Isaiah Berlin. A Value Pluralist and Humanist View of Human Nature and the Meaning of Life

Exchange ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-327
Author(s):  
Wiel Eggen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
A Value

Se perdre afin de se retrouver : l'importance du passage entre l’absence et la présence dans Œdipe sur la route de Henry Bauchau

2012 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Alicja Ślusarska
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
The Road ◽  
De Se ◽  
The City ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

Retracing in his novel the labyrinthine journey that leads Oedipus from the place of his abomination (Thebes) to the city of his future glory (Colonus), Henry Bauchau fills the emptiness between Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Bauchau’s hero, a powerful king, loses everything and stabs his eyes out when the cruel truth about his real identity is revealed. Blind, homeless, devoid of meaning of life, Oedipus leaves on a journey to pass away anywhere. However, his way to death turns out to be, thanks to benevolent presence of others and art’s liberating power, the road to personal elucidation. The story of Bauchau’s Oedipus, who finally recognizes himself as a truly human, is based therefore on the passage between absence and presence, between darkness and lucidity, on the union of contradictions which symbolize the complexity of human nature. This paper attempts to analyse different representations of absence in Bauchau’s novel. Afterwards, the article focuses on the ways which facilitate Oedipus’s road leading from depersonalization to rediscovery of his own identity.

Value Pluralism and Monotheism

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 818-840
Author(s):  
George Crowder
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
A Value ◽  
Religious Accommodation ◽  
Pluralist Approach

AbstractHow far can monotheism be reconciled with the pluralism characteristic of modern societies? In this article, I focus on the “value pluralism” of Isaiah Berlin, which I suggest captures a deeper level of plurality than Rawls's more familiar version of pluralism. However, some critics have objected that Berlinian pluralism is too controversial an idea in which to ground liberalism because it is profoundly at odds with the monotheism professed by so many citizens of a modern society. I argue that monotheists can be value pluralists as long as they do not insist that their faith is superior to all others. This pluralist position is exemplified by elements of the interfaith movement, according to which many religions are recognized as having roughly equal value. I also argue that a value-pluralist approach to religious accommodation, if it can be achieved, may be more stable than the uneasy combination of disapproval and restraint involved in the more orthodox solution to conflict among religions, toleration.

Human nature as God's purpose

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACOB AFFOLTER
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Sense Of Purpose

AbstractThis article responds to one of Thaddeus Metz's criticisms of the theory that the meaning of life is to fulfil a purpose assigned by God. In particular, it addresses the argument that only an atemporal God could ground meaning but that an atemporal God could not assign a purpose. In order to do this, the article first argues that Metz's criticisms misread the relevant sense of purpose. It then argues that on a more plausible reading of ‘purpose’, we can see that it is in fact the kind of thing that an atemporal God could assign.

scholarly journals LOVE IN THE NATURE OF HAPPINESS: EXISTING-HUMANISTIC ASPECT

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetyana HURLYEVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Human Essence ◽  
A Value ◽  
Humanistic Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Spiritual Ability

The article emphasizes the importance of humane values in personal development, in the fullest, creative realization of a person's human essence, in the continuous pursuit of happiness. It is the proclamation and implementation of such values as goodness, justice, compassion, responsibility, freedom, conscience, dignity, honor, and others. From the standpoint of the existential-humanistic approach, the role of love as a value in the nature of happiness, its connection with creativity, spirituality, and dreams is considered. Love as one of the most important human values, the high meaning of life, the spiritual ability of man can be manifested in various types of relationships. The author of the article focuses on love for all that exists - for other people, for nature, for life, for the world, on the meaning of a person's ability to give and receive love. Key words: happiness, love, dream, creativity, meaning of life, spirituality, existential-humanistic aspect

scholarly journals A child with disability as a value - motherhood in a noetic perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-506
Author(s):  
Kasper Sipowicz ◽  
Marlena Podlecka ◽  
Tadeusz Pietras
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
A Value ◽  
Human Functioning ◽  
Spiritual Perspective ◽  
Human Need

