This brief paper will help readers to understand of how Christianity entered in Nagaland and the growth of Christianity, and also the result of revival. It will help readers to see the great transformation that took place among the Nagas with the word of the Holy Spirit.

hroughout medieval Christianity, religious works of art emerged to illustrate the teachings of the Bible for the largely illiterate population. What, then, is the significance of the psychoactive mushrooms hiding in plain sight in the artwork and icons of many European and Middle-Eastern churches? Does Christianity have a psychedelic history? -/- Providing stunning visual evidence from their anthropological journey throughout Europe and the Middle East, including visits to Roslyn Chapel and Chartres Cathedral, authors Julie and Jerry Brown (...) document the role of visionary plants in Christianity. They retrace the pioneering research of R. Gordon Wasson, the famous “sacred mushroom seeker,” on psychedelics in ancient Greece and India, and among the present-day reindeer herders of Siberia and the Mazatecs of Mexico. Challenging Wasson’s legacy, the authors reveal his secret relationship with the Vatican that led to Wasson’s refusal to pursue his hallucinogen theory into the hallowed halls of Christianity. -/- Examining the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels, the authors provide scriptural support to show that sacred mushrooms were the inspiration for Jesus’ revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven and that he was initiated into these mystical practices in Egypt during the Missing Years. They contend that the Trees of Knowledge and of Immortality in Eden were sacred mushrooms. -/- Uncovering the role played by visionary plants in the origins of Judeo-Christianity, the authors invite us to rethink what we know about the life of Jesus and to consider a controversial theory that challenges us to explore these sacred pathways to the divine. (shrink)

The National Library of Finland and the Von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki keep the collected correspondence of Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein’s friend and successor at Cambridge and one of the three literary executors of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Among von Wright’s correspondence partners, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees are of special interest to Wittgenstein scholars as the two other trustees of the Wittgenstein papers. Thus, von Wright’s collections held in Finland promise to shed light on the (...) context of decades of editorial work that made Wittgenstein’s later philosophy available to all interested readers. In this text, we present the letters which von Wright received from Anscombe and Rhees during the first nine months after Wittgenstein’s death. This correspondence provides a vivid picture of the literary executors as persons and of their developing relationships. The presented letters are beautiful examples of what the correspondence as a whole has to offer; it depicts – besides facts of editing – the story of three philosophers, whose conversing voices unfold the human aspects of inheriting Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Their story does not only deal with editing the papers of an eminent philosopher, but with the attempt to do justice to the man they knew, to his philosophy and to his wishes for publication. (shrink)

The theological misappropriation of Christianity as a civilizing force occurs when individuals convert to Christianity due to deception that ignores the faith-based aspect of Christianity. The history of Western education in India illustrates the hidden curriculum that Christian missionaries employed to disrupt the Indian educational system. This unnerving pedagogy points to the need for a postcolonial theoretical framework that relates the inescapable hybridity of religion and culture where Orientalism has the potential to occur. To press the (...) ongoing urgency of this discussion, I convey how the history of British India connects to my lived-reality as an American Hindu. Overall, I point to hybridity as a lived paradox of ambiguous conflict that embraces interfaith relations. I offer implications for Christian missionaries today to foster authentic interfaith connections without engaging in colonizing ideologies. (shrink)

Human beings are social animals, not solitary ones. Morality is an instinct we have because it helps us socialize, live together harmoniously. This paper reviews how the evolution of morality and other mental functions associated with our survival and sociality gave rise to cultural behavior among the small groups of humans during the Palaeolithic period when the tribe was personified as a supernatural identity and guardian, a totem, an ancestor and ultimately a god. Loyalty to the tribe required loyalty to (...) the tribal god representing the tribe. Preservation of the tribe meant mistrust of other tribes and their gods. The merging of small groups rendered obsolete the tribal, locally cultural conception of religion, but it persisted as monotheism in the imperial stage of society from about 2000 BC, becoming the world religions. Today’s empires are global, and a belief system modelled on local tribes in competition is naïve divisive. Out-group hatred is more of a threat than any in-group moral benefits, and they too are disappearing with the failure to preserve small group coherence, and justice and fairness in capitalist society. The moral failure of imperial religion on the urban and global scale is the “Death of God”. Humans now cannot afford the moral laziness of constantly appealing to a supernatural totem in an otherwise do-nothing religion. Imperial religion was and still is a tool of the political right, used to manipulate us. Yet Christ offered an ethical scheme that is essentially a practical morality of mutual lovingkindness which does not require a supernatural God. It is Secular Christianity, a world view any scientist and atheist could adopt without compromise, and most Christians should. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Held every five years under the auspices of the Kant-Gesellschaft, the International Kant Congress is the world’s largest philosophy conference devoted to the work and legacy of a single thinker. The five-volume set Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense contains the proceedings of the Eleventh International Kant Congress, which took place in Pisa in 2010. The proceedings consist of 25 plenary talks and 341 papers selected by a team of international referees from over 700 submissions. The contributions (...) span 14 sections: Kant’s Concept of Philosophy; Theory of Cognition and Logic; Ontology and Metaphysics; Ethics; Law and Justice; Religion and Theology; Aesthetics; Anthropology and Psychology; Politics and History; Science, Mathematics, and the Philosophy of Nature; Kant and the Leibnizian Tradition; Kant and the Philosophical Tradition; Kant and Schopenhauer; and Kant’s Heritage. Thanks to cooperation from the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft, the 2010 conference was the first in the history of the International Kant Congress to include a session on Kant and Schopenhauer. (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)

