Lest We Forget: Free-Thought and the Environment

Human Affairs ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kile Jones

Lest We Forget: Free-Thought and the EnvironmentIn the world of modern theology, specifically Western theology, there has been a tendency to knit together religion and morality. It is partially because much work in theology is done with the assumption that since God exists God must care about human intentions and actions. The existence of God and religion, as the public manifestation of shared philosophical and moral beliefs, has been thought to impart moral awareness and behavior, as well as ground morality. Many modern theologians have given voice to sentiments like these. They equate irreligion with iniquity, freethinking with depravity, and atheism with apathy about the world, human life, and morality. This essay challenges such positions by arguing for the validity of naturalistic accounts of morality. It shows how such accounts can be applied to the treatment of our environment as well as give us the motivation to do so. From David Hume to Paul Kurtz a history of freethought is drawn and the human reasons for protecting and conserving our environment are examined.

PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Campbell Mossner

Hume as historian is still seriously misrepresented. The respect which all critics, friendly and unfriendly alike, are compelled to pay to his philosophical works is not extended to his historical works. Seeking to write a fair-minded history of England, Hume was genuinely astonished to find himself condemned at home by virtually all parties. The Whigs attacked him as Tory, the Tories as anti-clerical, the Church as anti-religious, the scholars as inaccurate. All of these accusations have some basis in fact; but, generally speaking, all centered around contemporary political and religious prejudices. Despite these initial assaults, Hume's History of England became a national classic within his lifetime and remained standard for well over a century. When Macaulay's History of England began to appear in 1849, it was generally regarded as a continuation of Hume's taking up where he had left off, and the two sets were frequently matched in binding. “To tell the world in 1849,” rhapsodizes an American reviewer, “that Hume's History is a work entitled to their favorable regard, would be like informing the public what are the peculiar features that render Niagara Falls a highly agreeable spectacle, or that George Washington was a great patriot.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (S-1) ◽  
pp. 183-187
Author(s):  
Kalaiselvan P

Different beliefs and practices are found in human life from birth to death. These beliefs are created by the people and are followed and protected by the mother’s community. Man has been living with nature since ancient times. Beliefs appeared in natural human life. Hope can be traced back to ancient Tamils and still prevails in Tamil Nadu today. The hope of seeing the omen in it is found all over the world. Proverbs show that people have faith in omens. Our ancestors wrote the book 'Gauli Shastri' because the lizard omen is very important in our society. The word lizard played a major role in Tamil life during the Sangam period. It is possible to know that people have lived by the benefit of the lizard. There is hope from the public that the sound of the lizard will predict what will happen next. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the lizard word that has been around for a long time in folklore.


In trying to show you the character of social anthropology as an academic discipline, I might try to sketch some substantive and perhaps intriguing findings in the field, or the history of its development, or some of its major intellectual problems today. I have chosen the last of these alternatives, because by showing the general problems we are grappling with I hope to reveal to you, in part no doubt inadvertently, the ways that anthropologists think, and also how our difficulties in part arise from the character of the social reality itself, which we confront and try to understand. The fundamental questions which social anthropology asks are about the forms, the nature, and the extent of order in human social life, as it can be observed in the different parts of the world. There is no need to prejudge the extent of this order; as members of one society we know how unpredictable social life can be. But concretely, human life varies greatly around the world, and it seems possible to characterize its forms to some extent. We seek means systematically to discover, record and understand these forms.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmytro Oltarzhevskyi

The article examines the world and Ukrainian history of corporate periodicals. The main purpose of this study is to reproduce an objective global picture of the emergence and formation of corporate periodicals, taking into account the business and socio-economic context. Accordingly, its tasks are to compare the conditions and features of corporate media genesis in different countries, to determine the main factors of their development, as well as to clarify the transformations of the terminological apparatus. The research is based on mostly foreign secondary scientific works published from 1915 to the present time. The literature was studied using methods such as overview, historical, functional and thematic analysis, description, and generalization. A systematic approach was used to determine the role and place of each element in the system, as well as to comprehensively consider the object in the general historical context and within the current scientific discourse. The method of systematization made it possible to establish internal and external connections, patterns and contradictions in the development of the object of study. The main historical milestones on this path are identified, examples of the first successful corporate publications and their contribution to business development, public relations, and corporate communications are considered. It was found that corporate media emerged in the mid-nineteenth century spontaneously, on the wave of practical business needs in response to industrialization, company increase, staff growth, and consumer market development. Their appearance preceded the formation of the public relations industry and changed the structure of the information space. The scientific significance of this research is that the historical look at the evolution of corporate media provides an understanding of their place, influence, capabilities, and growing communicative role in the digital age.


