scholarly journals Analytic Ecclesiology: The Social Ontology of the Church

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Joshua Cockayne

In this paper, I aim to show that analytic philosophy can contribute to the theological discussion of ecclesiology. By considering recent analytic work on social ontology, I outline how we might think of the Church as one entity, constituted by many disparate parts. The paper begins with an overview of the theological constraints for the paper, and then proceeds to examine recent work on the philosophy of social ontology and group agency. Drawing on this literature, I outline three models of social ontology from the history of philosophy and suggest reasons why all of them fail to provide an account of the Church’s agency. Finally, I develop an alternative model which, I suggest, better fits the conditions stipulated.

1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bennet

AbstractRorty’s profound and challenging critique of contemporary philosophy is in several ways somewhat unfair. Analytic philosophy can contribute towards ‘wisdom’ in a reasonable sense of the term, though not in Rorty’s narrow sense; and his contrast between ‘sophist’ and ‘sage’, with the latter understood in Plato’s way, is also too constricting. Also, some contemporary ‘analytic’ work in the ‘history of philosophy’, so called, is not invalidated by Rorty’s strictures - especially his implied accusation that we shan’t be interested in the intellectual past if we can’t look down on it.


1995 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 225-240
Author(s):  
Kenneth Minogue

It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Shachar Freddy Kislev ◽  

In British Hegelianism we find, forgotten, a weighty theory of individuality. This theory remains one of the most sustained attempts in the history of philosophy to analyze the individual, not in the social or psychological sense, but as a logical-metaphysical category. The Idealist conceptualization of the individual is bound with their unconventional theory of universals, for they argued that any individual is a “concrete universal,” and vice versa. This article reconstructs the British Idealist theory of individuality, highlighting its key insights: (a) the individual is not a simple unit, but a small system with interrelated parts; (b) the individual is not simply given, but is mediated by thought; (c) the individual is the conceptual glue holding the parts together and assigning them their respective places; (d) the conceptualization of the individual lies at the intersection of logic, aesthetics and systems theory.


1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-117
Author(s):  
John J. LaRocca

In a recent article, Caroline M. Hibbard noted that recent work on Tudor-Stuart recusancy has focused on the enforcement of royal and statutory policy on the local level and has examined the social composition of the recusant community. These studies have revealed that the recusant community was not dominated by priests, not subject to the political directives of the papacy, and not plotting rebellion. The problem inherent in these local studies, as Professor Hibbard points out, is that they do not explain why the English were anti-Catholic and they do not examine the international character of the English Catholic Community. This article is an attempt to view the recusant problem from the perspective of the monarch and the privy council, because both monarch and privy council were aware of the international character of Catholicism and both stated clearly in their policies toward recusants the grounds of their objection to the Catholic community. An analysis of the recusancy policy established by Elizabeth between 1559 and 1574 reveals that her primary objection to the recusants was not religious but political. The recusants denied a fundamental claim of the monarch: the headship of the church and, therefore, the claim that the monarch was the source of all power within the realm. This article, then, will examine the ways in which she wished to contain a minority who denied her supreme power in the realm and the circumstances which caused the queen and the council to change that policy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-109
Author(s):  
Snehal P. Sanathanan ◽  
Vinod Balakrishnan

Political cartooning was one among the many cultural products that colonial rule introduced in India. This British legacy has been used to produce narratives about the nature and history of Indian cartooning. However, these narratives have, invariably, overlooked the distinctly Indian cultural ethos as well as the Indian satirical tradition. The paper proposes an alternative model by positing that in the Indian satirical tradition, the Vidusaka – the comic figure in Sanskrit drama - has been an antecedent to the political cartoonist in terms of the social and political role as well as the nature and purpose of the humour.      The paper also locates the principles of caricaturing in precolonial Indian visual arts, and presents the early vernacular cartoons as the point of convergence between the local satirical tradition and the western format of the political cartoon which laid the foundation for a modern yet specifically Indian sensibility


Author(s):  
Silvia Sinicropi ◽  
Damiano Cortese ◽  
Massimo Pollifroni ◽  
Valter Cantino

This study emphasizes the history of accountancy, shedding light on its link with artistic and cultural patrimony, an issue that is scarcely addressed but is nearly always a matter underlying the greatest monuments of our civilization. As a case study, this study focuses on one of the significant architectural monuments of the City of Turin: the “Church of Gran Madre di Dio”; which was built to celebrate a historical and political event. Today it is a place of worship, a tourist attraction and a pilgrimage site. The current study corrects, from an accounting and historical perspective, the paucity of knowledge related to the Church of “Gran Madre di Dio”, and it also highlights the social impact its construction had upon the Turin area.


Author(s):  
Daniel W. Graham

A leading figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy, Vlastos was a pioneer in the application to ancient philosophers of the techniques of analytic philosophy. Concentrating on figures of early Greek philosophy, he made major contributions to the understanding of the Presocratics, Socrates and Plato. He saw the Presocratics as applying ethical concepts to nature which ultimately rendered nature intelligible. He distinguished between the early dialogues of Plato, which represent the philosophy of Plato’s master Socrates – a philosophy the early Plato shared – and the middle dialogues in which Plato develops a transcendental metaphysics and rationalist epistemology to ground Socratic ethical concepts. Vlastos’s work played a major role in bringing the history of philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical research.


Author(s):  
Ruth Cross ◽  
Simon Rowlands ◽  
Sally Foster

Abstract This book chapter seeks to: (i) explore concepts of 'health' held by lay people and health promoters; (ii) introduce recent work on the social determinants of health; (iii) introduce certain threshold concepts including salutogenesis, social models of health and upstream thinking; (iv) establish the value base of health promotion; (v) introduce the disciplinary foundations of health promotion; (vi) outline in more detail 'empowerment' as a key value in health promotion; and (vii) describe the key WHO conferences, which provide the milestones in the development of health promotion. This chapter has provided a foundation upon which to base further study; it has presented the key values and principles of health promotion; emphasized the need to tackle the social determinants of health; presented a history of health promotion's development through the WHO-led conferences; introduced some threshold concepts; introduced the disciplines that contribute to health promotion; outlined professional and lay concepts of health; and suggested that empowerment approaches are the essence of health promotion.


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