Blasius of Parma (d. 1416)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graziella Federici Vescovini
Keyword(s):  
Physical Science ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Quantitative Account ◽  
The Way

Blasius of Parma was an important Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer who popularized the achievements of Oxford logic and Parisian physics in Italy. He questioned the Aristotelian foundations of medieval physical science, mechanics, astronomy and optics, thus helping to open the way to the mathematics, optics and statics of modern times. His teaching influenced the artists of the Florentine Renaissance in their rediscovery of linear perspective, and his discussion of proportions influenced the Paduan mathematicians up to the time of Galileo. He presented an atomist and quantitative account of physical reality, and a materialist account of the human intellect. His consequent denial of the immortality of the soul won him the title of ‘diabolical doctor’ (doctor diabolicus). His position on the human ability to avoid astrological determinism was equivocal. Though his work was scholastic in style, he enjoyed good relations with such Italian humanists as Vittorino da Feltre, whose request for lessons in mathematics he refused. In Florence, he took part in conversations between humanists and scholastics.

scholarly journals The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-107
Author(s):  
Y. Domanskii
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is in­capable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.

scholarly journals Social Networks, a Populated Picture

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. C04
Author(s):  
Fabio Fornasari
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Way

Man, by his very nature, puts things between himself and the environment, turning the latter into a place, a space. He arranges the environment around him on multiple levels, by projecting parts of himself and shaping the frontiers and the horizons that surround, define and represent him. This was learnt a long time ago, but a trace and a memory remain in the way man acts: when mapping reality (both physical reality and the reality explored through digital means), we observe it and find a way through it by adopting behaviours that have always been similar. What has changed in this mapping is the ability to recognise, especially the ability to interpret maps and creatively work them.

Islamic Literature in Translation

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Lois Giffen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Great Books ◽  
Direct Acquaintance ◽  
The Way ◽  
Islamic Literature

This course of one semester for undergraduates samples the literature—broadly defined—of the Arab, Persian and Turkish peoples and a time span of from just before the rise of Muhammad to modern times. It is literature-centered, i.e., the attention is on the reading and discussion of certain works or selections from works, rather than on literary history. Conceived more on the style of a Great Books course, its aim is to give the student as much direct acquaintance as possible in a few weeks with the thought, and the literary sensibilities of a great civilization. An alternative title would be Islamic Humanities, taking a cue from the more inclusive Oriental Humanities courses and the successful Western Humanities courses which led the way for them.

Yin-Yang (Yijing) and the Bible

2021 ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Claudia von Collani
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Chinese ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Christianity In China ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
Chinese Religions ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Way

Chinese religions, philosophy, and especially Confucianism constituted a great challenge for the Catholic mission since its beginnings in China in early modern times. This essay looks at the way the missionaries, especially the Jesuits, made several attempts to solve the problem. Niccolò Longobardo s.j., for example, refused to use Chinese terms for the Christian God, dismissing them as insufficient or atheistic. Most Jesuits, however, advocated for terms such as Tian, Shangdi, Tianzhu, and Taiji for God in China. The Mandate of the Vicar Apostolic Charles Maigrot m.e.p., prohibiting the use of the Yijing and Taiji as the Chinese name for God, became a great challenge for Joachim Bouvet s.j. in developing his Figurism. With this system, he found complements for Christianity in China and created a new theology combining Eastern and Western ideas. These efforts were stopped by the prohibition of the Chinese rites and by the historical-critical method for reading the old Chinese books.

Introduction to Kracauer: Abstraction, Redemption and Modernity1

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Ian Aitken
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Modern Condition ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides an analysis of the key ideas of Siegfried Kracauer, covering his key concepts of abstraction, redemption and distraction, and his account of the modern condition, the role of conceptual reason within modernity, the subordination of intuition within modernity, and the way that film may contribute to the ‘redemption of physical reality.

Epistemology in Islamic philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shams C. Inati
Keyword(s):  
General View ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
Ibn Sina ◽  
Ibn Rushd ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
The Way

Muslim philosophers agree that knowledge is possible. Knowledge is the intellect’s grasp of the immaterial forms, the pure essences or universals that constitute the natures of things, and human happiness is achieved only through the intellect’s grasp of such universals. They stress that for knowledge of the immaterial forms, the human intellect generally relies on the senses. Some philosophers, such as Ibn Rushd and occasionally Ibn Sina, assert that it is the material forms themselves, which the senses provide, that are grasped by the intellect after being stripped of their materiality with the help of the divine world. However, the general view as expressed by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina seems to be that the material forms only prepare the way for the reception of the immaterial forms, which are then provided by the divine world. They also state that on rare occasions the divine world simply bestows the immaterial forms on the human intellect without any help from the senses. This occurrence is known as prophecy. While all Muslim philosophers agree that grasping eternal entities ensures happiness, they differ as to whether such grasping is also necessary for eternal existence.

Calvin and the Priesthood of all Believers

1968 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
John R. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Way

A Mong those elements of Christian doctrine which surged anew to the forefront of Christian thinking during the early sixteenth century was that biblical idea which, in more modern times, we have come to call the ‘priesthood of all believers’. Luther used the doctrine almost as a battle-axe, to hew away at the pretensions of the Roman hierarchy and sacramental system. Almost invariably, it is Luther's name which we find linked to this doctrine in studies of the Reformation period. However, any serious study of the idea of the priesthood of God's people would do well to include an examination of the way in which John Calvin dealt with it, and indeed, the way in which the idea found certain expressions within his system of ecclesiastical organisation. It is our purpose here to see what Calvin taught in relationship to this biblical idea, and what elements of the life of the Genevan church may be considered to be, at least in part, an expression of the idea.

scholarly journals Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA KRYLOVA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Collective Property ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995Magnetic Mountainintroduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001Kritikaarticle ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001Armageddon Avertedmarked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.

Banality of life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Станислав Борзых ◽  
Stanislav Borzykh
Keyword(s):  
Living Cell ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
The Universe

This book is devoted to the issues of the uniqueness of matter, life and consciousness - or mind. Despite the fact that we are taught to look at the world around us through the prism of this concept, in reality it is much more prosaic than it is customary to think. Neither the universe settings that allow the matter to take place, nor the complex machinery of a living cell that leads to the emergence of a new phenomenon in physical reality, nor even the human intellect, which we believe is the apex of evolution, cannot be recognized as something special and unique. Those laws and norms that allow all this to happen belong to this world and they are by it constituted, and therefore are not something outstanding and surprising. The infinity of the universe makes any talk that all of the above is unique and original meaningless and futile. On the contrary, there are good reasons to think that life, reason, and whatever else in what we see the uniqueness of both the world and ourselves, are an inevitable consequence of those processes that are observed in physical reality. Moreover, they were both predictable and expected. This paper shows that all these phenomena are trivial and relatively simple. We were just lucky players in the lottery, which somewhere necessarily had to lead to a win, and exactly this we are observing around. Much more experiments have ended in nothing, and this makes our case far less interesting than it seems to us. In dry residue, neither being, nor life, nor reason is something amazing, but all that is just banal.

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