Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

This concluding chapter returns to the theme of the worth or dignity of human life. What are the implications, in the face of the contemporary challenges of biotechnology and scientistic materialism, of a Jewish understanding of human nature and human dignity for our common human future? It argues that the ambivalence of the Jewish tradition toward human nature is an attitude well worth cultivating. We are holy—and capable of unimaginable evil. Judaism reminds us of both. We have the creativity and freedom to remake the world, and now, increasingly, to remake ourselves. Our own survival might depend on cultivating anew a sense of limits. Limits there will always be, many imposed by human nature. Our dignity inheres in knowing when and how to master them, and when and how to accept them with respect.

The Death of God

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Michalski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cross

This chapter turns to Plato's Phaedo as well as the Gospel of Matthew: two narratives about death, and two visions of human nature. Christ's cry on the cross, as told by Matthew, gives voice to an understanding of human life that is radically different from that of Socrates. For Phaedo's Socrates, the truly important things in life are ideas: the eternal order of the world, the understanding of which leads to unperturbed peace and serenity in the face of death. The Gospel is the complete opposite: it testifies to the incurable presence of the Unknown in every moment of life, a presence that rips apart every human certainty built on what is known, that disturbs all peace, all serenity—that severs the continuity of time, opening every moment of our lives to nothingness, thereby inscribing within them the possibility of an abrupt end and the chance at a new beginning.

scholarly journals Metaphysics and the Existential Problematic of Human Finitude

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Nutter
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Finite Horizon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intentional Structure ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Human Finitude

Rather than being of little practical importance, the metaphysical underpinnings of a given horizon determine the character of its existential problematic. With the breakdown of classical metaphysics concomitant with the modern turn to the subjective, the existential problematic of finitude as ultimate horizon arose. According to this subjective turn, the human person can no longer engage the world as though it were in itself constituted by transcendently grounded meaning and value. Standing within this genealogical lineage, Martin Heidegger undertook a phenomenological investigation into the existential constitution of the human person which defines authenticity in terms of finitude. For the early Heidegger, human life is essentially ‘guilty’. This guilt, however, is not the traditional cognizance of one’s sinfulness, but the foundational Nichtigkeit (‘nullity’) of life and its attendant possibilities in the light of the ultimate finality of death. Authenticity, then, consists of a resolute working out of one’s life in the face of such inevitable finality. For the later Heidegger, the finite horizon of a particular epochal disclosure gifts Being to thought and determines it thereby. Authenticity in this case consists of giving oneself over to be appropriated by an event of Being. In contrast, Lonergan understands authenticity as being true to that primordial love which beckons us to intellectual probity and responsibility in working out life’s possibilities. This essay will illustrate how Lonergan’s analysis of the intentional structure of human conscious operations stands as a corrective to Heidegger’s early existential analysis of human being-in-the-world and later thought about Being. While Lonergan defines authenticity as loving openness to transcendent Being, Heidegger, because of his forgetfulness of the subject in her conscious operations, does not allow for a transcendence which stands beyond any finite horizon. 

MULTIKULTURALISMEDALAM SASTRAKONTEMPORERAMERIKA Analisis Kumpulan Cerita Pendek Karya Brian Leung

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Arido Laksono
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Culture Time ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
Capital Constraints ◽  
Close Distance

The understanding towards values, norms ana culture of societies is a crucial matter nowadays considering the close distance among countries in the world. This phenomenon is undoubtedly considered as the result of the advancement of technology distributed and understood by people around the world as a big leap to comprehend societies with their various culture and customs. Thus, the understanding towards multiculturalism is an important issue in global societies to avoid prejudice and stereotypes of other ethnic and tribes. One of the ways is studying the values of multiculturalism either implicitly or explicitly through the work of literature as a reflection of human life. Literary work is regarded as an excellent medium for studying the richness of human nature and its culture considering the fact that only a few people are fortunate to have the opportunity to see and experience other culture. Time and capital constraints have given literary work spaces to accommodate someone's interest in experiencing values, norms and culture of other societies in different areas of the world.

scholarly journals The creation of beauty by its destruction: the idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Raphael
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Jewish Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human Figure ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Second Commandment

