Epistemological Implications

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
Evan F. Kuehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Coherent Picture

Chapter 4 examines the epistemological implications of the transcendence of the Absolute. It argues that Troeltsch did not offer a unified theory of religious knowledge, but that his attempts to explain how an experience of the Absolute is possible can be collated to offer a coherent picture of his religious epistemology. The chapter first examines his account of theological agnosticism in nineteenth-century theology developing out of the work of Kant, which puts in question the nature of human knowledge of God. Troeltsch’s constructive response to this agnosticism begins with his appropriation of historical concept formation from the thought of Heinrich Rickert and his concept of the religious a priori. Troeltsch uses the term “mysticism” to explain how these logical structures of the validity of the experience of the Absolute are actualized in religious life.

Knowledge of God

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Greco
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Proper Function ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Epistemology Of Testimony ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

Contemporary epistemology has taken an ‘externalist turn’ in its thinking about knowledge and related issues, and contemporary religious epistemology has followed suit in this respect. This is how we should understand Alvin Plantinga’s proper function view of religious knowledge, and William Alston’s view that we can have perceptual knowledge of God. Contemporary epistemology has more recently taken a ‘social turn’, and religious epistemology and the epistemology of theology might fruitfully follow this trend as well. For example, religious epistemology can benefit from recent work on epistemic authority and on the epistemology of testimony.

Philosophical Reduction(ism) in Meta-Language Reconstructions of Yhwh as Religious Object

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaco W Gericke
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
Theory Of Everything ◽  
Interpretative Approach

In Hebrew Bible/Old Testament scholarship, one encounters a variety of reductive perspectives on what exactly Yahweh as religious object is assumed to be. In this article, a clarification of the research problem is followed by an introductory overview of what is currently available on this topic as is attested in the context of various interpretative methodologies and their associated meta-languages. It is argued that any attempt to describe the actual metaphysical nature and ontological status of the religious object in the jargon of a particular interpretative approach is forever prone to committing the fallacy of reductionism. Even so, given the irreducible methodological perspectivism supervening on heuristic specificity, reductive accounts as such are unavoidable. If this is correct, then it follows a fortiori that a unified theory (of everything Yahweh can be said to be) and an ideal meta-language (with which to perfectly reconstruct the religious object within second-order discourse) are a priori impossible.

An Overview of the History of Religious Life in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Wittberg ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Religious Institutes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socioeconomic Composition

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.

On the transcendence and immanence of God

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nestler
Keyword(s):  
Image Of God ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Image Of God

Transcendence and immanence are two terms used to differentiate two realities, one of transcending worldly experience and the other of an inner-worldly experience. In scholastic theology (kalām), a respective distinction is being made regarding the image of God, whereby transcendence (tanzīh) is set against anthropomorphism (tašbīh) to solve the problem of how to deal with Quranic expressions that attribute human – formal or essential – characteristics to God. Also, in mysticism, the notion of transcendence and immanence of God plays a central role, for instance, in the teachings of Ibn al-ʿArabī. He mainly discusses this distinction in the chapter of Noah in Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (“The Bezels of Wisdom”), regarding knowledge of God. He rejects a pure theology of transcendence as it describes only a part of the divine reality. However, he points out that even though His immanent reality can be experienced, it is not comprehensible, because it is unlimited. Both realities interlock through the idea of the Oneness of Being or Unity of Existence (waḥdat al-wuǧūd), because ‘in reality’ they are nothing else than God. Ibn al-ʿArabī illustrates this ontological dependency by the example of Noah’s legend, by showing that the prophet supported the belief of the absolute transcendence of God, which was unacceptable for his people, not because they negated God’s existence, but because they had an immanent image of God. Accordingly, Ibn al-ʿArabī interprets the divine punishment, instead of misfortune, as immersing in the sea of knowledge of God. In this way the soul becomes a place of manifestation or a mirror of the divine reality.

scholarly journals Justifying Unparticipated Causality in Proclus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Greig
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
First Principle ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Separate Source ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
First Cause ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
The University ◽  
Phd Thesis

