The Theology of Victorian Scientific Naturalists

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-254
Author(s):  
Bernard Lightman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
The Human Condition

The Victorian scientific naturalists are particularly important for an understanding of the history of naturalism. They were the first group of scientists and intellectuals to adopt secular naturalism to forge an identity aimed at setting themselves apart from colleagues who remained loyal to Christianity. Three of the most important Victorian scientific naturalists, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the physicist John Tyndall, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer, drew on several concepts closely associated with the Christian theology of their day to articulate, largely in a secularized form, some of their deepest beliefs about nature and the human condition. These beliefs were integral to their science and their vision of scientific progress. They were elements of a ‘theology’ in line with modern science.

Holiness and Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-153
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter explores the connection between holiness and ethics or between holiness and goodness. Drawing on a theory of holiness in Judaism, it considers how holiness relates to other values, including moral ones, and whether holiness is more primordial or primitive than ethics. The discussion is anchored on two texts: the first from the Book of Leviticus, and the second from the modern Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The chapter argues that holiness and morality are equally primordial, equally original to the human condition, and goes on to propose a natural history of holiness in which the human experiences of love and awe, of goodness and holiness arise together against man's evolutionary background as a social primate. It also examines the concepts of primordial morality, natural morality, ethical naturalism, and moral realism before concluding with an analysis of intuition in relation to the good, the right, and the holy.

scholarly journals Elements of a History of the Soul in North-West Semitic Texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Joachim Schaper
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
North West ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract Amongst Hebrew Bible scholars the question of the understanding of biblical key terms and concepts pertaining to the human condition has attracted a fair amount of interest. And amongst those key terms and concepts it is the concept of nefeš that has proved to be particularly attractive and challenging. New light is thrown on the biblical concept by the recent discovery of the Katumuwa stele in Zincirli. The present article examines the evidence and draws conclusions with regard to the history of the concept of nefeš in the Hebrew Bible and in North-West Semitic literature and religion generally.

Bounded action: Hannah Arendt on the history of science and the limits of freedom

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-451
Author(s):  
Roni Hirsch
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Professional Community ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
History Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Experimental Scientist

The article asks why and how Hannah Arendt framed The Human Condition as a history of modern science. It answers that, in telling the history of instrumental rationality and the work of the experimental scientist, Arendt accomplished three main things. First, by identifying science as a form of ‘work’ she could demonstrate the significance of her threefold division of human activity into labour, work and action, highlighting the dangers of their indistinction. Second, Arendt used the form of organization typical of scientists – a professional community founded on standards of objectivity – to warn against the substitution of the appearance of publicity for true openness. Finally, she identified the transgression of the boundaries of action as the site where a political community might become visible to itself, taking the unsuccessful attempts of post-war ‘public scientists’ to reckon with their past as a cautionary tale. Her account of modern science thus allows her to define freedom through its dependence on human-made boundaries, politicizing the very act of history-writing.

Moving Further Beyond Secularism: A “Lutheran” Reading of the Cosmology of Thomas Nagel

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-254
Author(s):  
Yiftach Fehige
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Thomas Nagel ◽  
Metaphysical Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

Summary Thomas Nagel has proposed a highly speculative metaphysical theory to account for the cosmological significance that he claims the human mind to have. Nagel argues that the mind cannot be fully explained by Darwinian evolutionary theory, nor should theological accounts be accepted. What he proposes instead is an explanation in terms of cosmological non-purposive teleological principles. Our universe awakens to itself in each and every individual consciousness. What comes to light in a pronounced manner when consciousness arises, are the mental aspects of the stuff that the universe is made of. These mental aspects are always concurrently present with the physical aspects of the basic elements that constitute the universe. This paper situates Nagel’s cosmology in the context of discussions of the relationship between modern science and Christian theology. It focuses on the history of modern science’s efforts to locate the origins of humanity. The aim of the paper is to present a qualified “Lutheran” reading of Nagel’s theory of the cosmological significance of the human mind. This will unearth strong reasons to think that Nagel’s cosmology is less secular than it claims to be.