Tradition holds that many Brahmin families were converted through the ministry of St. Thomas and seven churches were established in Palur, Muziri, Parur, Gokkamangalam, Chayal, Niranam, and Quilon. After forming several more congregations out of Jews as well as of Dravidi people, Apostle Thomas went to Meliapur where even the Raja was converted with many of his subjects. This infuriated the Brahmins (of Aryan origin). According to tradition, St. Thomas was speared to death by Brahmins near Mylapore. According to many (...) early Church fathers, the mortal remains of Thomas were shifted from his tomb in India to Edessa.[2]. (shrink)

This introduction concerns the place that Indian philosophical literature should occupy in the history of philosophy, and the challenge of championing pre-modern modes of inquiry in an era when philosophy, at least in the anglophone world and its satellites, has in large measure become a highly specialized and technical discipline conceived on the model of the sciences. This challenge is particularly acute when philosophical figures and texts that are historically and culturally distant from us are engaged not only exegetically (...) but also with a view to recruiting their topics and arguments for contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

Indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Latin America make land claims and support them with a variety of arguments. Some, such as Zapatistas and the Mapuche, have appealed to the “ancestral” or “historical” connections between specific communities and the land. Other groups, such as MST in Brazil, have appealed to the extremely unequal distribution of the land and the effects of this on the poor; the land in this case is seen mainly as a means for securing a decent standard of (...) living for members of disadvantaged groups. Although there is a large literature on the history as well as the social and political dimensions of land contestations and conflicts in Latin America, the question of whether the land claims put forward by disadvantaged groups can be morally justified has not been adequately examined. In this essay, we investigate the scope and limits of appeals to what we shall call assistance-based, contribution-based, and benefitting-based moral reasons with respect to land claims made by these disadvantaged groups. (shrink)

Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright and Elizabeth Anscombe are well known as the literary executors who made Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy available to all interested readers. Their editions of Wittgenstein’s writings have become an integral part of the modern philosophical canon. However, surprisingly little is known about the circumstances and reasons that made Wittgenstein choose them to edit and publish his papers. This essay sheds light on these questions by presenting the story of their personal relationships—relationships that, on the (...) one hand, gave Rhees, von Wright and Anscombe distinct insights into Wittgenstein’s philosophizing; and, on the other hand, let Wittgenstein assume that these three former students, and later colleagues and friends, were the most capable of preparing his work for publication. Using hitherto unpublished archival material as well as information from published recollections, the essay sketches the development of the personal and philosophical bonds from which the literary heirs’ distinct ways of handling Wittgenstein’s unpublished writings grew in later years. (shrink)

Abstract. By the 7th century a new form of Buddhism known as Tantrism had developed through the blend of Mahayana with popular folk belief and magic in northern India. Similar to Hindu Tantrism, which arose about the same time, Buddhist Tantrism differs from Mahayana in its strong emphasis on sacramental action. Also known as Vajrayana, the Diamond Vehicle, Tantrism is an esoteric tradition. Its initiation ceremonies involve entry into a mandala, a mystic circle or symbolic map of the spiritual universe. (...) Also important in Tantrism is the use of mudras, or ritual gestures, and mantras, or sacred syllables, which are repeatedly chanted and used as a focus for meditation. Vajrayana became the dominant form of Buddhism in Tibet and was also transmitted through China to Japan, where it continues to be practiced by the Shingon sect. This is the usual understanding of Tibetan Tantra. With a feeling of great dismay, I regret to say that this is an understanding without any foundation. This is nothing more than an exotic superstition when separated from its metaphysical foundations. What Alfred North Whitehead tells us about Christianity can be transmitted with small changes to Buddhism. Whitehead says: "Christianity would long ago have sunk into a noxious superstition, apart from the Levantine and European intellectual movement, sustained from the very beginning until now. This intellectual movement is the effort of Reason to provide an accurate system of theology. Indeed, in outlying districts where this effort at rationalization died away, the religion has in fact sunk into the decrepitude of failure" (A.N.Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, The Free Press Paperback Edition 1967, page 162). In this short history in images I will present the Metaphysical Foundations of Tibetan Tantra. That is mainly the philosophy of the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna (2nd century CE) in comparison to the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). [The end of the abstract] . (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)