Proclus introduces the concept of the unparticipated (ἀμέθεκτον) (P1) among two other terms— the participated (P2) and participant (P3)—as the first principle (ἀρχή) of any given series of entities or Forms in his metaphysical structure. For instance, the unparticipated monad (P1), Soul, generates all individual, participated souls (P2), which in turn generate the attribute of life in their respective, participating bodies (P3). Proclus looks at (P2) as an efficient cause of (P3), where (P2) must be the attribute in actuality in relation to the attribute it brings about in (P3). At the outset, this suggests that (P2) is necessary and sufficient for (P3), which then implies a problem for positing (P1): if (P2) is doing the causal legwork for (P3), what role does (P1) play? One of Proclus’ main explanations is that (P1) is responsible for ‘unifying’ the multiple participated entities (P2), so that the commonality of the participated entities (P2) must go back to a separate source (P1). However, one could easily respond that this just amounts to a reversion to a priori Platonist principles for transcendent, separate Forms without providing a real justification for the necessity of (P1) as a cause. In my talk, I wish to elaborate on how Proclus thinks about (P1)’s type of causation in relation to (P2) and (P3), particularly showing why (P2) for Proclus is ultimately insufficient as an efficient cause compared to (P1) as the absolute first cause for a given series.[Early work on a PhD thesis chapter — presentation for the University of Edinburgh, July 16, 2017. Any comments or feedback are welcome!]

Physical Models and Physiological Concepts: Explanation in Nineteenth-Century Biology

1965 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Everett Mendelsohn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
Physical Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Claude Bernard ◽  
French School ◽  
Biological Laws ◽  
Analytical Tools

SynopsisThe response to physics and chemistry which characterized mid-nineteenth century physiology took two major directions. One, found most prominently among the German physiologists, developed explanatory models which had as their fundamental assumption the ultimate reducibility of all biological phenomena to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other, characteristic of the French school of physiology, recognized that physics and chemistry provided potent analytical tools for the exploration of physiological activities, but assumed in the construction of explanatory models that the organism involved special levels of organization and that there must, in consequence, be special biological laws.The roots of this argument about concept formation in physiology are explored in the works of Theodor Schwann, Johannes Müller, François Magendie and Claude Bernard among others.

Traditionalism and Revelation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Francesca Aran Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Biblical Anthropology

Traditionalism is the doctrine that God revealed himself to our first parents, and this revelation is the source of our knowledge of God: ‘the knowledge’, as London cabbies still call it, was passed on from its original recipients down the generations. Our knowledge of God is thus mediated through tradition; its only direct source is a divine revelation made to our original forebears. Traditionalism thus tends to accentuate that we cannot know God through our own efforts, for instance by philosophical proofs. Transmission from a single original source explains the analogies between religions and mythologies, while the ‘telephone game’, or ‘Chinese whispers’, over the millennia explains the diversities. Invented in the nineteenth century, traditionalism was at once a contribution to theory of religions, a piece of biblical anthropology, and a theory of revelation and its development. Traditionalists have held that without an original, igniting act of divine revelation to our first ancestors, it would be impossible for the human race to become a knowing, speaking creature, to create institutions, and act morally, or to obtain knowledge of God.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Sun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Chinese Religions ◽  
Religious Nature

This introductory chapter talks about the confusions and controversies over the religious nature of Confucianism. It argues that the confusions come mainly from three sources. First, they come from the conceptualization of Confucianism as a world religion at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, which was a historical product of the emergence of the “world religions” paradigm in the West. Second, they are caused by the problematic way in which Confucianism—and Chinese religions in general—has been studied and represented by questions which are based on a Judeo-Christian framework that cannot capture the complexity of Chinese religious life. Finally, confusion arises from the often contradictory development of Confucianism in today's China.

Historicity and Christian Life-Experience in the Early Philosophy of Martin Heidegger

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Anna Jani
Keyword(s):  
Life Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Philosophical Question ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Essential Connection

In his early Freiburg lectures on the phenomenology of religious life, published as his Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger sought to interpret the Christian life in phenomenological terms, while also discussing the question of whether Christianity should be construed as historically defined. Heidegger thus connected the philosophical discussion of religion as a phenomenon with the character of the religious life taken in the context of factical life. According to Heidegger, every philosophical question originates from the latter, which determines such questions pre-theoretically, while the tradition of early Christianity can also only be understood historically in such terms. More specifically, he holds that the historical phenomenon of religious life as it relates to early Christianity, inasmuch as it undergirds our conception of the religious phenomenon per se, reveals the essential connection between factical life and religious life. In this way, the conception of religion that Heidegger establishes through his analyses of Paul’s Epistles takes on both theological and philosophical ramifications. Moreover, the historicity of factical life finds its fulfillment in our comprehension of the primordial form of Christianity as our very own historical a priori, determined by our own factical situation. Hence, historicity and factical life belong together within the situation that makes up the foundation of the religious life.

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