Contemporary commentators are well aware that the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far from suppressing art, the Second Commandment produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to produce figurative images that at once cancel and restore the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests that Jewish art’s observance of the Second Commandment’s proscription of idolatrous images (a commandment that belongs indivisibly with the First) is ever more relevant to a contemporary image-saturated mass culture whose consumption induces feelings of both hubris and self-disgust or shame. The article revisits Steven Schwarzschild’s interpretation of the halakhic requirement that artists should deliberately misdraw or distort the human form and Anthony Julius’s account of Jewish art as one that that mobilizes idol breaking. As an aesthetic consequence of the rabbinic permission to mock idols – and thereby render the ideological cults for which they are visual propaganda merely laughable or absurd – distortive, auto-destructive and other related forms of Jewish art are not intended to alienate the sanctity of the human. On the contrary, by honouring the transcendence of the human, especially the face, idoloclastic art knows the human figure as sublime, always exceeding any representation of its form. Idoloclastic anti-images thereby belong to a messianic aesthetic of incompletion that knows the world as it ought to be but is not yet; that remains open to its own futurity: the restoration of dignity, in love.

scholarly journals El reconocimiento de la dignidad humana ante los avances de la genética

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisela Giner Rommel
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
The Face ◽  
One Step

La llamada era o siglo de la biotecnología, y con ella, una nueva realidad genética artificial, va abriéndose camino inexorablemente. La misma supone nuevas formas de dominio de la vida natural y humana sin precedentes. El hombre puede ya alterar nada menos que el curso de la evolución de las especies. Es fácil adivinar entonces por qué la genética traspasa su propio ámbito científico: se encuentra ineludiblemente cargada de dilemas éticos de toda índole, y unida al mundo filosófico y moral por su urgente necesidad de respuestas. La primera gran reflexión que la genética plantea a la ética es de tal calibre, que zozobra los cimientos de la propia tradición filosófica occidental y su concepción de la dignidad humana. Si el hallazgo del genoma humano lleva consigo una propensión de la visión de la realidad humana exclusivamente cientificista y biológica, procediendo a realizar una verdadera «sacralización de la ciencia» ¿Supone ello el derrumbe, la invalidación de la condición ética y libre del hombre? ¿Debemos renunciar a una visión del mismo como un ser digno y reducirlo a un animal más? ¿Debemos, en definitiva, dar carpetazo al humanismo, poniendo en tela de juicio la calidad moral del hombre? ¿Cerrar entonces los espacios de la ética o la filosofía, declarando que todos los aspectos que encierran la condición humana se consumen en una explicación científica? ¿Cómo afrontar otros posibles ataques a dimensiones de la dignidad humana como la libertad, la igualdad, la intimidad? ¿Precisan de disciplinas distintas, como la filosofía y el derecho, en busca de soluciones que exceden del campo científico y a los que éste no puede dar respuestas? Ante los nuevos poderes y responsabilidades que trae consigo el progreso científico, la explicación ética y la científica no deben sino reencontrarse. Apostar por el control ético del rumbo del proceso científico y tecnológico a través del paradigma de la dignidad humana se torna imprescindible. En definitiva, tratar de llevar a cabo el sueño del progreso universal, real, en el que la genética constituya un eslabón, un peldaño más en su consecución efectiva no puede darse sin intervención de la reflexión ética.This is definitely the age of biotechnology and with it comes a new artificial genetic reality. Biotechnology gives us never seen before control over plant, animal and human life. Mankind may now even be able to change the course of evolution in all living creatures, no less. That is why it is easy to understand that the science of genetics transcends its own domain; it is unavoidably confronted with ethical dilemmas of all kind and it is compelled to turn to philosophy and morality because of its need to find answers urgently. The first question raised by genetics is of such a magnitude that it overturns the basis of the Western philosophical tradition and its concept of human dignity. If the decoding of the human genome leads to an exclusively scientific and biological vision of human reality, to what you could call a «sacralisation of science», then what happens to free will, to man as an ethical being? Should we henceforth refuse to consider Man as a creature of Dignity and reduce him to just another animal? Should we, in short, abandon all humanistic idealism and question even the morality of human beings? Should we forget about ethics and philosophy and agree that all the aspects, implicit in the human condition, can find a scientific explanation? But how then should we deal with other attacks that may be made against such dimensions of human dignity as liberty, equality and privacy? Will there be no need for other disciplines, such as philosophy and law, to find solutions to problems which exceed the field of science and for which science has no answers to give?. In the face of all the new powers, potential and responsibilities brought about by scientific progress, ethics and science should not become adversaries. Ethical control over the course of scientific and technological progress based on the paradigm of human dignity is becoming essential. To summarise, it will be impossible to realise the dream of true progress, in which the science of genetics is but one step, without answering ethical questions.