Michael S. Moore defends the ideas of free will and responsibility, especially in relation to criminal law, against several challenges from neuroscience. I agree with Moore that morality and the law presuppose a commonsense understanding of humans as rational agents, who make choices and act for reasons, and that to defend moral and legal responsibility, we must show that this commonsense understanding remains viable. Unlike Moore, however, I do not think that classical compatibilism, which is based on a conditional understanding (...) of the ability to do otherwise, provides a sufficiently robust account of free will, even when it is amended as Moore suggests. I argue that free will and responsibility can be defended more robustly by observing that, at the level of agency, there can be alternative possibilities and mental causation in a stronger sense than recognized by classical compatibilism, even if physical determinism is true. Moore’s arguments could thus be strengthened by embracing this compatibilist libertarian position. At the same time, I note that, although the idea of responsibility is robustly defensible, there are independent reasons for rejecting a retributivist approach to punishment. (shrink)

Central to this chapter is a basic philosophical concept of the nature of modern science which exists amongst positivists, like Auguste Comte, who rejects as illegitimate all that cannot be directly observed in the investigation and study of any subject. Our daily experience of the nature of science continues to give us reasons to unlearn what can be considered as prejudices and errors in our conception of the nature of science. Consequently, the question "what is the nature of modern science?" (...) still perplexes us, and the answers we provide to this question often reveal how distorted our vision of history and thought has become over the years. This chapter shall, via the method of critical analysis in philosophy pass through Comte's three stages of arriving at the truth. This approach rejects as non-scientific all that cannot be directly observed in the investigation and study of any subject against Whitehead's approach in which he tries to make a “dispassionate consideration of the nature of things, antecedently to any special investigation into their details”. This is a standpoint Whitehead terms “metaphysical.” This explains why he developed a comprehensive metaphysical system for the understanding of science, society, and self as found in his major texts. In this light, science cannot be done without taking metaphysics into account. (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 Christian Thomas Kohl -/- Nagarjuna (2nd century) is known in the history of Buddhism by the keyword sunyata. This word is translated into English by the term emptiness. The translation and the traditional interpretations give the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty, illusionary, not real or not existing. Many questions could be asked at this point. What is the assertion made by this interpretation? Is it that nothing (...) can be found or, that there is nothing or, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying the external world? Did he wish to refute what evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things which arise? I submit two moves to provide an answer to these queries. The first move refutes the traditional translation and interpretation. The second move is to transcribes sunyata by rendering “dependence” in line with Nagarjuna’s writings. His central view could be called “interdependence of things”. Nagarjuna was not looking for an object to be declared as fundamental reality. His fundamental reality of this world is not an immaterial or material object. It is a relation between objects including sentient beings and its main exponent: human beings. This is a relational and non-foundational view of reality which considers reality as dynamics within a wide open space. ENGLISH AND CHINESE . (shrink)

This essay is a critical assessment of Sellars' interpretation and criticism of Descartes. It argues that Sellars made several mistakes in his view of Descartes, although the general thrust of his critique is sound.

This Open Access volume is based on the 'Early Carnap in Context’ workshop that took place in Konstanz in 2017 and looks at Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy, documented in his recently released diaries, from a combination of historical, cultural and philosophical perspectives. It enables further evaluation of the diaries and traces newly found interrelationships and their systematic definition. From a cultural and historical point of view, Logical Empiricism and Carnap’s pivotal opus, The Logical Structure of the World, did not evolve in (...) a vacuum. This applies equally in a history of philosophy context as well as under consideration of contemporary historical and cultural influences such as the socio-cultural setting in Vienna and Prague, the correlation between Logical Empiricism and Bauhaus modernism, the connection to the Life Reform Movement or the Youth Movement with its own life philosophy. Pursuing Carnap’s progression on a micro level of history and referring the results back to Carnap’s philosophy is now facilitated by recent access to his Diaries from 1908–1935. These shorthand records, reading lists, travel reports and notes constitute a valuable source for the research of networks and social movements which left their mark on him. (shrink)

Recent literature on Christian nationalism by sociologists of religion in the United States identifies a perceived novel phenomenon: the fusion of authoritarian governmental forms with Christianity. However, the socio-historical origin of this international trend has been left relatively unexplored. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to create a single international account that lends itself to future comparative theoretical frameworks and analyses through the term "Christofascism." -/- The chapter can also be accessed on google books at the link included (...) in the description. Finally, order the book on Routledge's website, also linked in the description. (shrink)

This chapter considers the literature associated with explorations of consciousness in Indian philosophy. It focuses on a range of methodological and conceptual issues, drawing on three main sources: the naturalist theories of mind of Nyaya and Vaisesika, the mainly phenomenological accounts of mental activity and consciousness of Abhidharma and Yogacara Buddhism, and the subjective transcendental theory of consciousness of Advaita Vedanta. The contributions of Indian philosophers to the study of consciousness are examined not simply as a contribution to intellectual (...) class='Hi'>history, but rather with a view to evaluating their relevance to contemporary issues, specifically to the mind-body problem. The presence of dualist positions with strong naturalist undercurrents in Indian philosophy, especially in the Nyaya and Samkhya traditions, rules out the possibility of treating the mind-body problem as an idiosyncratic feature of Cartesian metaphysics. (shrink)