The paper attempts to embed the experience of being a mother to a child with intellectual disabilities in a noetic (spiritual) perspective of human functioning. According to the noo-psychotheoretical assumptions (Popielski, 2018) constructed on the basis of Viktor Frankl’s concept of logotherapy (2009), finding and fulfilling the meaning of life is the highest human need and a kind of metamotivation. The suffering resulting from motherhood is seen as a borderline experience, in which the existential situation so far is revalued and the meaning appears to be the acceptance of an attitude of moral heroism towards the inevitable fate.

scholarly journals 在後現代語境下我們如何建構醫學模式？——對〈身體倫理醫學模式〉的閱讀

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Wei XIAO
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Problems ◽  
New Model ◽  
A Value ◽  
Digital Commons ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
Ethical Cultures

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.Medicine is a value construction. As the combination of a variety of values and methodologies, a medical model can be used to observe and handle medical problems in the field of medicine. Indeed, human understandings of medicine have undergone a long process of historical development. Sun’s “body ethics model of medicine” can be taken as a new medical model in the post-modern context. It is achieved through the combination of the Chinese and Western ethical cultures. In my view, this new model is shaped by three key elements: human nature, the body, and ethical relationships. At the same time, the model points toward an inevitable fact of life: “Politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale.”DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 39 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

On Value and value: A Reply to Quentin Smith

Philosophy ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 66 (258) ◽  
pp. 525-526
Author(s):  
Jonathan Westphal ◽  
Christopher Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Cosmic Radiation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Thomas Nagel ◽  
A Value ◽  
The One ◽  
Emotional Value

In ‘Concerning the Absurdity of Life’ Quentin Smith accuses us of contradicting ourselves in our argument against Thomas Nagel. On the one hand we said that Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 is not ‘insignificant’ compared with cosmic radiation. On the other we said that the life of a man of integrity or humanity could be lived without a formal claim to Value, so that there was nothing for Nagel's external perspective to negate. But where is the contradiction? We put ‘emotional value’, used of Mozart's concerto, in scare quotes, to show that we disapproved of the phrase, and we also called the emotional value ‘so-called’ with the same intention. What we said about the life of the man of integrity, as we characterized it, was that no formal claim about Value was made for it—note the capital V. ‘Formal’ was meant to make the same point. We meant neither to assert nor to deny that Value was objectively present in the concerto. If we had asserted it, that would have meant that the concerto was no good. If we had denied it, that would have committed us to a styptic view of what it would be for it to be false that it was no good. Also not wanted was to understand how music has a value, for example in education. Smith did not see that we were gunning for just the kind of analysis he gives of integrity and humanity. Hence that capital V in our reference to ‘Value’. It was meant ironically. Is a man's integrity ‘living by his values’, as Smith says, or is ‘humanity’, as we used it, ‘respecting the value of other human beings’? Integrity is surely, as the OED says, more a certain kind of unbrokenness or wholeness, being uncorrupted, even sinless, or innocent. The OED rightly makes no mention of values. Nor does it mention them under ‘humanity’: kindness, benevolence, humaneness, ‘traits or touches of human nature or feeling; points that appeal to man’. It is not true, let alone analytically true, as Smith says, that the notions of integrity and humanity involve value.

The Varieties of Ecological Piety

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronislaw SZERSZYNSKI
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Environmental Values ◽  
Deep Ecology ◽  
A Value ◽  
Abstract Ideas ◽  
Gaia Theory ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe idea of nature's sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernity's overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such beliefs embodied in their lives? An attention to the theological or cosmological level can only take us so far in understanding the dynamics of culture; we need also to attend to questions of practice, ritual, community and relationship, for it is through such elements that more abstract ideas about humanity's place in the universe are given both support and expression. It is in this spirit of inquiry that this paper proceeds, arguing that religious forms of action and corporateness characteristic of monastic, sectarian, churchly, and folk religiosity have shaped the way that contemporary environmental values are embodied in the practices and experience of everyday life.

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