Human Nature & Jewish Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
The Many

This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? This book shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike. Science may tell us what we are, the book says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. The book shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, the book demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to—and challenges many current assumptions about—these central aspects of human nature. A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.

Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
The World ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
Zadie Smith

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity today are impossibly complicated and planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction makes the surprising but compelling claim that it is precisely by culitvating a modest temperament that contemporary fiction can play an central role in conbating the despair that many of us feel in the face of such enormous and intractable problems. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction shows us how contemporary works of literature model modesty as a critical temperament. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, Dancer builds a case that the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, the book offers an engaging response to the debate over post-critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-154
Author(s):  
Olivier Roy
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Public Sphere

This concluding chapter discusses how values are returning today in the guise of dominant norms, both in the secular world and in religion. Today's crisis is not simply a crisis of values, but of referring to values at all. For what should values be founded on? On one hand, religions, which are no longer in sync with Europe's dominant cultures, are returning to the public sphere on behalf of a normative demand. On the other hand, the secular culture that professes freedom and rights is coming to a head in a burst of normative production. This is a normativity toward all forms of religion and religiosity, of course, but also normativity with respect to its own foundation, the social contract, and human nature, that of the desiring subject. Ultimately, the chapter argues that it is time to re-examine the question of values, to restore the particular cultural and social aspects of norms and to reinject them into society. In the face of globalization, the issue is at once to be more in touch with society and to act as a counterweight to other influences in the world: only Europe can meet these two objectives.

Medical Progress and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-91
Author(s):  
SARAH FRANCES VANNESTE
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Influenza Pandemic ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
Medical Progress ◽  
Influenza Outbreak ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rational Thought

ABSTRACT The influenza outbreak of 1918 spread around the world and left millions of people dead. This pandemic was both a crisis for human life and a crisis for medical professionals attempting to combat the disease. During a period when medicine had become thoroughly professionalized and had made numerous advances in medical treatment, medical professionals perceived their field to be rapidly and consistently progressing, and many believed that there was little medicine could not overcome. Success against such diseases as yellow fever fed the idea that science and rational thought could conquer society's ills drove medical professionals' efforts. However, these modern ideas of progress, perfectibility, and medicine's pending triumph over disease adversely affected the medical profession's ability to deal effectively with the influenza pandemic of 1918. Physicians' efforts had not prevented a serious outbreak, and once it had exploded, they could not control it. Looking specifically at the British medical profession's struggle with the pandemic, as it coursed through both Britain and Britain's armies abroad, this paper examines physicians' own writings and investigates both their initial confidence in the face of disease and their disappointment, fear, and lack of clear direction as the pandemic exploded. In the aftermath of the pandemic, their confusion, dearth of understanding, and pressure to fill the void in knowledge are evident. This paper, then, discusses how confidence affected their mindset when they confronted the pandemic, and how the pandemic, in turn, affected their concept of progress, the ability of medicine, and their duty thereafter.

scholarly journals Penerapan Athiti Krama Dalam Peningkatan Mutu Pendidikan Agama Hindu Pada Pasraman Dharma Bhakti Gianyar

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
I Gusti Ayu Oka Silantari ◽  
I Ketut Mardika
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Advanced Society ◽  
The People ◽  
The World

<p><em>In human nature, apart from being individual beings as well as social beings who have their own culture. Culture arises in humans due to reason and thought in the human being itself. Humans will be able to live perfectly when they live together with other humans, in relation to other humans, certain norms or rules are needed. In the regulation, one of them was written about the procedure for honoring guests called Athiti Krama. Athiti Krama gives motivation in human life because through this human being can foster good relations between humans one with other human beings in harmony. The implementation of Athiti Krama can be found in societies everywhere in the world, both in the advanced society and the people who are still modest in their civilization.<br /> In social life, everyone should behave well so as to create happiness for themselves and the community, because in the teachings of Hinduism, Athiti Krama teachings are basically contained which can bring people to achieve harmony in social order in society. The basis of Athiti Krama's teachings is the ethics or morality that many of the Vedic scriptures have mentioned, one of which is Tri Kaya Parisudha. Considering the importance of Athiti Krama as a social guide in people's lives. So it should be known to be applied in the learning process in Pasraman Dharma Bhakti.</em><strong><em></em></strong></p>

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document