Humanism and Technology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cor van der Weele ◽  
Henk van den Belt
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Lack Of Control ◽  
Control Technologies

The chapter argues that in human relations with technology, assumptions about ourselves are just as crucial as assumptions about technology. Neither the optimistic traditional humanist belief in human freedom and autonomy, nor the pessimistic view that humans are necessarily anthropocentric, will do for building sound relations with technology. The chapter develops this argument through three debates. First, Heidegger’s antihumanism, in which humans do not have any agency in their relations with technology, may not be convincing, yet lack of control is still a relevant theme. Second, the section on evolutionary humanism (turning to transhumanism and AI) shows that humans now often look vulnerable rather than masterful in their relations with technology. Third, Anthropocene debates tend to rest on bleak views of human beings, so that hard-to-control technologies may then seem to be our only hope. The chapter argues for a need to develop more detailed insights into how we function by facing and exploring our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as well our under-recognized abilities for responsibility. This may open perspectives on more modest and entangled forms of agency, more humane technologies, and more de-centered relations with nature.

Religiusitas Tokoh-Tokoh Dalam Novel Bumi Cinta Karya Habiburrahman El-Shirazy

AKADEMIKA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Minahul Mubin
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Aspects ◽  
Religious Elements

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

Natural Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 174-203
Author(s):  
Lenn E. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Naturalistic Fallacy ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Great Tradition

Natural law links moral and legal theory with natural theology and science. It is critical to thinking about God’s sovereignty and human freedom. Tracing the roots of the natural law idea, I defend the approach against conventionalism and legal positivism. For they leave human norms ungrounded. Chapter 7 opens by disarming Hume’s elenchus about ‘is’ and ‘ought’. I do not deny the reality of a naturalistic fallacy, but I do argue that facts make rightful claims on us and that the unity of reality and value central to Jewish thinking and to the philosophical great tradition does not confuse facts with values but does appreciate the preciousness of being—of life and personhood most pointedly. Once again here transcendence consorts with immanence. For we find God’s law writ subtly in nature, not least when we discover what it means to perfect ourselves as loving and creative human beings.

Predestination and freedom in Milton's Paradise Lost

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80
Author(s):  
Benjamin Myers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Fluid Sphere ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
History Of

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) offers a highly creative seventeenth-century reconstruction of the doctrine of predestination, a reconstruction which both anticipates modern theological developments and sheds important light on the history of predestinarian thought. Moving beyond the framework of post-Reformation controversies, the poem emphasises both the freedom and the universality of electing grace, and the eternally decisive role of human freedom in salvation. The poem erases the distinction between an eternal election of some human beings and an eternal rejection of others, portraying reprobation instead as the temporal self-condemnation of those who wilfully reject their own election and so exclude themselves from salvation. While election is grounded in the gracious will of God, reprobation is thus grounded in the fluid sphere of human decision. Highlighting this sphere of human decision, the poem depicts the freedom of human beings to actualise the future as itself the object of divine predestination. While presenting its own unique vision of predestination, Paradise Lost thus moves towards the influential and distinctively modern formulations of later thinkers like Schleiermacher and Barth.

scholarly journals Beyond Personalist Virtue Ethics: Transcendental Anthropology and its Implications for Interpersonal Communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kleio Akrivou ◽  
Manuel Joaquín Fernández González
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Communication Ethics ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Nature And Society

There is a need of deeper understanding of what human beings are for facing adequately global challenges. The aim of this article is to point to the possible contributions that transcendental anthropology would represent for complementing and expanding the valuable, but still incomplete solutions put forward by personalist virtue ethics to face these challenges. In particular, the question of the moral motivation and the complex relations between virtue and freedom are addressed, taking as a starting point the understanding of the uniqueness of the personal act-of-being and the transcendentality of human freedom, which is in dialogue with human nature and society, but ultimately not subdued to none of them. Some implications of the transcendental anthropology in the field of interpersonal communication ethics are put forward.

scholarly journals Out of Africa: Ecocriticism beyond Environmental Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Sule Emmanuel Egya
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
International Scholarship ◽  
Out Of Africa ◽  
The Right ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

      This essay is an attempt to present a broader view of ecocriticism in Africa. Ecocriticism, in theory and practice, appears to have limited itself to the notion of environmental justice, with the aim of raising consciousness against institutional powers behind ecological crises. The reason for this is not far-fetched. International scholarship on African ecocriticism tends to focus on the activism of the Kenyan Wangari Mathai and the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa; and on the fiction of a few writers concerned with environmentalism and conservation. This kind of ecocriticism, under the rubric of postcolonialism, is, in my view, narrow, too human-centred, and should, in fact, be decentred for an all-inclusive mapping of African ecocriticism. I attempt to shift this paradigm by foregrounding a narrative that stages the role and agency of nonhuman and spiritual materiality in practices that demonstrate nature-human relations since the pre-colonial period. I argue that for a proper delineation of the theory and practice of ecocriticism in Africa, attention should be paid to literary and cultural artefacts that depict Africa’s natural world in which humans sometimes find themselves helpless under the agency of other-than-human beings, with whom they negotiate the right path for the society. I conclude by making the point that a recognition of this natural world, and humans’ right place in it, is crucial to any ecocritical project that imagines an alternative to the present human-centred system.        Keywords: African ecocriticism, natural worlds, spiritual materiality, nonhuman agency