This volume constitutes an attempt at bringing together philosophies of time—or more precisely, philosophies on time and, in a concomitant way, history—emerging from Christianity’s and Islam’s intellectual histories. Starting from the Neoplatonic heritage and the voice of classical philosophy, the volume enters the Byzantine and Arabic intellectual worlds up to Ibn Al-Arabi’s times. A conscious choice in this volume is not to engage with, perhaps, the most prominent figures of Christian and Arabic philosophy, i.e., Augustine on the one (...) hand and Avicenna/Ibn Sina on the other, precisely because these have attracted so much attention due to their prominence in their respective traditions—and beyond. In a certain way, Maximus the Confessor and Ibn Al-Arabi—together with Al-Fārābi—emerge as alternative representatives of their two traditions in this volume, offering two axes for this endeavor. The synthesis of those approaches on time and history, their comparison rather than their mere co-existence, is left to the reader’s critical inquiry and philosophical investigation. (shrink)

Moral concern with food intake is as old asmorality itself. In the course of history, however,several ways of critically examining practices of foodproduction and food intake have been developed.Whereas ancient Greek food ethics concentrated on theproblem of temperance, and ancient Jewish ethics onthe distinction between legitimate and illicit foodproducts, early Christian morality simply refused toattach any moral significance to food intake. Yet,during the middle ages food became one of theprinciple objects of monastic programs for moralexercise (askesis). During the seventeenth (...) andeighteenth century, food ethics was transformed interms of the increasing scientific interest in foodintake, while in the nineteenth century the socialdimension of food ethics was discovered, with theresult that more and more attention was given to theproduction and distribution of food products. Becauseof the increasing distance between the production andconsumption of food products ever since, theoutstanding feature of contemporary food ethics is itreliance and dependence on labeling practices. (shrink)

While contemporary accounts understand esteem and self-esteem as essentially competitive phenomena, early modern natural law theorists developed a conception of justified esteem and self-esteem based on naturally good character traits. This article explores how such a normative conception of esteem and self-esteem is developed in the work of Christian Wolff. Two features make Wolff’s approach distinctive: He uses the analysis of common notions that are expressed in everyday language to provide a foundation for the aspects of natural law on which (...) his conception of natural duties of esteem depends. He develops a non-competitive conception of esteem and self-esteem into a cooperative conception, according to which enhancing the esteem in which others are held is seen as a tool for promoting self-perfection. Wolff’s ideas offer a solution to the well-known problems connected with competitive life-styles, and at the same time assign a central role in moral motivation to the desire of being esteemed and of having high self-esteem. Moreover, due to his emphasis on presenting a philosophical analysis based on common notions, he offers a solution that is meant to be persuasive from the perspective of everyday morality. (shrink)

Historically, many Christians have understood God’s transcendence to imply God’s properties categorically differ from any created properties. For multiple historical figures, a problem arose for religious language: how can one talk of God at all if none of our predicates apply to God? What are we to make of creeds and Biblical passages that seem to predicate creaturely properties, such as goodness and wisdom, of God? Thomas Aquinas offered a solution: God is to be spoken of only through analogy (the (...) doctrine of analogy). Gavin Hyman argues Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy was neglected prior to the early-modern period and the neglect of analogy produced the conception of a god vulnerable to atheistic arguments. Contra Hyman, in this paper, I show early-modern atheism arose in a theological context in which there was an active debate concerning analogy. Peter Browne (1665–1735) and William King (1650–1729) offered two competing conceptions of analogical predication that were debated through the 19th century, with interlocutors such as the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729), theologian/philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Lastly, I discuss the 18th century debate over theological analogy as part of the background relevant to understanding Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (shrink)

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated and (...) how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included. -/- Articles -/- 8 Martina Sauer and Christiane Wagner - Introduction -/- 11 Giada Lombardi and Giuseppe Di Cesare - From Neuroscience to Art: The Role of ‘Vitality Forms’ in the Investigation of Multimodality -/- 25 Martina Sauer - Abstract - Affective – Multimodal: Interaction between Medium and Perception of Moving Images from the Viewpoint of Cassirer’s, Langer’s and Krois’ Embodiment Theories -/- 49 Göran Sonesson - The Secrets of Plastic Language Revealed: Multimodality, Polysemiosis, and Iconicity -/- 71 Natalia Igl - Making Sense of the Material: Multisensory Reader Involvement in Contemporary Multimodal Novels -/- 87 J. Philippe Thompson - Art is All: Proust’s Life Lessons Through Perception and Art -/- 107 Hans Dieter Huber - Philippe Parreno and the Exhibition as a Multimodal Aesthetic Experience -/- 135 Jörg U. Lensing - The Performing Human Being in a Media Interaction Space: Multi- and intermodal productions by the Düsseldorf Theater der Klänge (Theatre of Sounds) . (shrink)

The history of the relationship between science and metaphysics is riddled with controversy. Aristotle and his followers see metaphysics as providing the foundations on which science and other human intellectual endeavors build. In opposition to the thoughts of Aristotle, Plato and his followers separate metaphysics from science as independent and unrelated sciences. With the Logical positivists, the debate is a reject of metaphysics in favour of science. Metaphysics then is seen as a pseudo-science. Rudolf Carnap's the "Elimination of Metaphysics (...) through the Logical Analysis of Language" and Alfred Jules Ayer's elimination of metaphysics from the domain of knowledge are examined, while Heidegger is brought in to salvage the situation given that he holds on to the superiority of metaphysics over science. (shrink)

This is the first volume to offer a systematic consideration and comprehensive overview of Christianity’s long engagement with the Platonic philosophical tradition. The book offers a detailed consideration of the most fertile sources and concepts in Christian Platonism, a historical contextualization of its development, and a series of constructive engagements with central questions. Bringing together a range of leading scholars, the volume guides readers through each of these dimensions, uniquely investigating and explicating one of the most important, controversial, and (...) often misunderstood elements of Christian intellectual history. (shrink)

History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 101-104, February 2012.

