Space in Relation to God or the Absolute in the Thought of Henry More and Śaṅkara: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 507-527
Author(s):  
Jonathan Duquette

AbstractSince Antiquity thinkers of all civilizations have speculated on the concept of space. The idea arose under various typologies and descriptions in different areas of knowledge ranging from cosmology, physics, and mathematics to philosophy and psychology. However, less known are the role and implications of space in theological and religio-philosophical discourse. This article aims to examine and characterize the claim that space is intimately related to God or the absolute from the perspective of two thinkers rooted in different historical, cultural, and religious settings: the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and the Advaita Vedāntin Śaṅkara. A comparative approach will bring forward the meeting points in their respective assessment of the relationship between space and God/the absolute, as well as the distinctiveness in their arguments, approach, and motivations. The present discussion may demonstrate alternative ways of addressing a valuable problem recurring at the intersection of philosophy and religion at different times and places throughout history.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-39
Author(s):  
Ivan Yu. Ilin ◽  

This article attempts to analyze the historical and philosophical views of S.N. Bulgakov and S.L. Frank about the meaning of religion, the nature of philosophy, and the essence of philoso­phical knowledge in the structure of religious experience. The article considers the correlation of religious and philosophical ideas of two thinkers and their positioning relative to each other. The article formulates the problem of the relationship and mutual influence of religious faith and philosophical reason in the legacy of Bulgakov and Frank, and raises the question of what role these outstanding authors of the Silver age assign to religious philosophy in the spiritual life of a Christian. The question of the place of conceptual thinking in the experience of understanding the Absolute is being clarified. The thesis about the role and significance of religious philosophy as a necessary beginning of discursive comprehension of the truths of faith (Bulgakov) and a holis­tic understanding of being (Frank) is being put forward.


2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
T. G. Korneeva

The article raises the question of understanding the principle of tawhid in the Isma‘ili philosophical discourse. Isma‘ili philosophers defended the absolute transcendence of God and His indescribability. The article describes the understanding of the one and only God in Isma‘ilism, analyzes the problem of the relationship between the One and the multiple within the paradigmatic pairs of Arab-Muslim philosophy ‒ “explicit‒hidden” and “basic‒branch”. It is impossible to call God the Original, otherwise it will be necessary to recognize that He is dependent and conditioned by His consequence, and this detracts from Him. God, according to the ideas of Ismailism, has only one “true” attribute — huwiyya, which forms the required nominal multiplicity and “transition” from the transcendent God to the cognizable plural world. It is the huwiyya of God that gives the impetus for the appearance of the First Cause — the command of God “Be!”, which is also its own consequence. Combining cause and eff ect, the command of God has absolute completeness. The reader is also off ered for the fi rst time in Russian a commented translation of an excerpt from the treatise of the Ismaili philosopher of the 11th century Nasir Khusraw “Six chapters” (Shish fasl) — Chapter “On the knowledge of tawhid”.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Ndiaye Berankova

The following article compares the notion of the absolute in the work of Georg Cantor and in Alain Badiou’s third volume of Being and Event: The Immanence of Truths and proposes an interpretation of mathematical concepts used in the book. By describing the absolute as a universe or a place in line with the mathematical theory of large cardinals, Badiou avoided some of the paradoxes related to Cantor’s notion of the “absolutely infinite” or the set of all that is thinkable in mathematics W: namely the idea that W would be a potential infinity. The article provides an elucidation of the putative criticism of the statement “mathematics is ontology” which Badiou presented at the conference Thinking the Infinite in Prague. It emphasizes the role that philosophical decision plays in the construction of Badiou’s system of mathematical ontology and portrays the relationship between philosophy and mathematics on the basis of an inductive not deductive reasoning.


2009 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Marco Ivaldo

- The Doctrine of Science of 1805, which Fichte developed at the University of Erlangen, is a philosophical reflection displaying great theoretical vigour. It can be seen as consisting of two parts: the theory of existence or of knowledge and the theory of form or of objectivity. In this work Fichte makes a criticism of certain concepts of Schelling, as expounded in Philosophy and Religion (1804), concerning the relationship between thought and life, between subjectivity and absolute reason (or essence) and between form and being, as well as the idea of nothingness. Considered here to be the central concept in Fichte's doctrine is the idea of knowledge (Wissen) or of thought as absolute existence and as the existence of the absolute.


