The Knowledge of God According to Two Process Theologians: A Twentieth-Century Gnosticism

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Colin Gunton

Knowledge of God, in the sense of acquaintance with him, is an unavoidable part of our experience as human beings. God is presented to us along with the other data of our experience. That is the heart of the understanding of the knowledge of God according to the doctrines of the two Process theologians who are the subjects of this paper. Quite how it is so will, I hope, follow from an exposition of the views of Schubert M. Ogden and Charles Hartshorne, who represent different aspects of the situation. Hartshorne is the philosopher, who has devoted all his intellectual life to preaching and refining his metaphysical system, while Ogden has taken up Hartshorne's discoveries for apologetic and theological reasons. A brief look at Ogden's intellectual history will set the scene.

Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-606
Author(s):  
NOAH B. STROTE

These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inga Pollmann

This book argues that there are constitutive links between early twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice, on the one hand, and vitalist conceptions of life in biology and philosophy, on the other. By considering classical film-theoretical texts and their filmic objects in the light of vitalist ideas percolating in scientific and philosophical texts of the time, Cinematic Vitalism reveals the formation of a modernist, experimental and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theater. The book focuses on the key concepts including rhythm, environment, mood, and development to show how the cinematic vitalism articulated by film theorists and filmmakers maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.


1952 ◽  
Vol 98 (413) ◽  
pp. 579-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. H. Hare

The word “oecology “was coined by Hacckel in 1869, and the study of the complex interactions between organisms and their environment led to fruitful results first in botany (at the beginning of the twentieth century) and later in zoology. In 1935 Bews formulated the principles of human ecology, but the precise boundaries of this discipline (as Banks (1905a) calls it, since it cannot be called a science) are still not the subject of any general agreement. Its dictionary definition as “that branch of biology which deals with the relations of human beings to their surroundings, their habits and modes of life,” although simple for the purposes of formulation, is probably too diffuse in practice. On the other hand, Miller (1950), in suggesting that the ecological study of disorders should be confined to their distribution in the purely demographic sense, seems unduly to restrict its application. There is a tendency among American ecologists (who have been the pioneers of this subject) to take a middle course. Park (1936) conceives of human ecology as the study of the community in terms of the competitive forces which mould it, as opposed to the cultural forces which make for social co-operation. Similarly, Faris (1944) distinguishes the ecological order, which arises automatically and unintentionally out of the struggle for survival, from the cultural order, which is based on mutual affection and sentiment.


Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 308-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bengt Kristensson Uggla

Abstract This paper explores the link between the extra nos in Gustaf Wingren’s theological anthropology and the homo capax in Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology, considered as two creative receptions of the tradition from Luther. I will argue that the reason that we find such synergies between these two thinkers, even though neither of them ever referred to the other, has to do with their common roots in, and their contributions to rethink, the tradition from the Reformation. Wingren takes his specific place in twentieth century theology as an angry critic of the dominant anti-liberal movements that took the distinctively Christian-in opposition to what we all share as human beings-as methodological startingpoint when understanding the Christian faith, and as an alternative he developed understanding of what it means to be human by starting “outside” oneself. Ricoeur’s philosophical position is developed as a creative alternative to both humanist and anti-humanist approaches, expressed as a wounded cogito capable of imagining “onself as another.” Taken together, these two thinkers provide us with a profound dialectical way of thinking what it means to be human by bringing together a de-centered self and a centered self as integral parts of a wider dialectics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Sepúlveda Ferriz

Freedom and Justice have always been challenged. Since the most remote times, and in the most varied circumstances of places and people, human beings have tried to clarify and put into practice these two controversial concepts. Freedom and Justice, in effect, are words, but also dreams, desires and practices that, not being imperfect, are less sublime and ambitious. Reflecting on them on the basis of an ethics of development and socioenvironmental sustainability is still a great challenge in our contemporaneity. This book is born from the need that we all have to reflect, understand what our role is in relation to the OTHER, understood as the other as Environment. Doing this from such disparate areas and at the same time as current as Economics, Philosophy and Ecology, is still a great opportunity to discuss complexity, transdisciplinarity and the inclusion of diverse themes, but which all converge in the Human Being and its relationship with the world. Endowing human beings with Freedom and a sense of Justice means RESPONSIBILITY. To be free and to want a better and fairer world is to endow our existence with meaning and meaning. Agency, autonomy, functioning, dignity, rights, are capacities that must be leveraged individually and collectively for authentic development to exist. Development as Freedom is a valid proposal for thinking about a socio-environmental rationality that interferes in the controversial relations between economics, ethics and the environment.


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