Finally published 34 years after his death, Foucault's book Confessions of the Flesh sheds new light on the debate about freedom and power that shaped the reception of his works. Many contributors to this debate argue that Foucault's theory of power did not allow for freedom in the 'genealogical phase,' but that he corrected himself and presented a solution to the problem of freedom in his later works, especially through his reflection on ancient ethics and technologies of the self in (...) volumes two and three of History of Sexuality, as well as the concept of parrhesia. In contrast to this view, I argue that Confessions of the Flesh shows that a concept of freedom as self-critical hermeneutics that aims at identifying a foreign power within the subject was only developed in Foucault's analysis of Christian practices of penance and confession. This interpretation of Confessions of the Flesh opens a new field of inquiry into the genealogy of critique and both the repressive and emancipative effects of truth-telling and juridification. (shrink)

The author of the monograph is a Candidate of Culturology, Associate Professor of Tyumen State University. The monograph tests approaches to the understanding of the essence of Hobbes’s and Locke’s ideas about miracles that are more flexible than a formational-evolutionist approach. The monograph presents the main characteristics of these ideas as Christian philosophical ones, shows their general Christian direction and the historiographic perspective of studying these ideas primarily in line with Christian philosophy. The monograph is intended for experts in the (...) history of philosophy, the history of ideas, theology, religious studies, historical anthropology, as well as for those interested in the problems of historical-philosophical knowledge. Автор монографии – кандидат культурологии, доцент Тюменского государственного университета. В монографии апробируются более гибкие подходы к пониманию сущности идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах по сравнению с формационно-эволюционистским подходом. Представлены основные характеристики идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах как христианских философских идей. Показана общехристианская направленность идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах и историографическая перспективность изучения этих идей в первую очередь как христианских философских идей. Монография рассчитана на специалистов в области истории философии, истории идей, теологии, религиоведения, исторической антропологии, а также на всех, кто интересуется проблемами историко-философского знания. (shrink)

Driven by technological innovations, newborn screening (NBS) panels have been expanded and the development of genomic NBS pilot programs is rapidly progressing. Decisions on disease selection for NBS are still based on the Wilson and Jungner (WJ) criteria published in 1968. Despite this uniform reference, interpretation of the WJ criteria and actual disease selection for NBS programs are highly variable. A systematic literature search [PubMED search “Wilson” AND “Jungner”; last search 16.07.22] was performed to evaluate the applicability of the WJ (...) criteria for current and future NBS programs and the need for adaptation. By at least two reviewers, 105 publications (systematic literature search, N = 77; manual search, N = 28) were screened for relevant content and, finally, 38 publications were evaluated. Limited by the study design of qualitative text analysis, no statistical evaluation was performed, but a structured collection of reported aspects of criticism and proposed improvements was instead collated. This revealed a set of general limitations of the WJ criteria, such as imprecise terminology, lack of measurability and objectivity, missing pediatric focus, and absent guidance on program management. Furthermore, it unraveled specific aspects of criticism on clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic, and economical aspects. A major obstacle was found to be the incompletely understood natural history and phenotypic diversity of rare diseases prior to NBS implementation, resulting in uncertainty about case definition, risk stratification, and indications for treatment. This gap could be closed through the systematic collection and evaluation of real-world evidence on the quality, safety, and (cost-)effectiveness of NBS, as well as the long-term benefits experienced by screened individuals. An integrated NBS public health program that is designed to continuously learn would fulfil these requirements, and a multi-dimensional framework for future NBS programs integrating medical, ethical, legal, and societal perspectives is overdue. (shrink)