Author(s):  
Peter Sarris

‘Text, image, space, and spirit’ considers the culture, literature, art, architecture, philosophy, and religion of the Byzantium Empire. Byzantine imperial ideology was predicated upon the concept of the absolute historical continuity of the Roman state. This profoundly conservative ideological impulse informed a broader tendency towards conservatism in Byzantine literary culture, which was a legacy from antiquity. The strongly conservative inflection to Byzantine culture was further intensified by the influence of the Church and also strongly impacted on art. However, there was much greater creativity than has often been supposed. The relationship between innovation and necessity is at its clearest with respect to Byzantine architectural and artistic development.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lonneke Dubbelt ◽  
Sonja Rispens ◽  
Evangelia Demerouti

Abstract. Women have a minority position within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and, consequently, are likely to face more adversities at work. This diary study takes a look at a facilitating factor for women’s research performance within academia: daily work engagement. We examined the moderating effect of gender on the relationship between two behaviors (i.e., daily networking and time control) and daily work engagement, as well as its effect on the relationship between daily work engagement and performance measures (i.e., number of publications). Results suggest that daily networking and time control cultivate men’s work engagement, but daily work engagement is beneficial for the number of publications of women. The findings highlight the importance of work engagement in facilitating the performance of women in minority positions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-236
Author(s):  
Martin Braxatoris ◽  
Michal Ondrejčík

Abstract The paper proposes a basis of theory with the aim of clarifying the casual nature of the relationship between the West Slavic and non-West Slavic Proto-Slavic base of the Slovak language. The paper links the absolute chronology of the Proto-Slavic language changes to historical and archaeological information about Slavs and Avars. The theory connects the ancient West Slavic core of the Proto-Slavic base of the Slovak language with Sclaveni, and non-West Slavic core with Antes, which are connected to the later population in the middle Danube region. It presumes emergence and further expansion of the Slavic koiné, originally based on the non-West Slavic dialects, with subsequent influence on language of the western Slavic tribes settled in the north edge of the Avar Khaganate. The paper also contains a periodization of particular language changes related to the situation in the Khaganate of that time.


Communicology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-148
Author(s):  
NATALIA MALSHINA ◽  

This study examines the ontological problems in the aspect of the ratio of different cognitive practices and their mutual conditionality in the context of communication and their socio-cultural prerequisites, which is possible only if the traditional approach to the distinction between epistemology and faith is revised. Based on the idea of identity of common grounds of cognitive practices “belief” is included in the understanding of interpretation in the communicative situation for true knowledge in each of the modes of being. Belief in the philosophical tradition reveals the ontological foundations of hermeneutics. Three reflections are synthesised: the hermeneutic concept of understanding, the structuralist concept of language, and the psychoanalytic concept of personality. It is necessary to apply the method of phenomenological reduction to the ontological substantiation of hermeneutics in the Christian Orthodox tradition. Hence, the very natural seems the meeting of semantics, linguistics, and onomatodoxy, with the ontology language of Heidegger, the origins of which resides in in Husserl phenomenology. Fundamental ontology and linguistics, cult philosophy - both in different ways open the horizons of substantiation of hermeneutics. The beginning of this justification is the hermeneutic problem in Christianity, which has appeared as a sequence of the question of the relationship between the two Covenants, or two Unions. In the paper, the author attempts to identify the stages of constructing the philosophical concept of Pavel Florensky. As a result, the substantiation of the birth of the world in consciousness by the cult is revealed. Ontological tradenote words can be seen in Florensky through symbols. The symbol makes the transition from a small energy to a larger one, from a small information saturation to a greater one, acting as a lumen of being - when by the name we hear the reality. The word comes into contact with the world that is on the other side of our own psychological state. The word, the symbol shifts all the time from subjective to objective. The communicative model acts as a common point uniting these traditions. The religious approach as part of semiotic approach reveals the horizons of ontological conditionality of language and words, and among the words - the name, as the name plays a central role in the accumulation and transmission of information, understanding of the commonality of this conditionality in the concepts of phenomenology and Christian, Orthodox tradition.


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