Mimesis and Attention: On Christian Sophrosyne

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274
Keyword(s):  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The Common ◽  
Bernard Stiegler ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

One might well wonder about the source of Girard’s knowledge. Where is it thought to have come from in the first place? From what vantage point are we supposed to be surveying the events he claims are originary? And what, then, is the condition for the very possibility of his Christian wisdom? In this paper, I argue that we can put forward a tentative solution by looking at one particular aspect of all the texts that Girard has interpreted: they are all written texts. Analyzing this in detail with the assistance of the proposals of Bernard Stiegler, I will claim that it is writing itself that has afforded us the possibility of paying attention. Moreover, in the second section, I shall also put forward an analysis of the gnoseological condition of the possibility of Christian wisdom. To do so, I expand on Stiegler’s reading of Kant’s notion of schema focusing on its relation with the hermeneutical notion of figura, as presented by Erich Auerbach. Commenting on the common rhetorical setting of both the Critique of Pure Rea- son and the Bible, I then show that these two written texts address a very similar problem—a critique of the way people judge—and also put forward, surprisingly, much the same solution: to properly judge, it would be better to take into account past examples of judgments and consider that, no matter whether we critique them or not, they will schematize our own experiences and influence our intentionality.

scholarly journals BIBLICKÁ BABYLONSKÁ VEŽA A ANTICKÍ ĽUDIA. HĽADANIE VLASTNÝCH PREDKOV V STREDOVEKU

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
RYSZARD GRZESIK
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Medieval Chronicles ◽  
The Common ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Medieval Historiography ◽  
The Way

The article is a presentation of ethnogenesis of Slavs in the view of medieval chronicles. Hungarian medieval historiography served as a starting point of the reflection. The author describes how national “Prehistory” was presented in Hungarian chronicles and compares them with the general tendencies in medieval historiography to show the way in which native origins were created. It was a search for a common ascendant of the European people based on the Bible figure of Japhet and the way in which this tradition is related to facts known from ancient history (like the Trojan War) as well as geographical description based on ancient erudition. It was the common explanation of native origins in the entire Western and Eastern Christianity.As a result, the culture of medieval and Pre-Modern Europe united despite the political divisions.

Causality Then and Now

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mechanical Model ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...

The Quranic Jesus: Prophet and Scapegoat

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-220
Author(s):  
John Ranieri
Keyword(s):  
Major Theme ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
The Way

A major theme in René Girard’s work involves the role of the Bible in exposing the scapegoating practices at the basis of culture. The God of the Bible is understood to be a God who takes the side of victims. The God of the Qur’an is also a defender of victims, an idea that recurs throughout the text in the stories of messengers and prophets. In a number of ways, Jesus is unique among the prophets mentioned in the Qur’an. It is argued here that while the Quranic Jesus is distinctly Islamic, and not a Christian derivative, he functions in the Qur’an in a way analogous to the role Jesus plays in the gospels. In its depiction of Jesus, the Qur’an is acutely aware of mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, and the God who comes to the aid of the persecuted. Despite the significant differences between the Christian understanding of Jesus as savior and the way he is understood in the Qur’an, a Girardian interpretation of the Qur’anic Jesus will suggest ways in which Jesus can be a bridge rather than an obstacle in Christian/Muslim dialogue.

Some Bad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Daniel Batson
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Empathic Concern ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Immoral Action ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Common ◽  
Mental And Physical Health ◽  
Do So

Despite its virtues, empathy-induced altruism can at times harm those in need, other people, and the altruistically motivated person. Specifically, it can hurt those in need when acted on without wisdom and sensitivity or when a cool head is required. It can produce paternalism. It is less likely to be evoked by nonpersonalized, abstract, chronic needs. It can be a source of immoral action, leading us to show partiality toward those for whom we feel empathic concern even when we know that to do so is neither fair nor best for all. Indeed, when our behavior is public, empathy-induced altruism can pose a more serious threat to the common good than does self-interest. Finally, it can at times jeopardize our mental and physical health—even our life. Any attempt to call on empathy-induced altruism to build a more humane society needs to take these problems into account lest we do more harm than good.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Election ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 homes in on Spinoza as a Bible critic. Based on existing historiography, it parses the main relevant historical contexts in which Spinoza came to articulate his analysis of the Bible: the Sephardi community of Amsterdam, freethinking philosophers, and the Reformed Church. It concludes with a detailed examination of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s major work of biblical criticism. Along the way I highlight themes for which Spinoza appealed to the biblical texts themselves: the textual unity of the Bible, and the biblical concepts of prophecy, divine election, and religious laws. The focus is on the biblical arguments for these propositions, and the philological choices that Spinoza made that enabled him to appeal to those specific biblical texts. This first chapter lays the foundation for the remainder of the book, which examines issues of biblical philology and interpretation discussed among the Dutch Reformed contemporaries of Spinoza.

Finding a Pastoral Idiom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde Skoie
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces yet another European ‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on translation and reception. Skoie focuses on three Norwegian translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and analyses the way they exhibit tendencies towards two complementary processes that have been labelled, in recent theories of translation, as ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’; and they do so as the language of translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity. Skoie explores the use of Virgilian pastoral idiom in a foreign language and the juxtaposition between rural and urban voices in the context of language politics.

Levinas as a Reader of Jewish Texts

2018 ◽  
pp. 442-458
Author(s):  
Ethan Kleinberg
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Related Issue ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
And Training ◽  
Do So

This article attempts to understand Levinas as a reader of Jewish texts, with particular attention paid to his Talmudic commentaries. To do so, the entangled relation between oral and written texts is explored; one must be able to properly “read” but also “write,” and there is the related issue of the methodology and training to be able to do so properly. Levinas offers commentary on each issue. Several interpretations of Talmudic texts and an important discussion of reading Scripture are analyzed in order to elucidate Levinas’s reading strategies, what this tells us about his relation to the larger tradition of Talmudic commentary, and Levinas’s particular historical moment, especially the role of the Holocaust for his approach to reading the Talmud and traditional texts.

Textualization and the Book of Jeremiah

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-158
Author(s):  
Joachim Schaper
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Specific Object ◽  
Book Of Jeremiah

Textualization implies the emergence of the concept of a “text” as a specific object that needs to be handled in a specific way: an object that is conceptualized as part of a tradition of reading and interpreting—indeed, an object that is constituted by the desire to preserve and make available a specific utterance (irrespective of whether that utterance was originally produced orally or in writing). Written texts therefore are the results of the desire of an individual or a community to establish a tradition for a speech act that the individuals or the community intend to preserve. As is the case with oral texts, written texts can give rise to ritualized or otherwise significant uses of the text-object. This is the key to the understanding of prophetic collections in the Bible, and especially in the book of Jeremiah. While “tradition” (Überlieferung) is the aim of textualization, that tradition comes in various shapes and forms. The growth of prophetic books is an excellent illustration of Konrad Ehlich’s analysis of the characteristics of textualization and its purposes, especially with regard to the fact that prophetic oracles were, in ancient Israel and Judah, textualized for the purpose of being preserved and performed and of serving as the basis for Fortschreibungen.

Queering America: Joy Harjo’s Vision of Radical Contingency

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Burbick
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Way

Joan Burbick reads Jay Harjo from a queering as well as post-colonial perspective, analyzing the way in which normative discourses of social cohesion are questioned and re-formulated from the vantage point of Native American categories such as the berdache. Harjo's vision promotes radical contingency and a seemingly spiritual notion of transference.

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