scholarly journals Joseph Ratzinger’s Argument for the Epistemological Seriousness of Faith

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1277-1294
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Cezary Kaucha
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Scientific Reason ◽  
Fundamental Theology ◽  
End Point ◽  
Scientific Certainty ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

Christianity, and the Christian faith, seems to be losing when confronted with scientific reason and scientific certainty. Christianity needs new arguments for the epistemological seriousness of its faith. Those could be found in Joseph Ratzinger’s writings, providing new insights into fundamental theology. The subject of faith as an element that is crucial to him (and to Christianity) pervades all his works. This paper aims at proving that Ratzinger has worked out an original epistemological way of defending the Christian faith. It is an attempt to recreate his argument on the basis of his entire intellectual output. The present research leads to the conclusion that Ratzinger’s way of argumentation is quite unique. In classical fundamental theology, the Christian faith (comprehended mostly as an individual act of faith) is placed at its end point, while in Ratzinger’s fundamental theology, faith (understood mostly as a historical and communal act) is practically a point of departure. From the beginning of his reasoning Ratzinger (due to his meta-faith perspective) persuades that the Christian faith is epistemologically very serious. Faith may not only manifest its presence alongside other serious attitudes to reality, but also be capable of demonstrating its foundation, rationality, originality, uniqueness, and even absoluteness (definitiveness).

scholarly journals O MÉTODO TEOLÓGICO NO CONTEXTO DA AMBIGÜIDADE RELIGIOSA ATUAL

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (104) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Pedro Rubens
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Contextual Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Fundamental Theology ◽  
Paradoxical Situation ◽  
Charismatic Renewal ◽  
Catholic Charismatic Renewal ◽  
Point Of Departure

O A. retrata em forma teórica e pensada o que foi o itinerário percorrido na elaboração da sua tese doutoral, não a resumindo – esta não tratou de metodologia –, mas destacando-lhe elementos metodológicos, depois de recordar-lhe a pré-história de cunho autobiográfico. O ponto de partida é a experiência de fé em tempos de ambigüidade religiosa. O cristianismo latino-americano vive situação paradoxal de conviver com o declínio da civilização cristã ocidental e com o ressurgimento explosivo de formas religiosas arcaicas e selvagens. A ambiguidade da fé cristã no Brasil manifesta na diversidade de formas que pretendem todas renovar o cristianismo: comunidades eclesiais de base, renovação carismática católica e neopentecostalismo. Aí surgem tarefas para uma teologia fundamental no contexto amplo da teologia e no contexto específico de uma teologia situada numa região. Faz-se necessário verdadeiro discernimento.ABSTRACT: The author theoretically and thoughtfully presents the journey taken during the process of writing his doctoral dissertation. It is not a summary – he did not address methodology in it – but he underlines the methodological elements after remembering its prehistory as autobiographical approach. The point of departure is the faith experience in times of religious ambiguity. Christianity in Latin America faces a paradoxical situation in having both the decadence of the Western civilization and the bloom of ancient and aggressive religious forms. The ambiguity of the Christian faith in Brazil manifests itself in the diverse ways these forms intend to renew Christianity: Ecclesial Base Communities, Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and Neo-Pentecostalism. There are here tasks for a fundamental theology in general and the specific contextual theology. It is necessary a true discernment.

scholarly journals Sjukdom och lidande och den kristna berättelsen: en biblisk och hermeneutisk analys

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greger Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Understanding Of Illness ◽  
Point Of Departure

How do Christians, who try to understand their lives according to the Christian narrative, cope with illness and suffering? This issue is the main concern of this article. Its point of departure is the assumption that the concept of “narrative” expressed in the idea that Christian faith is a narrative, might be taken to refer to a worldview, to a larger narrative (ie salvation history) or to the fact that Christians, in a process of hindsight, interpret their lives narratively. Based on talks with students and a process at Örebro Theological Seminary (ÖTH), in which we have been discussing the subject of illness and healing, I argue that some Christians are rethinking their understanding of illness and suffering. Since these Christians often have a high view of the Bible, it is important to examine how these issues are handled in scripture, and how biblical texts have been used traditionally. These Christians also refer to their experiences and to common apprehensions of illness and suffering in society. I propose that the Christians I refer to tend to avoid religious causal or teleological explanations of illness and suffering. They even seem to prefer not to involve God in these issues at all. This could be taken as a token of secularisation, but I argue that this is not the only possible explanation. I suggest instead that it can be linked to a reconsideration of basic tenets of these Christians’ theology and I make the claim that this reconsideration occurred during the process at Örebro Theological Seminary I have referred to above. The narrative reinterpretation of illness and suffering in the personal lives of these Christians is thus closely linked to a reinterpretation of the Christian worldview and salvation history.

