Bonaventure (c.1217–74)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Kent
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
Union With God ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Higher Purpose

Bonaventure (John of Fidanza) developed a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which Neoplatonic doctrines are transformed by a Christian framework. Though often remembered for his denunciations of Aristotle, Bonaventure’s thought includes some Aristotelian elements. His criticisms of Aristotle were motivated chiefly by his concern that various colleagues, more impressed by Aristotle’s work than they had reason to be, were philosophizing with the blindness of pagans instead of the wisdom of Christians. To Bonaventure, the ultimate goal of human life is happiness, and happiness comes from union with God in the afterlife. If one forgets this goal when philosophizing, the higher purpose of the discipline is frustrated. Philosophical studies can indeed help in attaining happiness, but only if pursued with humility and as part of a morally upright life. In the grander scheme of things, the ascent of the heart is more important than the ascent of the mind. Bonaventure’s later works consistently emphasize that all creation emanates from, reflects and returns to its source. Because the meaning of human life can be understood only from this wider perspective, the general aim is to show an integrated whole hierarchically ordered to God. The structure and symbolism favoured by Bonaventure reflect mystical elements as well. The world, no less than a book, reveals its creator: all visible things represent a higher reality. The theologian must use symbols to reveal this deeper meaning. He must teach especially of Christ, through whom God creates everything that exists and who is the sole medium by which we can return to our creator. Bonaventure’s theory of illumination aims to account for the certitude of human knowledge. He argues that there can be no certain knowledge unless the knower is infallible and what is known cannot change. Because the human mind cannot be entirely infallible through its own power, it needs the cooperation of God, even as it needs God as the source of immutable truths. Sense experience does not suffice, for it cannot reveal that what is true could not possibly be otherwise; so, in Bonaventure’s view, the human mind attains certainty about the world only when it understands it in light of the ‘eternal reasons’ or divine ideas. This illumination from God, while necessary for certainty, ordinarily proceeds without a person’s being conscious of it.

scholarly journals Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind and the Understanding of Human Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Elzbieta Magdalena Wasik
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
Ecology Of Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
Living Species ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

<p>Departing from the biological notion of ecology that pertains to mutual relationships between organisms and their environments, this paper discusses theoretical foundations of research on the nature of human mind in relation to knowledge, cognition and communication conducted in a broader context of social sciences. It exposes the view, explicitly formulated by Gregory Bateson, that the mind is the way in which ideas are created, or just the systemic device for transmitting information in the world of all living species. In consequence, some crucial points of Bateson’s reasoning are accentuated, such as the recognition of the biological unity of organism and environment, the conviction of the necessity to study the ecology in terms of the economics of energy and material and/or the economy of information, the belief that consciousness distorts information coming to the organism from the inside and outside, which is the cause of its functional disadaptation, and the like. The conception of the ecology of an overall mind, as the sets of ideas, notions or thoughts in the whole world, is presented against the background of theoretical and empirical achievements of botany and zoology, anthropology, ethology and psychiatry, sociology and communication studies in connection with the development of cybernetics, systems theory and information theory.</p>

scholarly journals Verifiability and Falsifiability as Parameters for Scientific Methodology

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Sandhya Shankar
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

The question of „how do we come to know‟ has been the search of mankind since time immemorial. Neither has there been a consensus for that question nor there will be. Many a great minds have looked into this, coming up with various perspectives. Two such varying perspectives in this field are empiricism and rationalism. While the former emphasizes that experience (through senses) is the only source of knowledge the latter upholds that there is something beyond the sense experience, the mind that is the source of knowledge. The shift towards a scientific phase from that of the earlier theological and metaphysical phase gained popularity with positivism, where progress of human knowledge was considered in identifying truths through scientific methods. In this scientific journey towards knowing the world emphasis was on empirically observable things. It was believed that there are no ideas which come into our head without being dependent on our perceptions, thereby on our experience. The basis of classical science was considered getting empirical observations. It had to be a systematic way of studying what is out there. Purpose of science was considered to be limited to things which can be observed, thus being connected to a means of being verified. This paper thus looks into the notion of verifiability as an important parameter of scientific methodology and its importance as asserted by logical positivists. But this criteria of scientific method was challenged by another criteria, that of falsifiability. The next section will look into falsifiability as another parameter of scientific methodology. Since these parameters have been discussed widely among philosophers, this paper shall be focusing on the views of A. J. Ayer and Sir Karl Popper regarding the same. Furthermore, its application and relevance to the field of linguistics will also be discussed.

Hegels Philosophie des Geistes

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-86
Author(s):  
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophie Des Geistes ◽  
Object Level ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

In order to understand Hegel’s form of philosophical reflection in general, we must read his ‘speculative’ sentences about spirit and nature, rationality and reason, the mind and its embodiment as general remarks about conceptual topics in topographical overviews about our ways of talking about ourselves in the world. The resulting attitude to traditional metaphysics gets ambivalent in view of the insight that Aristotle’s prima philosophia is knowledge of human knowledge, developed in meta-scientific reflections on notions like ‘nature’ and ‘essence’, ‘reality’ (or ‘being’) and ‘truth’, about ‘powers’ and ‘faculties’ – and does not lead by itself to an object-level theory about spiritual things like the soul. We therefore cannot just replace critical metaphysics of the human mind by empirical investigation of human behaviour as empiricist approaches to human cognition in naturalized epistemologies do and neuro-physiological explanations propose. Making transcendental forms and material presuppositions of conceptually informed perception and experience explicit needs some understanding of figurative forms of speech in our logical reflections and leads to other forms of knowledge than empirical observation and theory formation.