The Geopolitics of the Personal

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-198
Author(s):  
Cairns Craig
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lack Of Control ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Individual ◽  
Territorial Rights

Christian existentialist philosophers, such as Gabriel Marcel, argued for a conception of the human individual not as an isolated subjectivity, as in Descartes’ cogito, but as born into and shaped by its relationships with others. ‘Being’ is necessarily ‘being with’. Spark’s plots dramatise, in characters such as Jean Brodie, the dangers of an isolating subjectivity that seeks to make the world conform to its own wishes in order to deny the fact they have been ‘thrown’ into a world they did not choose. In defiance of Sartre’s emphasis on the ability of human beings to choose their own future, Spark’s novels emphasise the historical and geographic ‘thrownness’ of her characters, their accidental arrival in situations they did not choose. These may be the geographical flashpoints of modern history, such as the Palestine of The Mandelbaum Gate, or the temporal eruption of the past into the present, as in Territorial Rights. It is this fundamental lack of control that leads Spark to insist that ridicule must be central to contemporary art, since ridicule not only challenges religious, political and ideological efforts to control events but challenges the presumptions of art itself when it seeks to shape the world.

The Freedom of God and Human Freedom

1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Axel D. Steuer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Images Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Actions ◽  
Freedom Of Action

Our peculiar dignity as persons seems to rest on our freedom of action, since freedom of action is required to make sense both out of moral responsibility and out of the God—man relationship. Indeed, the possession of freedom seems to be a (if not the) major justification for claims that humans are in an important way images of God. Furthermore, the most promising theodicies all ascribe a good portion of the evil experienced in the world to the free actions of human beings.

Reading Rahner’s Evolutionary Christology with Bonaventure

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-529
Author(s):  
Michael Rubbelke ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Karl Rahner ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Character ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Trinity

In his evolutionary Christology, Karl Rahner shares some surprising affinities with Bonaventure. Both envision human beings as microcosmic, that is, as uniquely representative of the whole of creation. Both describe creation Christocentrically, oriented in its design and goal toward the Incarnate Word. Both understand humans as radically responsible for the non-human world. These similarities point to a more foundational congruence in their Trinitarian theologies. Rahner and Bonaventure connect the Father’s personal character as fontal source of Son and Spirit to God’s unoriginated and free relation to creation. If the Word expresses the Father fully, creation expresses God in a real but incomplete way. This grounds a series of analogous relationships between created spirit and matter, human freedom and nature, as well as grace and human nature. From this perspective, Rahner’s evolutionary Christology can be seen as ecologically significant, appreciatively critical of evolution, and ultimately rooted in the Trinity.

An Attempt To Defend Theism

Philosophy ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 39 (147) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
W. D. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Great Good ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Clear Statement

The fact of evil has worried theists for a long time. The earliest clear statement of this worry is perhaps to be found in the book of Habbakuk: ‘Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?’ (i, 13). More precisely formulated, it comes to this: if God is good and omnipotent, why evil ? From his goodness it would follow necessarily that he does not will evil and from his omnipotence that he could prevent it; why then should it occur? Theists have attempted to escape from this dilemma by means of an argument which turns on the claim that human beings are, to some degree at any rate, free to choose and act as they will. They are free to do good or evil; frequently they choose the latter and that is why evils, or at least many of them, occur. This human freedom, however, is a necessary condition of personality and, as such, a great good; so it is perfectly consistent with the goodness of God that he should will it. But what of his omnipotence? The point of the argument is that God has to allow those evils which result from men making evil choices, and this certainlylooks, at first blush, like a limitation of his power. But, we are assured,it is not really a limitation because all it amounts to is that God cannot do the logically impossible, viz., make beings who, at one and the same time, are both free to do what they will and pre-determined to do good.To deny that God can do the logically impossible, of course, is not to den his omnipotence; it is merely to point out that there are some things which it would not make sense to say that he had done.

Concluding Reflections

2016 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-109
Author(s):  
Govert Buijs ◽  
Simon Polinder
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Fundamental Notion ◽  
The World ◽  
Practice Approach

This article sketches a research agenda for the development of a Christianly inspired perspective in International Relations. It is argued that a practice-approach offers fruitful starting points for such an attempt. This approach shares three fundamental insights with the Christian philosophical approach known as Reformational philosophy, namely that science is just one mode of relating to the world, that human action and human freedom should be taken seriously, and that reality is intrinsically meaningful. In turn, Reformational philosophy can deepen existing practice-approaches on four points. In the first place, it addresses the fundamental notion that all human beings have an (Archimedean) point of trust. Secondly, it includes the notion that reality is made up of many dimensions. Thirdly, it takes seriously dominant cultural ideas or so-called groundmotives. Finally, a Reformational approach is sensitive to vicissitudinary processes which may open up or close down certain positive developments in history.

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