Light and Sensitivity: Love in the Time of the Daguerreotype

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Czeczot
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Sensitive Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Passive Object

The article deals with the love of Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka. The point of departure is the poet's definition of love as looking and reads Krasiński's relationship with his beloved in the context of two phenomena that fascinated him at the time: daguerreotype and magnetism. The invention of the daguerreotype in which the history of photography and spiritism comes together becomes a pretext for the formulation of a new concept of love and the loving subject. In the era of painting the woman was treated as a passive object of the male gaze; photography reverses this scheme of power. Love ceases to be a static relationship of the subject in love and the passive object – the beloved. The philosophy of developing photographs (and invoking phantoms) allows Krasiński - the writing subject to become like a light-sensitive material that reveals the image of the beloved.

Chicago's Mecca Flat Blues

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 382-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bluestone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Residential Buildings ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

This essay explores the Mecca, one of Chicago's largest nineteenth-century apartment houses. Designed in 1891, the Mecca's innovative plan incorporated an exterior landscaped courtyard and two monumental interior atria. The form and meaning of these spaces diverged in important respects. The exterior courtyards appropriated aspects of the single-family residential form and domestic ideology. The interior atria relied on Chicago skyscraper models and their cosmopolitan approach to the possibilities of density. Exterior courtyards later proliferated, while atria appeared in only two other local residential buildings. Nevertheless, the Mecca's atria possessed a sense of place that deeply etched the building into Chicago's cultural and political landscape. The building became the subject of 1920s blues improvisation-the "Mecca Flat Blues." In the 1940s and 1950s tenants waged a decadelong Mecca preservation campaign. Housing rather than Chicago School aesthetics provided the preservationists with their point of departure. Race interesected with space and Mies van der Rohe's vision of modern urbanism to seal the Mecca's fate. The essay's methodology develops the social and cultural meaning of form. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of pushing architectural history beyond the nexus of meaning created by original patrons and designers. We stand to learn a great deal about architectural and urban history by studying how people have defined and redefined, valued and devalued, their buildings, cities, and landscapes.

scholarly journals Metaphysical Anthropocentrism, Limitrophy, and Responsibility: An Explication of the Subject of Animal Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Jan-Harm De Villiers
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article undertakes a critical analysis of subjectivity and exposes the metaphysical and anthropocentric quasi-transcendental conditions that give rise to the construct(ion) of the Subject. I locate a critical moment for the metaphysical Subject in the work of Martin Heidegger which, whilst sadly not sustained in his later writings, provides a point of departure for an examination of the significance that animality plays in the metaphysical tradition and its constitutive relation to the construct of subjectivity. I discern this relation to be violent and sacrificial and draw on Jacques Derrida's nonanthropocentric ethics against the background of Drucilla Cornell's ethical reading of deconstruction to construct a critique of approaches that assimilate animals to the traditional model of subjectivity in order to represent their identity and interests in the legal paradigm. The main argument that I seek to advance is that such an approach paradoxically re-constructs the classical humanist subject of metaphysics and re-establishes the subject-centred system that silences the call of the animal Other, thereby solidifying and extending the legitimacy of a discourse and mode of social regulation that is fundamentally anthropocentric. I examine how we can address, incapacitate and move beyond this schemata of power through a rigorous deconstruction of the partitions that institute the Subject and how deconstruction clears a space for a de novo determination of the animal "subject" that can proceed from different sites of nonanthropocentric interruption. What follows is a call to refuse the mechanical utilisation of traditional legal constructs and I argue in favour of an approach to the question of the animal (in law) that identifies and challenges anthropocentrism as its critical target. I ultimately propose a critical engagement with the underlying metaphysical support of animal rights at a conceptual level, rather than simply utilising the law pragmatically as an instrument of immediate resolution.    

scholarly journals The Religious Aspect of Ulster Revivalism

1860 ◽  
Vol 7 (35) ◽  
pp. 59-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. M'Ilwaine
Keyword(s):  
Direct Reference ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Mental Phenomenon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Aspect

The regions of religion and philosophy are distinct, but by no means opposed. Some professors of the Christian faith may have fallen into the error that revelation and science are antagonistic, but such a position has neither any foundation in fact, nor any countenance in the Divine record. Warnings, no doubt, occur in the apostolic writings under the head of science and philosophy; but these are directed against “science falsely so called“, and such philosophy as is identified with “vain deceit.” There can be no opposition between nature and revelation, inasmuch as the author of both is the same God, who is “light“, and whose essence is “truth”. In examining therefore a mental phenomenon, such as that of Revivalism, as lately exhibited in the northern counties of Ireland, and during whose rise and progress so much of a religious element was developed, it would be, in a manner, impossible to do justice to the subject, without a direct reference to this element; nor will the interests of evangelical truth be injured, by an endeavour to discriminate between the false and the true, the genuine and the factitious, in this singular excitement; neither, I must presume, will the pages of a journal devoted mainly to subjects of a psychological character be diverted from their legitimate application if the Religious Aspect of Ulster Revivalism be introduced to them.