Thailand has a rich history of using aesthetics as a means of communication. This is seen not only in the communication of basic ideas, but aesthetics are also used to communicate the cultural values of the nation. Aesthetical images in Thailand have the tendency to dwell both in the realm of the mundane and the supernatural, in the daily and the esoteric. Historically, many faith traditions have used aesthetics as an effective form of communication, including Buddhism, Brahmanism, as well (...) as other local expressions of deities across the country. Art plays a large role in the daily communication of religious values and concepts. -/- While Christianity has a rather long history in Thailand, the large-scale impact that Christianity, and specifically Protestantism, has had is rather minimal. There can be a myriad of reasons for this, but one potential possibility is Christianity’s lack of an aesthetical engagement upon and within Thai culture. This potentially is not an issue of only the Protestant church in Thailand but also stems from some of the western Christian roots throughout its faith tradition. One finds a chasm between aesthetical practices and faith from the Heidelberg Confession, in which Christians became so worried about the ramifications of idol worship, that they threw out the proverbial ‘baby with the bathwater’ and basically condemned the use of icons and other forms of art in western Protestantism. -/- Therefore, this paper will examine the relationship between Thai culture and Christianity, trying to remove the western biases in Christianity and will attempt to suggest new ways that the Thai Christian Church may develop organic, indigenous Thai art, that can be used as a more effective means of communication. If Christianity wants to effectively convey its concepts into Thai culture, it must value aesthetics as a means of communication. Is it possible that Christianity could not only communicate a more effective message in Thailand, but also that Christianity could experience a more robust self-analyzation of its core concepts through Thai aesthetics? Therefore, one needs to explore the ways that Christianity may be able to better understand itself through current Thai aesthetical practices. These concepts will be explored to develop a more robust and organic way of communicating the Christian concepts through a Thai paradigm. (shrink)

In this exposition of important and yet often neglected developments in the history of Western spirituality, Stefan Rossbach reminds us of the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of the Cold War era. He argues that the conflict's main protagonists - representing the "Third Rome" and the "New World" respectively - drew on the traditions of apocalypticism, millenarianism and "Gnostic" spirituality for the formation and articulation of their self-understanding as the key agents of providential history. In order to characterize the (...) attitudes reflected in these traditions, "Gnostic Wars" offers a historical analysis of conceptions of subjectivity and spiritual order which imply the possibility, and indeed the necessity, of a radical "externalization of evil". Beginning with the "Gnostic" systems of late Antiquity, the analysis follows "lines of meaning" which extend, through the millenarianism of the late Middle Ages and the Hermeticism and "Christian Cabala" of the Renaissance, right up to the present. From the long-term perspective which is thereby established, the spectre of a man-made nuclear apocalypse appears as the latest and most dramatic expression of an outlook on the human condition which refuses to accept limits in the imposition of human designs on the world. The concluding discussion of the paradoxical continuities that underlie the sense of epoch evoked by the end of the Cold War highlights this work's implications for our understanding of contemporary international politics. (shrink)

This article gives a brief history of chance in the Christian tradition, from casting lots in the Hebrew Bible to the discovery of laws of chance in the modern period. I first discuss the deep-seated skepticism towards chance in Christian thought, as shown in the work of Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. The article then describes the revolution in our understanding of chance—when contemporary concepts such as probability and risk emerged—that occurred a century after Calvin. The modern ability to quantify (...) chance has transformed ideas about the universe and human nature, separating Christians today from their predecessors, but has received little attention by Christian historians and theologians. (shrink)

A brief overview of the Christian just war tradition, with case studies.

This paper explores the theological and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and Neuroscience research on the Christian’s notion of the human person. The paschal mystery of Christ is the intuitive foundation of Christian anthropology. In the intellectual history of the Christianity, Platonism and Aristotelianism have been employed to articulate the Christian philosophical anthropology. The Aristotelian systematization has endured to this era. Since the modern period of the Western intellectual history, Aristotelianism has been supplanted by the positive (...) sciences as the standard scientific and philosophical interpretative framework for many. This paper argues that there is need for a new Christian anthropology based on the interpretation of the paschal mystery of Christ that is consistent with contemporary science and philosophy, especially as informed by research in AI and neuroscience. Christian anthropology today ought to be fully aware of the theological and philosophical implications of AI and neuroscience research. This paper denotes this new Christian anthropology as neuro-theological Christian anthropology. (shrink)

The privation theory of evil (PTE) states that evil is the absence of some good that is supposed to be present. For example, if vision is an intrinsic good, and if human beings are supposed to have vision, then PTE implies that a human being’s lacking vision is an evil, or a bad state of affairs. The mere-difference view of disability (MDD) states that disabilities like blindness are not inherently bad. Therefore, it would seem that lacking sight is not a (...) bad state of affairs. Thus PTE and MDD seem to be in tension. This essay discusses that apparent tension and explains how it might be resolved without doing violence to either view. Given the prominence of PTE in the history of Christian theology, and the wide support for MDD among disability theorists, it is worth finding a way to harmonize these two views. (shrink)

Our focus in this chapter will be the role the pride has played, both historically and contemporarily, in Christian theology and philosophical theology. We begin by delineating a number of different types of pride, since some types are positive (e.g., when a parent tells a daughter “I’m proud of you for being brave”), and others are negative (e.g., “Pride goes before a fall”) or even vicious. We then explore the role that the negative emotion and vice play in the (...) class='Hi'>history of Christianity, with particular attention to a number of influential figures. We conclude by exploring how pride connects with a number of other central issues in Christian theology. (shrink)

