Scientific Rationalism and Supernatural Experience Narratives

2017 ◽  
pp. 60-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane E. Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Rationalism

“World without End”

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-89
Author(s):  
Erik Meganck
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
First World ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
The Way ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

Abstract In this article, I want to make the following points, none of which are totally new, but their constellation here is meant to be challenging. First, world is not a (Cartesian) thing but an event, the event of sense. This event is opening and meaning – verbal tense. God may be a philosophical name of this event. This is recognized by late-modern religious atheist thought. This thought differs from modern scientific rationalism in that the latter’s so-called areligious atheism is actually a hyperreligious theism. On the way, the alleged opposition between philosophy and theology, between thought and faith is seen to erode. The core matter of this philosophy of religion will be the absolute reference, the system of objectivity and the holiness of the name. All this because of a prefix a- that has its sense turned inside out by the death of God.

Myth, metaphor and hypothesis: how anthropomorphism defeats science

1995 ◽  
Vol 349 (1328) ◽  
pp. 215-218 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The State ◽  
Selfish Gene ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

Dawkin’s theory of the selfish gene has achieved an hegemony quite out of proportion to its intellectual finesse. Its popularity among not just sociobiologists, but biologists proper, provides yet another illustration of the susceptibility of scientific rationalism to the social and political ideologies of the day, to which scientists, being only too human, are heir. A singular achievement of nineteenth century biology, through such writers as Darwin and Huxley, was the construction of an objectifying language for the description of biological phenomena. Transposed into evolutionary theory, this language carefully deanthropomorphizes the processes of mutation, competition and survival, which were defined as central to the state of being of the natural world. Implications of motivation and intention were excluded from the meaning of these terms, as improper for the species and operations involved.

Intimacy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Signs And Symptoms ◽  
Clinical Situation ◽  
Clinical Encounter ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

This chapter argues that where narrativity ends, intimacy may begin. The clinical encounter is an aesthetic experience. One must dodge the scientific rationalism in order to preserve the phenomenological understanding and achieve an understanding of the meaning of a clinical situation as felt, rather than simply assessing objective signs and symptoms. The acceptance of atmospheres as clinically relevant phenomena is ultimately related to the acknowledgement of the ambiguous nature of the clinical encounter. The clinical encounter is an event suspended between the pathic and the linguistic domains of experience, an open event that invites participation, and must remain so in order to preserve the phenomenological precision. Intimacy is an atmosphere in which both partners feel a sense of connectedness and a shared understanding. It can be encapsulated in the formula ‘aloneness–togetherness’—sharing one’s own aloneness with another person. Intimacy is the meeting of two solitudes. This relatedness is transformational.

For a Defense of Historical Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

This chapter argues that historians must go beyond the premises of the paradigm of the Centaur and uphold the autonomy and prerogatives of historical knowledge with respect to the Enlightenment. It suggests that the correct question to ask a historian is not “What is the Enlightenment?” but rather “What was it?” and that we should ask what is it that we know about the Enlightenment's significance in the history of Europe during the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, the historian questioned should not think of the Enlightenment as a kind of philosophia perennis. The chapter also considers Ernst Cassirer's declaration of faith in Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton's scientific rationalism and Michel Foucault's attempt to revive the paradigm of the Centaur as “historico-philosophical practice” in the wake of the great German historiography of the Aufklärung.

Roots of the Organic Challenge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Barton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Organic Farming ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Industrial Farming ◽  
International Trading ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

The introduction briefly surveys the developments that have taken place in the last 500 years relating to the growth of crown capitalism, monoculture, the rise of international trading regimes, the impact of industrial farming, and the scientific and romantic reaction that gave birth to organic farming. Organic farming merged romanticism, holism, ecology, science, and desiccation theory, and fitted within the larger environment movement that spanned from the nineteenth century to the present. It placed an emphasis on wholeness and change that inverted or rejected the main philosophical assumptions underlying scientific rationalism realism and re-introduced into mainstream European culture elements of immanence and mysticism.

scholarly journals Mindfulness in Western Contexts Perpetuates Oppressive Realities for Minority Cultures

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ishikawa
Keyword(s):  
Stress Reduction ◽  
North American ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
Teaching Resources ◽  
Minority Cultures ◽  
Reduction Strategies ◽  
Mindfulness Practices ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

This paper examines mindfulness-based practices in North American classrooms as culturally appropriated through the dominantly western modality of individualism and scientific-rationalism. Through investigating MindUP™ and other mindfulness teaching resources, I demonstrate the construed qualities of mindfulness practices in western contexts.  I argue that mindfulness is molded to fit colonial ontologies of values and knowledge and perpetuates oppressive realities for minority cultures. I propose that mindfulness should be reoriented into its Buddhist contexts through required lessons and trainings in Buddhist cultures, ontologies, and knowledges, and creators and supporters of mindfulness-based educational programs should refer to the practices they are promoting as attention-focusing and stress-reduction strategies and not as misconstrued, individualistic qualities of mindfulness. This paper intends to extend awareness to the broader sociopolitical consequences of culturally appropriating mindfulness practices.

Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity

Philosophy ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 46 (176) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Paul Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Existential Philosophy ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Great Achievement ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Scientific Truth ◽  
First Time ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

The Alleged Turning Point in European PhilosophyExistentialists, especially those who follow either Heidegger or Jaspers, find a great deal objectionable in what they variously call ‘scientism’, ‘scientific rationalism’, and ‘positivism’. In this article I shall discuss one of the alleged defects of scientific rationalism, that it recognizes only one kind of truth—the kind that existentialists call ‘objective truth’. ‘One great achievement of existential philosophy,’ writes William Barrett, ‘has been a new interpretation of the idea of truth in order to point out that there are different kinds of truth, where a rigid scientific rationalism had postulated but one kind: objective scientific truth.’ Not only scientific rationalists but traditional metaphysicians from Plato to Aquinas and Hegel are judged to be equally at fault here: they too have failed to recognize any truth other than the objective variety. It was Kierkegaard who for the first time effectively challenged the assumptions shared by scientific rationalists and traditional metaphysicians. Kierkegaard, in Barrett's words, ‘had to re-open the whole question of the meaning of truth … his stand on the question may well have marked a turning point in European philosophy.’

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