Leadership and Regimes

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-200
Author(s):  
Laurie M. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Scientific Reason ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Political Deliberation ◽  
Civil Violence

This chapter looks at the similarities and differences between Thucydides and Hobbes on the subject of regimes. Hobbes was convinced that Thucydides had proved the absurdity of democracy and the desirability of absolute monarchy. However, Hobbes misread Thucydides on this point. For Hobbes, monarchy was the only regime in which the selfish interests of the ruler and ruled rationally coincide. Revealingly, in order to deal with the leadership of Pericles, Hobbes had to characterize him superficially as a monarch, ignoring how Pericles won and maintained his power. But it is just the type of statesmanship exemplified by Pericles that Hobbes cannot accept because of his rigid assumptions about human nature. Thucydides' focus on the importance of studying the thought, character, and actions of statesmen is an important difference between the Thucydidean and the Hobbesian realist models. Hobbes's horror at civil violence led him to lose faith in ordinary human reason and thus in political deliberation. It is because he lost faith in the latter that scientific reason emerged as a powerful alternative. But if human beings are so unreasonable that one can no longer take seriously what they say, how can one expect them to be reasonable enough to accept Hobbes's prescriptions? The Hobbesian solution is that an absolute government must enforce the plan. The chapter then argues that this solution to political problems is even more dangerous than the Thucydidean solution, which relies on political rhetoric and judgment.

The People: Ethnoracial Configurations, Old and New

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-96
Author(s):  
Leila Brännström
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Association ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Point Of Departure

In recent years the Sweden Democrats have championed a clarification of the identity of the ‘the people’ in the Instrument of government. The reference, they argue, should be to the ethnic group of Swedes. This chapter will take this ambition to fix the subject of popular sovereignty as the point of departure for discussing some of the ways in which the contemporary anti-foreigner political forces of Northern and Western Europe imagine ‘the people’ and identify their allies and enemies within and beyond state borders. To set the stage for this exploration the chapter will start by looking at Carl Schmitt’s ideas about political friendship, and more specifically the way he imagines the relationship between ‘us’ in a political and constitutional sense and ‘the people’ in national and ethnoracial terms. The choice to begin with Schmitt is not arbitrary. His thoughts about the nature of the political association have found their way into the discourse of many radical right-wing parties of Western and Northern Europe.

Dewey, John (1859–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gouinlock
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Material Substance ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

The philosophy of John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood. Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence. Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy. The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself. Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century.

Abelard, Peter (1079–1142)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin M. Tweedale
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Rational Argumentation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

Among the many scholars who promoted the revival of learning in western Europe in the early twelfth century, Abelard stands out as a consummate logician, a formidable polemicist and a champion of the value of ancient pagan wisdom for Christian thought. Although he worked within the Aristotelian tradition, his logic deviates significantly from that of Aristotle, particularly in its emphasis on propositions and what propositions say. According to Abelard, the subject matter of logic, including universals such as genera and species, consists of linguistic expressions, not of the things these expressions talk about. However, the objective grounds for logical relationships lie in what these expressions signify, even though they cannot be said to signify any things. Abelard is, then, one of a number of medieval thinkers, often referred to in later times as ‘nominalists’, who argued against turning logic and semantics into some sort of science of the ‘real’, a kind of metaphysics. It was Abelard’s view that logic was, along with grammar and rhetoric, one of the sciences of language. In ethics, Abelard defended a view in which moral merit and moral sin depend entirely on whether one’s intentions express respect for the good or contempt for it, and not at all on one’s desires, whether the deed is actually carried out, or even whether the deed is in fact something that ought or ought not be done. Abelard did not believe that the doctrines of Christian faith could be proved by logically compelling arguments, but rational argumentation, he thought, could be used both to refute attacks on Christian doctrine and to provide arguments that would appeal to those who were attracted to high moral ideals. With arguments of this latter sort, he defended the rationalist positions that nothing occurs without a reason and that God cannot do anything other than what he does do.

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