Augustine′s conversion to Christianity in A.D. 386 is a pivotal moment not only in his own life, but in Christian and world history, for the theology of Augustine set the course of theological and cultural development in the western Christian church. But to what exactly was Augustine converted? Scholars have long debated whether he really converted to Christianity in 386, whether he was a Platonist, and, if he adhered to both Platonism and Christianity, which dominated his (...) thought. The debate of the last thirteen decades spans an immense body of literature in multiple languages. In this literature, four major views on Augustine′s conversion may be discerned. The first view is associated with Gaston Boissier and Adolph von Harnack, and was famously championed by Prosper Alfaric: that Augustine in 386 converted to neo-Platonism but not to Christianity. Second, there is the view recently promoted by Catherine Conybeare: that Augustine in 386 converted to Christianity and rejected neo-Platonism. Third, there is the view that he converted to Christianity and was also a neo-Platonist; the most famous adherents of this view are Robert J. O′Connell and Pierre Courcelle. Finally, there is the view recently promoted by Carol Harrison: that Augustine committed to Christianity in 386, yet did not utterly reject neo-Platonism; rather, he aimed to develop a Christian faith that was informed by neo-Platonic insight. In this article, I first explain and distinguish these four general views, and then I explain why I prefer the fourth view. -/- More Info: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of Boone, Mark, "The Role of Platonism in Augustine's 386 Conversion to Christianity," Religion Compass 9.5 (May 2015), 151-61. This article has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12149/abstract. (shrink)

G.E.M. Anscombe famously claimed that ‘the Hebrew-Christian ethic’ differs from consequentialist theories in its ability to ground the claim that killing the innocent is intrinsically wrong. According to Anscombe, this is owing to its legal character, rooted in the divine decrees of the Torah. Divine decrees confer a particular moral sense of ‘ought’ by which this and other act-types can be ‘wrong’ regardless of their consequences, she maintained. There is, of course, a potentially devastating counter-example. Within the Torah, Abraham is (...) apparently commanded by God to slaughter and set fire to his innocent son, Isaac. For attempting to do so, he is praised in the Biblical passage and by later Jewish and Christian commentators. This paper examines rabbinic and early Christian analyses of the story and finds that it was not unambiguously held by these interpreters that God absolutely prohibits killing the innocent, until the time of Augustine, whose position on the story evolved over time. (shrink)

This paper deals with the concept of religiousness and religion in the context of Krause´s panentheist metaphysics, understood as a life of union, as intimacy of and with God, particularly on the part of human beings and also in relation to the rest of the existing. An evolutionary review of this conception of religion is undertaken throughout Krause´s work, and the program of a philosophy of religion is traced, which, besides a metaphysical and anthropological substantiation, would address an understanding of (...) the history of religions and especially of Christianity, proposing a vision of reciprocal illumination between religion, knowledge, feeling and morality, as well as the possibility of an appealing notion of religious freedom, the hallmark of Krausism in its historical development. (shrink)

Asaf Halet Çelebi, who is a poet interested in Eastern religions. This is due to reach the family atmosphere, the love to know different languages and mysticism. What makes him different aspects of Turkish literature, the history of religions is the masterful use of motifs in his poems. Religions, mythology, mysticism and music information about the poet, his poetry reflects this versatility. Sound in poetry, harmony, knowledge, symbols, and images of compliance on this issue reveals the talent of the (...) poet. He uses motifs in poetry from Ancient Egypt, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam traditions. This is particularly highlighted in poems motifs identified with religious traditions. In this context, the Tafnit, Bodhisattva, Sidharta, Mâra, Torah, Abraham, Solomon, the Church of Christ, the Trinity concepts are the motives of the history of religions of the poet's poems aesthetic and depth to you to use. Çelebi focuses more on Buddhism. For this reason, he wrote a work called According to Pali texts Budha Gotama. Here he focuses on the Buddha's life story and some Buddhist texts. This study entrated on the religious motifs of a poet who is a historian of religions. In this context, priority has been given to the poetry found associated with religious motifs. In this article, it is tried to explain what these motifs in his poems mean in terms of the history of religions. -/- . (shrink)

In light of new historical evidence regarding ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s correspondence with art historian Erwin Panofsky, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the presence of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art within the context of the controversy between Wasson and philologist John Marco Allegro over the identification of a Garden of Eden fresco in the 12th century Chapel of Plaincourault in France. It reveals a compelling financial motive for Wasson’s refusal to acknowledge that this fresco represents Amanita muscaria, (...) as well as for Wasson’s reluctance to pursue his hypothesis regarding the entheogenic origins of religion into Christian art and artifacts. While Wasson’s view – that the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the Near and Middle East ended around 1000 BCE – prevailed and stymied research on entheogens in Christianity for decades, a new generation of 21st century researchers has documented growing evidence of A. muscaria and psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christian art, consistent with ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini’s typology of mushroom trees. This article presents original photographs, taken during fieldwork at churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, that confirm the presence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art: in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows. Based on this iconic evidence, the article proposes a psychedelic gospels theory and addresses critiques of this theory by art historians, ardent advocates, medieval historians, and conservative Catholics. It calls for the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels to independently evaluate the growing body of evidence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art in order to resolve a controversial question regarding the possible role of entheogens in the history and origins of Christianity. (shrink)