Author(s):  
Alexander Murray

People with a logical turn of mind say that the history of the world can be summarised in a sentence. A précis of mediaval historian Richard William Southern's work made in that spirit would identify two characteristics, one housed inside the other, and both quite apart from the question of its quality as a work of art. The first is his sympathy for a particular kind of medieval churchman, a kind who combined deep thought about faith with practical action. This characteristic fits inside another, touching Southern's historical vision as a whole. Its genesis is traceable to those few seconds in his teens when he ‘quarrelled’ with his father about the Renaissance. The intuition that moved him to do so became a historical fides quaerens intellectum. Reflection on Southern's life work leaves us with an example of the service an historian can perform for his contemporary world, as a truer self-perception seeps into the common consciousness by way of a lifetime of teaching and writing, spreading out through the world (all Southern's books were translated into one or more foreign language).


Author(s):  
Helmuth Plessner ◽  
J. M. Bernstein

“Centric positionality” is a form of organism-environment relation exhibited by animal forms of life. Human life is characterized not only by centric but also by excentric positionality—that is, the ability to take a position beyond the boundary of one’s own body. Excentric positionality is manifest in: the inner, psychological experience of human beings; the outer, physical being of their bodies and behavior; and the shared, intersubjective world that includes other human beings and is the basis of culture. In each of these three worlds, there is a duality symptomatic of excentric positionality. Three laws characterize excentric positionality: natural artificiality, or the natural need of humans for artificial supplements; mediated immediacy, or the way that contact with the world in human activity, experience, and expression is both transcendent and immanent, both putting humans directly in touch with things and keeping them at a distance; and the utopian standpoint, according to which humans can always take a critical or “negative” position regarding the contents of their experience or their life.


Collections ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Colleen Bradley-Sanders

The Brooklyn College Listening Project is designed to engage students in active learning through the inclusion of an oral history interview assignment in a variety of humanities courses, including history, English, sociology, music, journalism, and more. The products of these interviews, oral history recordings, are creating an archive of student-generated material. The benefits to the students extend beyond the simple completion of an assignment for a grade. With the diversity of races and cultures at Brooklyn College, students make connections with classmates and interview subjects that might not otherwise occur. As one student commented, “There is more to learn and know about the world, than just the people that you look like.”1 Written by the college archivist, this article examines the history of the still-young program and the difficulty in archiving the recordings and making them available to the public.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Jonghyun Kim

This article analyzes the formative power of the Korean dawn prayer service to better understand the public and private dimensions of Christian spirituality. It explores the origin of the dawn prayer in the history of Korean Protestantism, and examines an example from a particular church. On the basis of this exploration, it is argued that the dawn prayer service should not be understood as an instrument to strengthen individual spirituality, but rather as a place to participate in God’s redemptive work to and for the world. Both the individual and communal aspects of dawn prayer practice are important, but I will argue that current Korean practice leans too much toward the individual.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Dina I. Waked

This article proposes the use of antitrust law to reduce poverty and address inequality. It argues that the antitrust laws are sufficiently malleable to achieve such goals. The current focus of antitrust on the efficiency-only goals does not only lead to increasing inequality further but is also inconsistent with the history of antitrust. This history is presented through the lens of the public interest that emerges into the balance between private property and competition policy. Tracing the public interest at different historical moments, we get to see how it has been broad enough to encompass social welfare concerns. Over time, the public interest concern of antitrust was narrowed to exclusively cover consumer welfare and its allocative efficiency. Once we frame antitrust as public interest law, in its broadest sense, we are empowered to use it to address inequality. A proposal to do so is exposed in this article.


Author(s):  
Sára Czina ◽  

At the turn of the 20th century, Budapest was famous for its Coffeehouse Culture. One of the most popular Café was the New-York Coffeehouse; today, it is remembered for its literary life. After 20 years of operation, in 1913, new people bought the tenant’s rights and established the first Coffeehouse joint-stock company in Hungary, called New-York coffeehouse Company Limited. This paper aims to analyze the operation of the Company in relation to the stock transfers, analysis of its profitability, and the changes in the transformations in the shares. The main goal was to figure out how the profitability and the stock transfers were connected to the contemporary social and economic circumstances. The years of the World Wars, Revolutions, the Great Depression, and the cultural/social life of the twenties had their deep effects on the life of the Company. The changes were perceptible for the public, too. Many articles were published about the hardships of the Company and the changing atmosphere of the Coffeehouse. These were different; not all of them damaged the interest of the Company Limited equally. Still, the difficulties influenced the stock transfers, profitability, and the everyday life of the Managers and Shareholders. These circumstances are parallel to the changes of the Company.


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