scholarly journals The case of demonic possession

1912 ◽  
Vol XIX (3) ◽  
pp. 521-531
Author(s):  
K. V. Shalabutov
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Demonic Possession ◽  
World Outlook ◽  
The World ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Good And Evil

As far as the human mind is developed, the area of ​​the miraculous and supernatural is wider and immense for it; therefore, all the incomprehensible and striking phenomena of him belong to him to the action of a higher, mysterious power. This is the origin of the world outlook of primitive peoples, in whom, over the course of time, invisible abstract forces were recognized as deities governing the fate of people, at which there usually arose the influence of deities on good and evil, clean and unclean. Deities have their servants angels and gods. Evil spirits and their incarnations in the image of bots, according to the primitive peoples and uncultured popular masses, have great influence on human life; unhappiness, death and illness depend on them. Sumtsov) says that diseases have long been among different peoples in the form of demonic beings. The spirits of darkness are doctors of health and life; they penetrate into the body of a person and serve as a source of illnesses, they darken the mind and torment the body. Already in the brick books of the ancient Chaldeans, there are conspiracies against diseases, like demonic beings. Among the Iranians, magic spells and cleansing from illnesses were widespread, like unclean demonic creatures. Among the Greeks and Romans, illnesses also had a demonic meaning, In the ancient Scandinavians, internal illnesses were attributed to the action of evil spirits and treated them with conspiracies and sympathetic means. In England in the X and XI centuries and later internal illnesses were considered directly caused by evil spirits, elves, demons, spells of sorcerers or the pernicious influence of the evil eye. The Slavs, in particular the Russians, share the demonic origin of illnesses with all other peoples.

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The World ◽  
Empirical Realism

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.

scholarly journals Enacting Media. An Embodied Account of Enculturation Between Neuromediality and New Cognitive Media Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Fingerhut
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Work ◽  
The Mind

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work (e.g., a TV series, a picture, a text, or even a city) that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind.

The Epistemological Promise of Externalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Central Problem ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Challenging Problem ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Perceptual Illusions ◽  
The World

This chapter discusses the promise of an ‘externalist’ or ‘anti-individualist’ account of the contents of the thoughts and beliefs that one must have even to be faced with the challenging problem associated with ‘externalist’ definitions of the concept of knowledge. It first considers the central problem for philosophy since the time of Socrates: to understand the role of sense-experience in human knowledge, and to see whether or how we can know what we do about the world on the basis of what we perceive to be so. It suggests that threatening reflections about sense perception start from the undeniable fact of perceptual illusions or mistakes. It also examines efforts that have been made to define the concept of knowledge and concludes by explaining how externalism can be helpful in the diagnosis and dissolution of the traditional epistemological problem.

Fugitive Figures

2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Mary Franklin-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Gilbert Simondon ◽  
The Way

Abstract Through a study of early French romances, especially the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, this essay offers a new approach to the automaton in medieval literature. Bruno Latour’s plural ontology, which elaborates on the earlier work of Gilbert Simondon and Étienne Souriau, provides a way to break down the division between the human mind and the world (and hence the mind and the machine), offering a rich understanding of the way in which the beings of technology [TEC], fiction [FIC], and religion [REL] act in concert upon us to inspire our desire for technological fictions.

Substance, mode, and accident in modern philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited, and were witness to, the decline of the metaphysics of substance, mode, and accident of the Aristotelian tradition. The causes of this decline can be gleaned from an investigation of various puzzles which arose during the period, and of the ways in which different philosophers reacted to these puzzles. One such puzzle concerns independence. A substance is meant to be something that exists independently – but what meets this standard, other than God? Another puzzle concerns identity. A substance is meant to be something which in some sense supports (etymologically, stands under) its modes or accidents – but how can we penetrate to the nature, or identity, of the substance itself? A third puzzle concerns unity. A substance is meant to be unified in a way that a heap of stones is not – but what qualifies as a genuine unity? The puzzles were initially raised by those, such as Descartes and Locke, who did not intend for them to radically modify our understanding of substance, mode, and accident. But radical changes followed shortly thereafter nonetheless. Spinoza maintained that God or Nature is the only substance, all other things being mere modes of God. Conway, Leibniz, and Berkeley argued that the world is fundamentally spiritual or mind-like. And eventually, Hume and Kant questioned whether the notions of substance, mode, and accident were, in some sense, unavoidably problematic. As an investigation of this debate reveals, theories of substance, mode, and accident were intertwined with many other enduring philosophical themes, including the nature of reality, the mind–body relation, and the limits of human knowledge.

scholarly journals Fire in the mind: changing understandings of fire in Western civilization

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1696) ◽  
pp. 20150166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Pyne
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

For most of human history, fire has been a pervasive presence in human life, and so also in human thought. This essay examines the ways in which fire has functioned intellectually in Western civilization as mythology, as religion, as natural philosophy and as modern science. The great phase change occurred with the development of industrial combustion; fire faded from quotidian life, which also removed it from the world of informing ideas. Beginning with the discovery of oxygen, fire as an organizing concept fragmented into various subdisciplines of natural science and forestry. The Anthropocene, however, may revive the intellectual role of fire as an informing idea or at least a narrative conceit. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’.

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