous post-Imperial West a needed account of worldly affairs as spiritual affairs. (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a French philosopher who is also a prominent figure in the tradition of Christian mysticism. In her early philosophical writings and lectures, she describes her understanding of the aim of philosophy as “the Search for the Good”. Very much influenced by Plato, Descartes and Kant, Weil states that God as the absolute Good is beyond known truths and can only be reached through Love. This treatment of love as a destructive power whereby the (...) Self effaces itself in order to get closer to God, echoes a somewhat mystical scheme. Weil believes that the only way to reach such knowledge and therefore God, which in her view is the sole purpose of life and should also be the purpose of philosophy. This dissertation focuses on the grounds that bring her to such conclusions as well as providing an analysis of whether Weil’s philosophical approach as an alternative to metaphysical and ethical problems in philosophy is able to stand firm on its own. (shrink)

The first and greatest commandment according to Jesus, and so the one most central to Christian practice, is the command to love God. We argue that this commandment is best interpreted in aretaic rather than deontic terms. In brief, we argue that there is no obligation to love God. While bad, failure to seek and enjoy a union of love with God is not in violation of any general moral requirement. The core argument is straightforward: relations (...) of intimacy should not be morally imposed upon autonomous beings. We contend that such reasoning applies to human beings’ relationship to God. So, even if our ultimate end is to enjoy communion with God, God has no right that human beings seek a relationship with him. If this is correct, then the command to ‘love God’ is not the sort of moral principle that can be supported by threats of hellfire or other forms of coercion. (shrink)

One side of this paper is devoted to showing that the Golden Rule, understood as standing for universal love, is centrally characteristic of Confucianism properly understood, rather than graded, familial love. In this respect Confucianism and Christianity are similar. The other side of this paper is devoted to arguing contra 18 centuries of commentators that the negative sentential formulation of the Golden Rule as found in Confucius cannot be converted to an affirmative sentential formulation (as is found in (...) Christianity) without a change in its meaning. In this respect Confucianism and Christianity are different. (shrink)

In his paper, the author considers “the humans’ love of themselves, of their perfection and self-preservation.” He shares Al-Ghazali’s postulate “humans love the eternitв of their being” and highlights the presence of this idea in the doctrine of Christianity, in the conceptions of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and Erich Fromm (1900–1980).

Religion has a considerable influence over the public’s attitudes towards science and technologies. The objective of the paper is to understand the ethical and religious problems concerning the use of embryo for research in assisting conception for infertile couples from the perspective of Catholic Christians. This paper seeks to explain our preliminary reflections on how religious communities particularly the Catholic Christian communities respond to and assess the ethics of reproductive technologies and embryo research. Christianity as a whole lacks a (...) unified and definitive statement on when an embryo becomes a person, although fundamentalist Christians tend to be opposed to embryo experimentation. Roman Catholics tend to believe that the embryo should be treated as human life from the moment of conception or fertilisation. As opposed to this preconception I have tried to point out that a foetus is a clump of cells and lacks individuality as a conscientious human being and thus can be used for research for therapeutic reason. The paper concluded that the Church accepts techniques on embryo that respect their life. So they would allow procedures that are akin with healing and improvement of life without involving undue risks. The Church feels children should arise out of act of love between man and his wife in co-operation with God. In this regard, it may be pointed out though the creation of a child through a conjugal act in a wed lock is the preferred method since it is the most natural, least expensive one. But that does not mean, it should be the only acceptable means to conception. To state a child born using ARTs would be less perfect compared to a child born through conjugal act of husband and wife is absurd one to be mentioned. (shrink)

"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." This quote, often attributed to Gandhi, suggests the illegitimacy of the retributive urge. On the other hand, many feel a strong intuitive sense that "justice must be served" and that violators of justice must be fittingly punished. In this paper I examine the urge for retributive justice and argue that, at its base, it is rooted in a profound desire to have a wrongdoer see the nature of his or (...) her wrongdoing, with the ultimate aim of inducing the repentance and reformation needed for a genuine healing of relationship. In this way, the urge for retributive justice may be seen as having, as its true end, the restoration of wholesome relations between wrongdoer and wronged. (shrink)

I agree with about 95% of what Paul Moser has written in his book The Elusive God. However, I have three main points of disagreement with Moser, two of which I ventilate in this paper. The third I discuss in my paper "What's Love Got to Do with It?" also on this website.

The juxtaposition of models of God and Christian faith may seem repugnant to many, as models are tentative and faith aims at an abiding certainty. In fact, for many Christians, using models of God in worship amounts to idolatry. By examining Biblical and extra-Biblical views of idolatry, I argue that models are not idols. To the contrary, the practice of God-modeling inoculates Christians against one of the most seductive idols of our age: the love of certainty. Furthermore, by (...) examining meditations upon certainty in Melville’s Moby Dick and the early discourses of the Buddha, I suggest that overweening conviction is a vice that hinders rather than guarantees Christian discipleship, and that Christian faith is better defined as any or all of the following: relative confidence in propositions, faithful relationship, and a virtue of disciplined credulity. (shrink)

The paradox of 'the One and the Many' might, more generally, be understood as the paradox of relationship. In order for there to be relationship there must be at least two parties in relation. The relation must, at once, hold the parties apart (otherwise they would collapse into unity) while holding them together (otherwise relationship itself would cease). It must do so, further, without itself becoming a third party which would then, itself, need to be related. This paper considers this (...) paradox as we find it manifest in the theories of quantum physics, the Socratic pursuit of universals, and, finally, at the very heart of human personhood - where we discover it at the core of interpersonal relationships, existential anxiety, and social distress. It is suggested, in the end, that though reason cannot resolve the terms of this paradox, there is a potential solution to the existential problems that spring from it, a solution lying in what Jesus calls, simply, 'faith.'. (shrink)

