Tennant's Struggle with a “Desperate Task”

1942 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-208
Author(s):  
Graham Frisbee

In his essay, “On God and the Absolute,” F. H. Bradley declares that the “assertor of an imperfect God is, whether he knows it or not, face to face with a desperate task or a forlorn alternative. He must try to show (how I cannot tell) that the entire rest of the Universe, outside his limited God, is known to be still weaker and more limited. Or he must appeal to us to follow our Leader blindly and, for all we know, to a common and overwhelming defeat.” The appeal of the second course, even when it is set forth in the spirited and heroic manner of William James, cannot survive a full realization of what is involved in such a prospect. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that most of the more sober-minded theologians who hold the idea of a limited God attempt to do so in the first form suggested by Bradley. F. R. Tennant belongs to this group. And it is his attempt to accomplish the “desperate task” that we propose to examine.

Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams

This chapter provides a fuller treatment of the pure manifold theory with an expanded discussion of competing doctrines. It is argued that competing doctrines fail to account for the extensive and/or transitory aspect(s) of time, or they do so at great theoretical cost. The pure manifold theory accounts for the extensive aspect of time because it admits a four-dimensional manifold and it accounts for the transitory aspect of time because it hypothesizes that the increase of entropy is the thing that is ‘felt’ in veridical cases of felt passage. A four-dimensionalist theory of time travel is outlined, along with a sketch of large-scale cosmological traits of the universe.


Author(s):  
Saam Trivedi

Saam Trivedi ponders the Sangita Ratnakara by the Ayurveda physician Sarangadeva. In this thirteenth-century manuscript, Sarangadeva asserts that Sound, identical to the Absolute, is the only fundamental thing in the universe and that all other things are illusory or, at best, some derivative or other manifestation of Sound. While the twenty-first century, non-monist Trivedi is critical of this claim, he finds much to be fascinated by, and, in his dissection of the main points of the Sangita Ratnakara, he offers the reader an imagining of sonic monism that, while far-removed from the orthodoxy of today’s acoustics and natural sciences, might one day come to be seen as inspiration for the latest scientific ideas concerning sound.


1998 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie Molendijk ◽  
Henriette E. de Swart

Abstract. This paper deals wilh the use of Ihe passé simple and the imparfait of French in frequentative sentences. It is argued that frequency implies sentence-internal quantification, meaning that frequentative sentences report just one (complex) eventuality. This claim is related to the fact that, as far as establishing temporal relationships between eventualities is concerned, sentences containing frequency adverbs behave like sentences that don't imply quantification at all. So they may establish all kinds of temporal relationships between eventualities. Given the claims put forward in this paper about the temporal meaning of the passe* simple and the imparfait (Molendijk 1990), it naturally follows that, as a general rule, frequency adverbs combine with both tenses. But they do not always do so under exactly the same circumstances. In this regard, a distinction can be made between dependent frequency adverbs {tout le temps 'all the time' etc.), which imply reference to a contextually determinable concrete situation, and independent ones (toujours 'always', etc.), which may be used without any reference to such a situation. This distinction helps us to understand, for instance, why dependent frequency adverbs do not easily combine with the 'absolute' (non-narrative) passe simple, whereas they do combine with the imparfait and the 'narrative' passé simple.


Author(s):  
Nikita A. Solovyev ◽  

A ternary ontological model in which the living being is a triad of I – form – substrate is described. I is an intangible subject, contemplating the content of consciousness and controlling the material body, which is the unity of the form and the substrate. The contents of consciousness are connected both with the form of the body, which I contemplate in the inner “mental space” in the form of in­formation, and with the substrate, which embodies the forms of the body and is responsible for sensations and intentions. The problem of control of the material body by the non-material self is solved under the assumption that the human brain is a quantum object. The ternary model of a living being is inscribed in an absolute ontology, in which the Absolute also has a threefold structure and is the unstitched unity of the absolute I, the absolute Form and the absolute Sub­strate. The Absolute creates the other world with its threefold energies, which provides the threefold structure of a living being. The created world arises from the timeless world of the potential possibilities of the Universe, which modern cosmology associates with its wave function. Created entities arise in the process of alienation from the Absolute, resulting in free will.


Author(s):  
John Barnden

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Anisa Ilmia

ABSTRACTIslamic economics is an economic system that is different from the capitalist economic system and the socialist economic system, one of which is the ownership rights. Islam recognizes the existence of human ownership, but still emphasizes that Allah SWT is the absolute owner of everything include the universe so that what humans have is only a mandate that must be obtained and utilized in accordance with Allah’s rules. Ownership is the integration of the Islamic economic system so that it contains an element of morality that will give birth to the value of the khilafah and the value of al-birr wa al-taqwa (goodness and obedience) in which both values are centered on divine value (Ilahiyah). The realization of these values in ownership has implications for the well-being and economic equalization to achieve “falah” (bliss of the world and the hereafter). Keywords : ownership, morality, value, Islamic economic, obedience


Author(s):  
M.B. Rarenko ◽  

The article considers the story by Henry James (1843 – 1916) «The Turn of the Screw» (1898 – first edition, 1908 – second edition) in connection with the emergence of a new type of narrator in the writer's late prose. The worldview and creative method of H. James are formed under the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism, which became widespread at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries thanks to the works of the writer's elder brother, the philosopher William James (1842 – 1910). The core of pragmatism is the pluralistic concept of William James based on the assumption that knowledge can be realized from very limited, incomplete, and inadequate «points of view» and this leads to the statement that the absolute truth is essentially unknowable. The epistemological statements of William James's theory is that the content of knowledge is entirely determined by the installation of consciousness, and the content of the truth in this case depends on the goals and experience of the human, i.e. the central starting point is the consciousness of the person. Henry James not only creates works of art, but also sets out in detail the principles of his work both on the pages of fiction works of small and large prose, putting them in the mouths of their characters – representatives of the world of art, and in the prefaces to his works of fiction, as well as in critical works.


Author(s):  
Nienke Roelants

In the early 1540ies G.J. Rheticus wrote an anonymous treatise entitled both Epistola deTerrae Motu and Dissertatio de Hypoth[esibus] Astron[omiae] Copernicanae. In thisletter he discusses why proclaiming the motion of the earth does not need to beconsidered as an impious act incompatible with the words of Holy Scripture. Based onan analysis of authorities mentioned by the author in this letter, I conclude thatRheticus’ strategy on the one hand consists in playing down the importance of thetraditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic notions on the universe in the field of astronomy andby emphasizing the indirect character of Biblical authority in these matters. On the otherhand, he claims the absolute, immediate authority of mathematics in astronomy bywhich he consequently challenges the traditional medieval hierarchy of sciences.Rheticus considers the achievements of Copernicus to be part of divine providence.


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