Problems of Nothingness

Author(s):  
Kate Kirkpatrick

Part III (Chapters 4 to 7) is dedicated to a part-by-part examination of Being and Nothingness. Sartre, like Schleiermacher, would object to any claim to understand the whole of a work on the basis of considering a single part. The reader is asked to bear in mind, therefore, that individual chapters of this part cannot be separated from the whole. Chapter 4 (on Being and Nothingness Part I) introduces Sartrean consciousness as ‘the being by which nothingness comes into the world’, bringing Sartre’s account of human freedom into dialogue with the theorists of nothingness and negation introduced in Chapters 2 and 3. It argues that Sartre’s néant in Being and Nothingness, like that of many of his Augustinian predecessors—is intimately connected with problems of epistemology—especially, self-knowledge.

AKADEMIKA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Minahul Mubin

A novel titled BumiCinta written by Habiburrahman El-Shirazy takes place in the Russian setting, in which Russia is a country that adopts freedom. Russia with various religions embraced by its people has called for the importance of human freedom. Free sex in Russia is commonplace among its young people. Russia is a country that is free with no rules, no wonder if there have been many not embracing certain religion. In fact, according to data Russia is a country accessing the largest porn sites in the world. Habiburrahman in his Bumi Cinta reveals some religious aspects. He incorporates the concept of religion with social conflicts in Russia. Therefore, the writer reveals two fundamental issues, namely: 1. What is the characters' religiosity in the Habiburrahman El-Shirazy'sBumiCinta? 2. What is the characters' religiosity in the BumiCinta in their relationship with God, fellow human beings, and nature ?. To achieve the objectives, the writer uses the religious literary criticism based on the Qur'an and Hadith. It emphasizes religious values in literature. The writer also uses the arguments of scholars and schools of thought to strengthen this paper. This theory is then used to seek the elements of religiousity in the Habiburrahman El-Shirazy'sBumiCinta. In this novel, the writer explains there are strong religious elements and religious effects of its characters, especially the belief in God, faith and piety


Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey

This chapter focuses on theological anthropology and probes the extent and reality of human freedom, especially considering structural and systemic constraint. It begins by exploring existing formulations of egalitarian anthropology that foreground tawhid, fitra, khilafah, and taqwa. It then engages Christian womanist and feminist perspectives on theological anthropology, embodiment, constraint, and survival articulated by M. Shawn Copeland, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, and Delores S. Williams. These perspectives prompt important considerations of individual autonomy and systemic injustice, and of possible responses to such injustice. The chapter concludes by articulating a Muslima theological expansion of taqwa—transformative taqwa—that centers Hajar and stresses systemic transformation through visibilization, conscientization, and prioritization of the marginalized.


Horizons ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-194
Author(s):  
Christopher Pramuk

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?


1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.IA Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.


Author(s):  
Robert A. Ferguson

This concluding chapter looks at a speech conducted at the January graduation ceremony of prisoners who would receive their college degrees at the Fishkill Correctional Institution, in conjunction with programs run by Nyack College in upstate New York. It explains how graduation oratory is all about telling people to apply what they have learned in the world. The graduation speech consists of six key takeaways: the more you know, the more you realize you do not know; recognizing what you do not know is a social tool; education is self- knowledge; education is also about learning to write well; education is self- improvement; and finally, education is a place of its own.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rami Gabriel

The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bond groups through the imaginative formats of myth and participatory ritual. These cultural materializations can be shared by communities both synchronically and diachronically in works of art. Art is thus a form of self-knowledge that equips us with a motivated understanding of ourselves in the world. In the sacred state produced through the arts and in religious acts, the sense of meaning becomes noetically distinct because affect infuses the experience of immanence, and one's memory of it, with salience. The quality imbued thereby makes humans attentive to subtle signs and broad “truths.” Saturated by emotions and the experience of alterity in the immanent encounter of imaginative culture, information made salient in the sacred experience can become the basis for belief fixation. Using examples drawn from mimetic arts and arts of immanence, I put forward a theory about how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and the imagination.