The Orthodox Church has been given the fullest of truth by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, truth honored and valued in the communion of the Saints. For men, to grasp divine truth is a progressive process part of a permanent development. Each and every person walks along this path together with other people, without being the same as the others. Every person is offered and understands truth according to their own religious experience and skills to understand. Ultimate truth exists (...) and it has been revealed completely, but the way in which it is grasped varies from one person to another. “This is not a narrowly doctrinal vision of theological truth. However, it is an essentially spiritual vision for worldly reality, one that removes arrogance from authority and opens new ways of approaching believers of other religions. It presupposes magnanimity and charity, faith and hope, tolerance and reconciliation. It opposes forceful conversion and conflinct, imposition and intolerance, aggression and violence”.85 This approach prevents us from assigning to God intentions and plans which are exclusively ours. Thus, whenever we have a dialogue with those of different beliefs and ideologies, we must always start from God’s sacrificial love for all men. (shrink)

Theology, philosophy, and science have been in mutual conversation for centuries, but the major debates have nearly always dealt with explanations rather than ways of living. Over and above explanatory or theoretical issues, there are other boundary issues that can be called practical. These are often neglected because they do not deal with what scientists or theologians say. They deal rather with what scientists and theologians do. As recent work in the history of the natural sciences shows, it is a (...) mistake to see scientific theories as timeless entities totally detached from the philosophical, theological, and cultural environments in which they are born. A cultural paradigm affects, and is in turn affected by, the discovery and formulation of any given major theory. Moreover, cultural paradigms affect individuals not only in their thinking but also in their living. This paper explores the neglected dimension of how the conversation between theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences impacts on existential concerns. I will do this by first determining two key areas of this practical dimension, and then, in section two, by considering and eventually blocking some objections. I will conclude by drawing some concrete proposals on how to take this discussion further. (shrink)

Review of Peter Forrest's "Development Theism".

In my chapter "Christology and Anthropology in Friedrich Schleiermacher,” I discuss Schleiermacher's understanding of both the person and work of Christ. Schleiermacher's dialogue with the orthodox Christological tradition preceding him, as well as his understanding of the work of Christ, is founded on a critical analysis of the fundamental person-forming experience of being in relation to Christ and the community founded by him. I provide an analysis of Schleiermacher's discussion of the difficulties surrounding the use of the word "nature" in (...) relation to Jesus' humanity and divinity, and then move to discuss how Schleiermacher understands both the humanity and divinity of Jesus, as well as how the two stand in relation to one another. In the original divine decree Jesus Christ is ordained as the person through which the whole human race is to be completed and perfected, and the essence of perfect human nature just is to express divine. This is the essence of Schleiermacher's solution to the Christological problem, that is, of how the divine and the human can converge in one person. I then move to discuss Schleiermacher's understanding of the work of Christ as involving two interrelated moments. The first is the awakening of the God-consciousness. The second involves the self-expression of this God-consciousness in the form of Christian love in the community of believers. As such, the principle work of Christ is the founding of the kingdom of God. (shrink)

A brief dialogue on the meaning of Christ's salvation with a Christian evangelical.

William James declared a moral war, Charles Peirce a metaphysical one: "fall into the ranks then" was his battle cry, follow your colonel. Keep your one purpose steadily and alone in view, and you may promise yourself the attainment of your sole desire, which is to hasten the chariot wheels of redeeming love. (6.448:1893) Peirce's was a war not against war, but against the metaphysical equivalent of war, individuation. In the field of social philosophy, Peirce's enemy appeared under the (...) alias of Darwinism, which Peirce fought with Christian Love. In the field of metaphysics, it appeared under the alias of nominalism, which Peirce fought with his special brand of pragmatic realism. But most challenging of all, the enemy appeared within Peirce's own thought under the alias of what I call Kantian conceptualism, and it took Peirce most of his career to win the battle. (shrink)

What is the relationship of human desire to divine love? Spiritual traditions teach us that human desire achieves its true aim only when elevated into the life of divine love. In this essay, I provide a reading of three sayings from three spiritual traditions - Buddhist, Taoist, and Christian - in order to explore the meaning of this.

The notion of divine love was essential to medieval Christian conceptions of God. Jewish thinkers, though, had a much more ambivalent attitude about this issue. While Maimonides was reluctant to ascribe love, or any other affect, to God, Gersonides and Crescas celebrated God’s love. Though Spinoza is clearly sympathetic to Maimonides’ rejection of divine love as anthropomorphism, he attributes love to God nevertheless, unfolding his notion of amor Dei intellectualis at the conclusion of his (...) Ethics. But is this a legitimate notion within his system? In the first part of this article, I will explain some of the problems surrounding this notion, and then turn, in the second part, to consider two unsatisfactory solutions. In the third part, I will attempt to rework Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis from his definitions of love and the other affects in part three of the Ethics. In the fourth part, I will examine closely how Spinoza tweaks his definition of love in order to allow for the possibility of divine intellectual love, and conclude by trying to explain what motivated this move. (shrink)

I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important. Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley’s Alciphron (Berkeley, (1732), Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dotcompandemonium (see for example Dunn (2001) and Adams (2003)). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is (...) information? The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman 1989, Losee (1997), Machlup and Mansfield (1983), Debons and Cameron (1975), Larson and Debons (1983)). (shrink)