The Relevance of Ancient Science to the Survival of Secularism

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-76
Author(s):  
Richard Carrier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Ancient Science

Abstract To oppose Secularism modern Christians depend on myths about the historical development of civilization. Such as the myth of a Christian America, imagining such things as that the United States Constitution was based on Biblical Christian principles. Parallel to this myth is another about science: that the Scientific Revolution, and therefore modern science, was based on Biblical Christian principles and could not have occurred (and therefore cannot continue) without them. Necessary to this are several false claims, most particularly that ancient pagans never did and never could have made any significant scientific progress, and that Christian theology was essential to doing so. These myths are here dispelled with recourse to a survey of the actual facts of the matter.

Frances Burney and the Art of Accident

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Katarina O'Briain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.

scholarly journals Parallel Narratives and the Question of Novelness in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Reading of its Genre

2016 ◽  
Vol 216 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Instr. Amer Rasool Mahdi / Ph.D.
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

The present study attempts to probe into a genre reading of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress as this is deemed as one of the founding texts in English letters. It thus tries to have Bunyan's work re-contextualised within the historical and formal debate of the rise of the novel and the very idea of Novelness. Within the framework and practice of novelness, it is proposed here that formal (generic) self-consciousness is pre-structured within the allegorical renditions of the human condition; these renditions are more likely to be seen as gearing toward being part of the pre- or parallel-history of the novel vis-à-vis the debatable norms of formal realism.

Global Beckett

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Production History ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Human Condition

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.

scholarly journals H. ARENDT‘S INTERPRETATION OF NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL IN THE POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE HUMAN CONDITION / H. ARENDT NATŪROS IR ARTEFAKTO INTERPRETACIJA ŽMOGAUS BŪKLĖSPOLITINĖJE FENOMENOLOGIJOJE

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Gábor Kovács
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Human Condition

Modernity, in philosophical and sociological literature, has “traditionally” been presented as the age when artifacts supplant nature and destroy the originally given natural environment. The process of modernization, from this point of view, is the process of de-naturalization. This widely shared conviction has basically been questioned by Hannah Arendt. During the centuries of modern age, in the detriment of the commonly created and uphold human world, process of re-naturalization has been taking place, Arendt argues. This means, from other aspect, that modernity is the age of world-alienation. It is one of the results of modern science that human beings lose their confidence in the reliability of their senses. The Arendtian critique of modernity, which has deeply been influenced by Martin Heidegger's philosophy, takes a difference between the notions of Earth and world. In Arendt's theory technology enhances the processes of re-naturalization. The problem of the relation of natural and artificial, in The Human Condition (1958), has been inserted in two narratives; one of them is the narrative of cultural criticism and another is that of political philosophy. These narratives have been embedded in different contexts borrowing ambivalences and inconsistencies to Arendt's argumentation. Santrauka Filosofinėje ir sociologinėje literatūroje modernybė „tradiciškai“ buvo pristatoma kaip epocha, kai artefaktai išstumia gamtą ir griauna pirminę natūralią aplinką. Šiuo požiūriu modernizacijos procesas – tai denatūralizacijos procesas. Šį plačiai paplitusį įsitikinimą iš esmės ginčijo Hanna Arendt. Pasak jos, moderniosios epochos šimtmečiais bendrai kurto ir puoselėto žmogaus pasaulio nenaudai vyko renatūralizacijos procesas. Kita vertus, tai reiškia, kad modernybė – tai pasaulio atskirties epocha. Viena iš moderniojo mokslo pasekmių yra ta, kad žmonės praranda pasitikėjimą juslėmis. Arendt modernybės kritika, giliai paveikta Martino Heideggerio filosofijos, atskiria Žemės ir pasaulio sąvokas. Arendt teorijoje technologija sustiprina renatūralizacijos procesus. Natūros ir artefakto santykio problema Žmogaus būklėje (1958) buvo įterpta į du naratyvus; vienas jų – tai kultūrinės kritikos naratyvas, o kitas – politinės filosofijos naratyvas. Šie naratyvai įsitvirtino skirtinguose kontekstuose, Arendt argumentacijai suteikdami dviprasmiškumų ir neatitikimų.

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