John Calvin’s Historicizing Interpretation of the Bible

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Literal Sense ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Exegetical Tradition

This chapter makes the case for viewing John Calvin’s engagement with the Bible in light of contemporary concerns with history and historical method. It outlines the contexts of his exegetical program, including premodern exegetical traditions and their understandings of scripture’s historical sense as well as the broader intellectual milieu and the social, cultural, and political contexts that shaped his work. It delineates four central aspects of Calvin’s method: his commitment to continuous exposition and lucid brevity; his focus on the mind of the biblical author and prioritizing of the literal sense; his views on the authority of Paul and the exegetical tradition; and his theological assumptions about the scopus and unity of scripture. Finally, it provides a summary of the remaining chapters in the book.

David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Comprehensive Study

This book is an intellectual biography of one of the most controversial thinkers of nineteenth-century Germany: David Friedrich Strauß (1808–74). It examines Strauß’s intellectual development from his first work—Das Leben Jesu—to his last—Der alte und der neue Glaube. This is the first comprehensive study of all of Strauß’s most important theological and philosophical writings. It investigates in detail works that have been ignored or treated only superficially: the 1840 Die christliche Glaubenslehre, the 1864 Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk, and the1865 Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte. It also examines many writings that have hitherto eluded scholarly attention, especially Strauß’s political writings. It also provides an account of Strauß’s early Tübingen lectures. This book is also a partial defense of Strauß as a philosopher. It argues that his biblical criticism did not presuppose the truth of any metaphysics but was only an application of the historical method. His method was essentially limited to an internal critique of the Bible and did not apply alien standards to it. Strauß’s theory of myth, which went through several formulations, was essentially an attempt to explain the social and cultural origin of religious belief. It did not hold that myths are fictions but only the expression of the values of a culture. The idea of a Volksgeist was not a metaphysical postulate but a heuristic maxim to investigate the social, political, and historical factors behind the formation of a religious belief. The book concludes with a chapter defending Strauß against his most eminent critics, Nietzsche, Treitschke, and Schweitzer.

Thèmes et variations Réflexions stylistiques sur l’itinéraire d’Égérie

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 611-621
Author(s):  
Sára Horváthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Changes ◽  
The South ◽  
Hidden Information ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social

SummaryEgeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”.What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time.Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.

Ancient Israel's Neighbors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak
Keyword(s):  
Nearest Neighbors ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Level ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Turmoil

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Israel’s nearest neighbors—not only discovering what the Bible has to say about them but also what we can know from archaeology, ancient inscriptions, and other sources. The Bible itself presents these neighbors in nuanced and conflicting ways; sometimes they are friends or even related to Israel at a family level, and sometimes they are enemies, spoken of as though they must die in order for Israel to live. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have affected our thinking about these people as historical groups, on their own terms. How would an Aramaean have described her own religion? How would an Edomite have described conflict with Israel? This book explores both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel and what people can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, one can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others.

A chronology of Distributed Adaptive Control

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. M. J. Verschure
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Control ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Integration Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
Distributed Adaptive Control ◽  
Core Components ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Convergent Validation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

This chapter presents the Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) theory of the mind and brain of living machines. DAC provides an explanatory framework for biological brains and an integration framework for synthetic ones. DAC builds on several themes presented in the handbook: it integrates different perspectives on mind and brain, exemplifies the synthetic method in understanding living machines, answers well-defined constraints faced by living machines, and provides a route for the convergent validation of anatomy, physiology, and behavior in our explanation of biological living machines. DAC addresses the fundamental question of how a living machine can obtain, retain, and express valid knowledge of its world. We look at the core components of DAC, specific benchmarks derived from the engagement with the physical and the social world (the H4W and the H5W problems) in foraging and human–robot interaction tasks. Lastly we address how DAC targets the UTEM benchmark and the relation with contemporary developments in AI.

scholarly journals Deep-Down Time: Political Tradition in Central Africa

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 341-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Common View ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Impact

Around 1850 the peoples of central Africa from Duala to the Kunene River and from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes shared a common view of the universe and a common political ideology. This included assumptions about roles, statuses, symbols, values, and indeed the very notion of legitimate authority. Among the plethora of symbols connected with these views were the leopard or the lion, the sun, the anvil, and the drum, symbolizing respectively the leader as predator, protector, forger of society, and the voice of all. Obviously, in each case the common political ideology was expressed in slightly different views, reflecting the impact of differential historical processes on different peoples. But the common core persisted. The gigantic extent of this phenomenon, encompassing an area equal to two-thirds of the continental United States, baffles the mind. How did it come about? Such a common tradition certainly did not arise independently in each of the hundreds of political communities that existed then. However absorbent and stable this mental political constellation was, it must have taken shape over a profound time depth. How and as a result of what did this happen? Is it even possible to answer such queries in a part of the world that did not generate written records until a few centuries ago or less?This paper addresses this question: how can one trace the social construction of such a common constellation over great time depths and over great regional scale? All the peoples involved are agriculturalists and the political repertory with which we are concerned could not easily exist in its known form outside sedentary societies.

Psycho-Physical Union: The Problem of the Person in Descartes

Dialogue ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Murray Lewis Miles
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
The Mind

The problem of the person may be described as the crux of Descartes' philosophy in the fairly obvious literal sense that it is the point of intersection of the two chief axes of the system, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. The actual, if not professed aim of the former is the ousting of the occult powers and faculties of Scholastic-Aristotelian physics by the mechanical concept of force or action-by-contact. The chief tenet of the latter is that mind, whose essence is thinking, is clearly and distinctly conceivable apart from matter, the essence of which is extension. From this, by an illicit inference which need not concern us further, Descartes concludes that the mind is “really distinct” from matter, that is, a substance capable of existing apart from body in its own right. Where these two lines of thought meet, the problem of the person constitutes itself in the following manner.

scholarly journals “The Might of My Own Hand Has Gotten Me This Wealth”: Reflections on Wealth and Poverty in the Hebrew Bible and Today

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-17
Author(s):  
Joel S. Kaminsky
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Social Safety Net ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social

The growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest members of society is a pressing social concern regularly invoked in discussions surrounding taxation, the minimum wage, and the social safety net. Advocates of particular positions at times reference various biblical passages. This essay examines several relevant themes and passages within the Hebrew Bible in order to explore ways the Bible might be brought into productive conversation with these contemporary issues.

Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Cevolini
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Filing Cabinet ◽  
The Social ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Card Index ◽  
Social Use ◽  
The Mind

Thanks to a grant of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Bielefeld University has started a fifteen-year project (2015–2030) that includes the production of a critical edition of Niklas Luhmann’s extant works and manuscripts, as well as the digitalization of his famous card index. This valuable enterprise has rekindled interest in what many scholars hold to be a ‘holy grail’: a marvelous instrument that aided great creativity and scientific production by the German sociologist. Indeed, people feel that looking inside the filing cabinet is like looking inside the mind of a genius at work. This article suggests a different point of view, rooted in the Enlightenment project of the sociologist of Bielefeld. The main hypothesis is that in the use of a card index as a surprise generator, there is nothing particularly surprising if one considers the evolution of knowledge management in early modern Europe. Rather, the question should be: how it is possible to explain the evolutionary improbability of the social use of ‘machines’ as secondary memories for knowledge management and reproduction? This article provides some suggestions for research and tries to determine where Luhmann’s card index comes from.

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