scholarly journals What is in a name? Does the difference between onto-theology and theo-ontology direct the way from eco-theology to theo-ecology? Specific Russian theological perspectives

2022 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Buitendag

I approach this venture of figuring out the correct terminology to understand reality through the prism of two distinctive Russian Orthodox theologians, Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) and Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944). The lens I apply mainly to their works is their respective understanding of cosmology, that is, ontology and epistemology. Therefore, I concur with Grenz to abandon the term ‘onto-theology’ and qualify the inverse as a Trinitarian theo-ontology. This honours the intimate connection between knowing and being, and prevents the bifurcation between fidelity and rationality. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to ‘eco-theology’. This inversion reminds one of Hans-Urs von Balthasar, who bartered the concept of an aesthetic theology for theological aesthetics. Turning this question around would advance our dialogue with the sciences as the common denominator of the discourse is rather nature (creation) discerned from an acknowledged a priori (as all cognition do). In other words, the term theo-ecology is proposed.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The purpose study is not ecological but rather an asyndetic use of the terminology about the science and religion dialogue, with reference to the nomenclature of ecology and theology. All observation terms and sentences are theory-laden. Religion can be viewed as a linguistic framework that shapes the entirety of life and thought. Truth claims should focus on the grammar (or rules of the game) and not the lexicon when expressive symbolism is employed. 

Author(s):  
Angela Dalle Vacche

The best way to understand Bazin’s film theory is to pay attention to art, science, and religion, since spectatorship depends on perception, cognition, and hallucination. By arguing that this dissident Catholic’s worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that cinema recapitulates the history of evolution and technology inside our consciousness, so that we may better understand how we overlap with, but also differ from, animals, plants, objects, and machines. Whereas in “Art,” the author explains the difference between painting as a static object and the moving image as an event unfolding in time, in “Science,” she discusses Bazin’s dislike of classical geometry and Platonic algebra, his fascination with biology and modern calculus to underline his holistic Darwinism, and his anti-Euclidean mathematics of motion and contingency. Comparable to a religious practice, Bazin’s cinema is the only collective ritual of the twentieth century capable of fostering an emotional community by calling on critical self-interrogation and ethical awareness. Especially keen on Italian neorealism, Bazin argues that this sensibility thrives on beings and things displacing themselves in such a way as to turn the Other into a Neighbor. Bazin’s film theory acknowledges the equalizing impact of the camera lens, which is analogous to, but also different from, the human eye. In the cinema, two different kinds of eyes coexist: one is mechanical and objective, the other is human and subjective. By refusing to reshape the world according to an a priori thesis, Bazin’s idea of an anti-anthropocentric cinema seeks surprise, dialogue, risk, and experiment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (58) ◽  
pp. 431-482
Author(s):  
Mário Jorge Pereira de Almeida Carvalho

  This paper deals with Fichte’s The Characteristics of the Present Age, and in particular with his discussion of the “empty form of knowledge” he claims stands at the centre of the third – i.e. the present – age. Fichte speaks of a fundamental principle that forms the ‘common denominator’ between the third and fourth main epochs. This fundamental principle – the “maxim of comprehensibility” (Maxime der Begreiflichkeit) – makes knowledge and comprehension the measure of all that “counts as being valid and as really existing”. But the question arises: How can one and the same principle act as the “unifying concept” for two different “main epochs of human life”? Does this not go directly against Fichte’s claim that two main epochs differ from each other in every respect, precisely because they arise from two entirely different “unifying principles”, and because everything in them must reflect the difference between their “unifying principles”? Fichte’s answer to this question is as follows:  a)  the fundamental maxim in question allows for two diametrically opposed interpretations, so that each of them provides the principle or the “unifying concept” from which the third and fourth main epochs arise, and b) the third main epoch only gives rise to the empty form of science, as opposed to “truly real science”: it stands for a careless and easy-going, shallow, conventional, trivializing and incorrect conception of the “fundamental maxim of comprehensibility” –  so that it misses what is essential, does not do justice to the fundamental maxim, overlooks its implications, and indeed goes against its innermost meaning. Special attention is paid to the question of whether and how some major features of Fichte’s “empty form of knowledge” result from a misguided and superficial understanding of Kant’s “maxims of the self-preservation of reason” and can be reconstructed from this vantage point.           


Author(s):  
Sr. Teresa Obolevitch

Alexei Losev was among those few religious thinkers who remained in the USSR after the revolution. He was an advocate of the so-called onomatodoxy movement in the Russian Orthodox Church according to which the name of God is not something conventional, but God himself. It was Losev who elaborated the philosophical foundations of this teaching and built a sort of synthesis of Platonism (and Neoplatonism) and the thought of the Eastern Fathers of the Church, especially St. Gregory of Palamas. As an encyclopaedic man, Losev dealt with different branches of philosophy: philosophy of language, music, mathematics, aesthetics, etc. The common denominator of all works was the issue of symbol, which he considered to be an external expression of an internal content. In the context of onomatodoxy debates, it means that the name of God is nothing but His energy (using the term of the Greek Fathers of the Church), or manifestation of His unknowable essence in the world. Therefore, a symbol is primarily of an objective character and at the same time assumes the cooperation (synergy) between God and man.


