God, Information and the World: The Metaphysics of William Dembski and Al-Ghazālī

Philosophy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 94 (04) ◽  
pp. 547-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoaib Ahmed Malik
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Monograph

AbstractThis article intends to review William Dembski's recent monograph entitled Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, in which he establishes an entire information-centric metaphysics. This viewpoint is compared with al-Ghazālī’s perspective, a Muslim philosophical theologian from the Medieval period. It is concluded that what Dembski defines as information, which for him is the ontological basis of the natural world, seems remarkably close to al-Ghazālī’s notion of God's will and omnipotence. This article is an explorative comparison of their metaphysical frameworks that are discussed in light of modern scientific developments, highlighting their differences and similarities.

Shintō is the Indigenous Religion of the World

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Takashi Miura
Keyword(s):  
Medieval Period ◽  
Indigenous Religion ◽  
The World ◽  
Japanese Religion ◽  
Entire World ◽  
Recent Monograph ◽  
The Universe

Abstract This article responds to a call for more research on the theme of “universality” in Japanese religion as articulated by Michel Mohr in his recent monograph (2014). The article focuses on Deguchi Onisaburō 出口王仁三郎 and examines the ways in which he utilized “Shintō” as a self-universalizing framework. He argued that Shintō is the spiritual foundation of the entire world, a kind of cosmic principle that pervades the universe. Based on this, he claimed that all religions around the world are merely different forms of Shintō. Onisaburō was not the first to advance this type of universalizing argument, as a number of Shintō thinkers had made comparable claims since the medieval period. What was at stake for Onisaburō and his predecessors, in other words, was not Shintō’s “indigeneity” to Japan, but its universality. This observation helps to further relativize and historicize the prevailing characterization of Shintō as Japan’s “indigenous religion.”

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

Varieties of Understanding

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
Shed Light

According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.

Fundamentality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Healey
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Natural World ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Quantum Field Theories ◽  
Fundamental Physics ◽  
The World ◽  
Energy Physics

The metaphor that fundamental physics is concerned to say what the natural world is like at the deepest level may be cashed out in terms of entities, properties, or laws. The role of quantum field theories in the Standard Model of high-energy physics suggests that fundamental entities, properties, and laws are to be sought in these theories. But the contextual ontology proposed in Chapter 12 would support no unified compositional structure for the world; a quantum state assignment specifies no physical property distribution sufficient even to determine all physical facts; and quantum theory posits no fundamental laws of time evolution, whether deterministic or stochastic. Quantum theory has made a revolutionary contribution to fundamental physics because its principles have permitted tremendous unification of science through the successful application of models constructed in conformity to them: but these models do not say what the world is like at the deepest level.

Beyond Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

Jiangnan Style

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wickham
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
New Research ◽  
Different Parts

Building on impressive new research into the concept of a ‘global middle ages’, this chapter offers insights into how economic formations developed around the world. Drawing on new research on both Chinese and Mediterranean economies in the ‘medieval’ period, it compares structures of economy and exchange in very different parts of the world. The point of such comparisons is not simply to find instances of global economic flows but to understand the logic of medieval economic activity and its intersections with power and culture; and, in so doing, to remind historians that economic structures, transnational connections, and the imbrications of economy and politics do not arrive only with modernity, nor is the shape of the ‘modern’ global economy the only pattern known to humankind.

How is science to be carried forward, and its conclusions reported?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Briggs ◽  
Hans Halvorson ◽  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Proof ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Component Part ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The World

The chapter appraises science as an intellectual activity that is appropriately carried out on its own terms. Consequently, it is not appropriate to introduce references to God as a component part of a mathematical proof, nor of a system of forces in the natural world, nor of a sequence of impersonal processes in the biosphere. This does not mean that it is inappropriate to be thankful to God and to celebrate all these aspects of the world as gifts. They can be employed as opportunities to express appreciation through studying and understanding them better in their own right. Nevertheless, there may be processes, such as those which shape a person’s self-identity, in which it is appropriate to recognize God’s more direct role. Good practice concerning acknowledgements sections in scientific publications such as doctoral theses and journal articles is then discussed.

Montaigne on Monsters and Monstrosity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

Monsters take on many roles in Montaigne’s Essays, almost always in novel ways. They do not take on their usual roles as markers of other races, genders, or bodies, as threats or objects of repulsion. Rather, the authorial self and his work are seen as monstrous; Europeans and their culture are seen as monstrous; the knowledge systems that create monsters are themselves monstrous; man’s vanity is monstrous. But most of all, the monster is the provocation to meditation on man’s presumption, and on the limitations of human knowledge and power in the face of the world and the divine. As the sign of the diversity and mutability of the natural world and thus of divine omnipotence, the monstrous and unusual is valued by Montaigne over the normal or usual. It is also the mark of human creativity, dependent as it is on the vagaries of the imagination, new and radically different from the rhetorical, literary, and artistic norms. This is why the Essays themselves can be considered a monstrous work.

scholarly journals Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

Tending this Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: The Pope's Encyclical in Dialogue with Ecomimesis, a Design Model for Conservation Stewardship

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Pollution ◽  
Anthropogenic Impact ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
World Population ◽  
Natural Ecosystem ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.

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