Author(s):  
Tymofii HAVRYLIV

This article is one of the first scholarly attempts to analyze the creative work of Ukrainian filmmaker and traveler Sofiia Yablonska-Uden. For the first time in the Ukrainian and the world literary studies, identical implications are analyzed in the «From the Country of Rice and Opium» by S. Yablonska. The purpose of the article is to highlight the complex nature of identity issues in travel literature. In terms of identity, the journey performs two fundamental, closely interconnected tasks: knowledge of the other and self-knowledge. Hermeneutic approaches are used in the article. The main results can be summarized as follows: 1) the journey has its own time-spatial dimension, consisting of two disproportionate moments: preparation for travel and travel itself, and begins literally and symbolically with the overcoming, or the crossing of the border; 2) the intention of the trip contains an identity challenge that affects the preparation, organization, realization of the travel, the way and the content of documenting impressions; 3) such parameters of travel as an accident, an adventure, a game which formed the world of traveler's impressions, are subordinated to the identity problem in the given work; 4) the essay character of the book makes it possible to talk about implications as a response to an identity challenge. The book of travel essays «From the Country of Rice and Opium» of S. Yablonska-Uden is a sample of a successful combination of the business and private aspects of travel, intentions of knowledge and self-knowledge, poetry and faculty; learning about another people and countries, the writer learns a lot of things about himself. Travel literature is an important study object of Ukrainian writing, which opens the prospects for further interdisciplinary studies. The study of travel literature, an identity issue, is extremely relevant both for the development of Ukrainian society and for the formation of optimal responses to the challenges of our time. Keywords travel, travel literature, identity, identical implications, time-space disposition.


1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Baruch A. Brody

It seems to me that those who place great value on the right to human freedom can be badly divided on the question of the use of force by states to defend the liberties of those who are not citizens of that particular state. Concerned about the liberties to be defended, they might be enthusiastic supporters of the use of such force by liberty-loving countries throughout the world. Concerned about the liberties that might be violated when the state marshals its forces for use internationally, they might adopt a more isolationist approach to this issue. This paper is an attempt to help clarify this conflict by looking at some of the philosophical issues it raises. Because I wish to avoid factual debates about current conflicts, I will give no real-life examples. However, they are on my mind, and I hope the reader will keep them in mind as well.


2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Lindsay Mahon Rathnam

Abstract In his evaluation of the mad despot Cambyses, Herodotus proclaims that preference for one’s own culture persists after examination. This paper examines how Herodotus’ treatment of Cambyses reveals the insidious ways that thought is bounded by cultural attachments. Blindness to one’s attachments spurs the drive to empire by covering and justifying expansionist appetites. Herodotus’ treatment of Cambyses’ imperialist inquiries will thus not only implicate the Persians, but raise unsettling questions about the Hellenes’ own appetites. Herodotus offers his own methods of inquiry as an alternative. Rather than denying appetite and rendering it subterranean, Herodotus suggests that inquiry must be motivated by the quest for self-knowledge – understanding the diversity of the world helps reveal the fuller contours of human nature. Herodotus’ storytelling engages affect by provoking the intellectual curiosity of his audience. It promises that expansionist appetites can be rehabilitated into genuine curiosity and openness to difference.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Strijbos ◽  
Gerrit Glas

This article provides a philosophical framework to help unpack varieties of self-knowledge in clinical practice. We start from a hermeneutical conception of “the self,” according to which the self is not interpreted as some fixed entity, but as embedded in and emerging from our relating to and interacting with our own conditions and activities, others, and the world. The notion of “self-referentiality” is introduced to further unpack how this self-relational activity can become manifest in one's emotions, speech acts, gestures, and actions. Self-referentiality exemplifies what emotions themselves implicitly signify about the person having them. In the remainder of the article, we distinguish among three different ways in which the self-relational activity can become manifest in therapy. Our model is intended to facilitate therapists’ understanding of their patients’ self-relational activity in therapy, when jointly attending to the self-referential meaning of what their patients feel, say, and do.


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