Are psychiatric disorders natural kinds? This question has received a lot of attention within present-day philosophy of psychiatry, where many authors debate the ontology and nature of mental disorders. Similarly, historians of psychiatry, dating back to Foucault, have debated whether psychiatric researchers conceived of mental disorders as natural kinds or not. However, historians of psychiatry have paid little to no attention to the influence of (a) theories within logic, and (b) theories within metaphysics on psychiatric accounts of proper method, and (...) on accounts of the nature and classification of mental disorders. Historically, however, logic and metaphysics have extensively shaped methods and interpretations of classifications in the natural sciences. This paper corrects this lacuna in the history of psychiatry, and demonstrates that theories within logic and metaphysics, articulated by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), have significantly shaped the conception of medical method and (psychiatric) nosology of the influential nosologist Boissier De Sauvages (1706-1767). After treating Sauvages, I discuss the method of the influential nosologist William Cullen (1710-1790), and demonstrate the continuity between the classificatory methods of Sauvages and Cullen. I show that both Sauvages and Cullen were essentialists concerning medical diseases in general and psychiatric disorders in particular, contributing to the history of conceptions of the ontology and nature of mental disorders. (shrink)

This study investigated Boko Haram and terrorist activities in Nigeria while looking at the ethical implications and responses of the Christians. The study was guided by two objectives which are to; analyse whether the acts of terror carried out by Boko Haram are ethical and examine the responses of the Christians with respect to Boko Haram acts of terror. However, the methods of exposition and critical analysis was used and content analysis was used to analyse data collected. Data was collected (...) from secondary sources like textbooks, journal articles, interviews, institutional materials and internet sources. The study also looked at concept of terrorism and a brief history of Boko Haram. The findings of the study showed that since Boko Haram acts of terrorism is simply a display of violence to terrify the populace and the government, it can be said that their actions and activities which include violence is unacceptable and could be termed wrong taking cognizance of the consequentialist view which opines that the morality of an action depends on its results. The ethics of care which is seen as a context-based approach to preserve relationship, negates Boko Haram acts of terror which apparently has a considerable effect on a number of relationships. The findings further showed that the Christians responded by rejecting to integrate with Muslims and also encouraged Christians to move to areas where there are major Christian settlements while others had to fall back to the natural tendency of self-preservation. (shrink)

A Fortiori Logic: Innovations, History and Assessments is a wide-ranging and in-depth study of a fortiori reasoning, comprising a great many new theoretical insights into such argument, a history of its use and discussion from antiquity to the present day, and critical analyses of the main attempts at its elucidation. Its purpose is nothing less than to lay the foundations for a new branch of logic and greatly develop it; and thus to once and for all dispel the (...) many fallacious ideas circulating regarding the nature of a fortiori reasoning. -/- The work is divided into three parts. The first part, Formalities, presents the author’s largely original theory of a fortiori argument, in all its forms and varieties. Its four (or eight) principal moods are analyzed in great detail and formally validated, and secondary moods are derived from them. A crescendo argument is distinguished from purely a fortiori argument, and similarly analyzed and validated. These argument forms are clearly distinguished from the pro rata and analogical forms of argument. Moreover, we examine the wide range of a fortiori argument; the possibilities of quantifying it; the formal interrelationships of its various moods; and their relationships to syllogistic and analogical reasoning. Although a fortiori argument is shown to be deductive, inductive forms of it are acknowledged and explained. Although a fortiori argument is essentially ontical in character, more specifically logical-epistemic and ethical-legal variants of it are acknowledged. -/- The second part of the work, Ancient and Medieval History, looks into use and discussion of a fortiori argument in Greece and Rome, in the Talmud, among post-Talmudic rabbis, and in Christian, Moslem, Chinese and Indian sources. Aristotle’s approach to a fortiori argument is described and evaluated. There is a thorough analysis of the Mishnaic qal vachomer argument, and a reassessment of the dayo principle relating to it, as well as of the Gemara’s later take on these topics. The valuable contribution, much later, by Moshe Chaim Luzzatto is duly acknowledged. Lists are drawn up of the use of a fortiori argument in the Jewish Bible, the Mishna, the works of Plato and Aristotle, the Christian Bible and the Koran; and the specific moods used are identified. Moreover, there is a pilot study of the use of a fortiori argument in the Gemara, with reference to Rodkinson’s partial edition of the Babylonian Talmud, setting detailed methodological guidelines for a fuller study. There is also a novel, detailed study of logic in general in the Torah. -/- The third part of the present work, Modern and Contemporary Authors, describes and evaluates the work of numerous (some thirty) recent contributors to a fortiori logic, as well as the articles on the subject in certain lexicons. Here, we discover that whereas a few authors in the last century or so made some significant contributions to the field, most of them shot woefully off-target in various ways. The work of each author, whether famous or unknown, is examined in detail in a dedicated chapter, or at least in a section; and his ideas on the subject are carefully weighed. The variety of theories that have been proposed is impressive, and stands witness to the complexity and elusiveness of the subject, and to the crying need for the present critical and integrative study. But whatever the intrinsic value of each work, it must be realized that even errors and lacunae are interesting because they teach us how not to proceed. -/- This book also contains, in a final appendix, some valuable contributions to general logic, including new analyses of symbolization and axiomatization, existential import, the tetralemma, the Liar paradox and the Russell paradox. (shrink)