Author(s):  
Idit Perelmuter Idit Perelmuter

Idit Perelmuter, The National Days in the Bilingual School. Interdisciplinary Contexts of Special Pedagogy, no. 27, Poznań 2019. Pp. 299–333. Adam MickiewiczUniversity Press. ISSN 2300-391X. e-ISSN 2658-283X. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14746/ikps.2019.27.14 The bilingual school tends to address both the national days of the Arabs and the national days of the Jews as a part of its multicultural perception. As aforementioned, these days are characterized as tense and complicated days in the school, both for the Arabs and for the Jews, because of the narratives and perceptions that they represent, which sometimes are contradictory and. Nevertheless, it is possible to see that the school addresses the different perceptions and narratives of each culture, with recognition of the difference and uniqueness of each one of them and with reinforcement of the commonalities between them. In this way, it gives hope and encourages the desire for a shared life between Jews and Arabs in Israel, which on the one hand includes the difference and on the other hand broadens the common denominator between the two groups. This article will describe the national days of Arabs and Jews in the bilingual school in Jerusalem. It will focus on the meaning of the days, their complexity, and the ways of coping and implementation in the framework of the school, with reference to the school perception.


2020 ◽  
Vol 228 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Michael Bošnjak ◽  
Nadine Wedderhoff

Abstract. This editorial gives a brief introduction to the six articles included in the fourth “Hotspots in Psychology” of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie. The format is devoted to systematic reviews and meta-analyses in research-active fields that have generated a considerable number of primary studies. The common denominator is the research synthesis nature of the included articles, and not a specific psychological topic or theme that all articles have to address. Moreover, methodological advances in research synthesis methods relevant for any subfield of psychology are being addressed. Comprehensive supplemental material to the articles can be found in PsychArchives ( https://www.psycharchives.org ).


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-115
Author(s):  
Syed Mahmudul Hasan

The Narration of Aisyah (May Allah be pleased with her), is the main focus of the controversy among Bangladeshi scholars on the issue of women's prayer in the mosque. The reason for the dispute is that a group of them issued the ruling based on the phenomenon of the text, and the others explained the ruling of Hadith according to the common situation in the society. If the circumstances change, the ruling will change along with it, because the originality of the issue is permissible, that is proven from other texts. This research adopts an inductive method to survey the Prophetic hadiths that talk about the prayer of women in the Mosque in terms of permissibility and prohibition and analytical method to analyze the difference in opinion of Bangladeshi scholars related to this issue. The research finds that the ruling of Shari’ah is a process that is continuous and permanent. But in necessity and emergency, it has the notion of flexibility and explanation. In the issue of women’s presence in the mosque, they should be allowed if they abide by the suggestions of Prophet (s) and should not if they don’t. So, Prohibition is not from the prophet (s), but it is from their obedience to the ruling.


Author(s):  
Anne Phillips

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, this book challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. The book explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. The book asks what is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? The book contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But it also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, the book demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kunal Debnath

High culture is a collection of ideologies, beliefs, thoughts, trends, practices and works-- intellectual or creative-- that is intended for refined, cultured and educated elite people. Low culture is the culture of the common people and the mass. Popular culture is something that is always, most importantly, related to everyday average people and their experiences of the world; it is urban, changing and consumeristic in nature. Folk culture is the culture of preindustrial (premarket, precommodity) communities.


2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Michalak

Motives of espionage against ones own country in the light of idiographic studies The money is perceived as the common denominator among people who have spied against their own country. This assumption is common sense and appears to be self-evident truth. But do we have any hard evidences to prove the validity of such a statement? What method could be applied to determine it? This article is a review of the motives behind one's resorting to spying activity which is a complex and multifarious process. I decided to present only the phenomenon of spying for another country. The studies on the motives behind taking up spying activity are idiographic in character. One of the basic methodological problems to be faced by the researchers of this problem is an inaccessibility of a control group.


2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-102
Author(s):  
KErstin Thomas

Kerstin Thomas revaluates the famous dispute between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida, concerning a painting of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh. The starting point for this dispute was the description and analysis of things and artworks developed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In discussing Heidegger’s account, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s main point of critique concerned Heidegger’s claim that the artwork reveals the truth of equipment in depicting shoes of a peasant woman and thereby showing her world. Schapiro sees a striking paradox in Heidegger’s claim for truth, based on a specific object in a specific artwork while at the same time following a rather metaphysical idea of the artwork. Kerstin Thomas proposes an interpretation, which exceeds the common confrontation of philosophy versus art history by focussing on the respective notion of facticity at stake in the theoretical accounts of both thinkers. Schapiro accuses Heidegger of a lack of concreteness, which he sees as the basis for every truth claim on objects. Thomas understands Schapiro’s objections as motivated by this demand for a facticity, which not only includes the work of art, but also investigator in his concrete historical perspective. Truth claims under such conditions of facticity are always relative to historical knowledge, and open to critical intervention and therefore necessarily contingent. Following Thomas, Schapiro’s critique shows that despite his intention of giving the work of art back its autonomy, Heidegger could be accused of achieving quite the opposite: through the abstraction of the concrete, the factual, and the given to the type, he actually sets the self and the realm of knowledge of the creator as absolute and not the object of his knowledge. Instead, she argues for a revaluation of Schapiro’s position with recognition of the arbitrariness of the artwork, by introducing the notion of factuality as formulated by Quentin Meillassoux. Understood as exchange between artist and object in its concrete material quality as well as with the beholder, the truth of painting could only be shown as radically contingent. Thomas argues that the critical intervention of Derrida who discusses both positions anew is exactly motivated by a recognition of the contingent character of object, artwork and interpretation. His deconstructive analysis can be understood as recognition of the dynamic character of things and hence this could be shown with Meillassoux to be exactly its character of facticity – or factuality.


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