Biblical Criticism and the Phenomenology of Scripture

Author(s):  
Adam Y. Wells

This introductory chapter has three aims. First, it summarizes the phenomenological method. Second, it explores the way that various assumptions about the epistemic priority of the natural sciences operate in modern biblical criticism. Third, it summarizes the essays included in the volume.

Author(s):  
Courtney Freer

This introductory chapter outlines where and how this book contributes original research to the existing scholarship on politics of rentier states in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the academic work on political Islam through a brief literature review. This book will demonstrate that political Islam serves as a prominent voice critiquing social policies, as well as promoting more strictly political, and often populist or reformist, views supported by a great many Gulf citizens. As laid out in this chapter, this book demonstrates that the way that Islamist organizations operate in the unique environment of the super-rentiers is distinct. It also presents information about the methodology and sources used, as well as a detailed explanation for the use of country cases chosen. The chapter closes by describing the format of the book.


Author(s):  
Jetze Touber

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-334
Author(s):  
Octavio A. Chon Torres

AbstractThere is a record of the positive effects of astrobiological research for the natural sciences and eventually for their technological use on Earth. However, on the philosophical effects, this is not as visible as the other sciences, which is why it can be assumed that it is a waste of time speculating on astrobioethics or also on the philosophy of astrobiology. This is the reason why this work seeks to identify and sustain the philosophical utility of astrobioethics. To achieve this, this article focuses on three essential aspects: teloempathy, education and astrotheology. Russell's argument about the value of philosophy will be used as a fundamental basis for the usefulness of astrobioethics.


1995 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Terence J. Keegan

AbstractPostmodernism involves recognizing that the objective certitude sought by modern scientific and humanistic methods is not possible. Deconstruction paved the way for postmodernism in literary studies, but it is most evident in the work of some reader-response critics. Many reader-response critics utilize the indeterminacy of postmodern insight but are hesitant to accept its subjectivist implications. Biblical scholars tend to prefer methods that yield verifiable results, but some have successfully used postmodern approaches. Christian scholars, though committed to an idea of transcendence to which postmodernism seems to deny access, can still profitably use postmodern approaches but must be prepared to deal with such questions as inspiration and the relation of scholarship to the Church.


Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky

This introductory chapter discusses the unquestioned identification between “Zionism” as a national movement that sought to realize the Jewish nation's self-determination in Palestine, and “the Jewish nation-state,” which has no room for the national collective existence of any particular national group other than the Jews and which represents the ultimate and teleological realization of the Zionist project. The vast majority of those who support the two-state solution, who are known as the “Zionist left,” base their position on the need to avoid the formation of a binational state in which the Jewish demographic majority would be endangered. They argue that this is the way to rescue what they consider to be the political core of the Zionist idea: a mono-national state for the Jewish political collective.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Jacek Wiewiorowski

THE NATURAL SCIENCES IN THE SERVICE OF PLEADINGS IN CASES INVOLVING MINORS: REMARKS ON CTH 2.4.1 [A. 318/319] = C. 5.4.20)SummaryThe subject of this article is the status of juvenile persons in Roman law, as exemplified by one of the constitutions of Constantine the Great, CTh 2.4.1 [a. 318/319] = C. 5.40.2, fragments of which are preserved in Theodosius’ Code of 438, and in an abridged version in Justinian’s Code of 534. In the first part of the article the author analyses the extremely controversial issue of the identity of the constitution’s addressee. In the second part he discusses the content of this constitution and the premises for its issue in the light of the Constantinian legislation on family matters and the way it was later interpreted. The article’s third part is an attempt to apply the natural and social sciences to the question of minors and their personality, and the examination of this issue as regards CTh 2.4.1 [a. 318/319] = C. 5.40.2. The author takes into consideration the basic data on the status of minors in Roman law, in the subsequent history of European law, and in non-European cultures. He concludes by making a series of observations on the potential for the application of the natural sciences in the study of Roman law, which could serve to confirm the timeless and universal nature of some of the solutions it prescribed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (55-56) ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Vassiliou

Alois Riegl’s essay “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst” (1899) has been one of art historiography’s early attempts to bridge art and science. In this text, Riegl not only presents the background of some of his theoretical and methodological premises but he also provides an overarching argument for the way natural sciences af- fect modern spectatorship. In this way, he establishes the basis of a Kunstwollen for the ‘age of the natural sciences’ and describes its appropriate artistic traits. Addressing the intellectual and historical context of the Stimmung Essay, this article shows how Riegl’s ideas work in a subtle and intricate manner, involving the combination of sensual and phenomenological observations to modes of knowl- edge. In this respect, the relation of art and science does not seem to be settled on a fixed contemplative basis but on the combination of the art with cognition and affects.


Author(s):  
Christopher Morton

Chapter 1 sets out the main arguments and contexts of the book. It begins with a discussion of why using the photographic archive to explore the fieldwork on which Evans-Pritchard’s celebrated writings was based is so transformative. It discusses the relationship between anthropology and colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Evans-Pritchard’s equivocal positioning within this as someone directly funded by the colonial administration and yet having a critical relationship to it. It explores the way in which Evans-Pritchard sought to move anthropology away from the natural sciences and towards history and the humanities. It compares his fieldwork photography to other anthropologists of the period and challenges the assumption that anthropology in the period was not a visual endeavour.


Author(s):  
Jodi Rios

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the racialized policing and governing practices in North St. Louis County, Missouri. In the suburbs of North St. Louis County, city governments discipline and police Black residents as a source of steady revenue. To put it in the way many residents do, municipalities view poor Black residents as “ATM machines,” to which they return time and again through multiple forms of predatory policing, juridical practices, and legalized violence. As part of this system and to hold on to the coveted yet hollow prize of local autonomy, Black leaders invest mightily in the white spatial imaginary of the suburbs by adopting a rhetoric of producing good citizens, promoting safety, protecting private property, and upholding norms of respectability. Narrated through questions of rights and suburban citizenship, the double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space. The systems that create and profit from this double bind rely on tropes of Black deviance, honed over the course of centuries; the illegibility of Black suffering; and questions concerning Black personhood.


Author(s):  
Rudolf A. Makkreel

Wilhelm Dilthey saw his work as contributing to a ‘Critique of Historical Reason’ which would expand the scope of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by examining the epistemological conditions of the human sciences as well as of the natural sciences. Both kinds of science take their departure from ordinary life and experience, but whereas the natural sciences seek to focus on the way things behave independently of human involvement, the human sciences take account of this very involvement. The natural sciences use external observation and measurement to construct an objective domain of nature that is abstracted from the fullness of lived experience. The human sciences (humanities and social sciences), by contrast, help to define what Dilthey calls the historical world. By making use of inner as well as outer experience, the human sciences preserve a more direct link with our original sense of life than do the natural sciences. Whereas the natural sciences seek explanations of nature, connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through hypothetical generalizations and causal laws, the human sciences aim at an understanding that articulates the fundamental structures of historical life given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that has been recognized as anticipating phenomenology. Dilthey first thought that this descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but in his later hermeneutical writings he rejected the idea of a foundational discipline or method. Thus he ends by claiming that all the human sciences are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of interpreting the ‘objectifications of life’, the external expressions or manifestations of human thought and action. Interpersonal understanding is attained through these common objectifications and not, as is widely believed, through empathy. Moreover, to fully understand myself I must analyse the expressions of my life in the same way that I analyse the expressions of others. Not every aspect of life can be captured within the respective limits of the natural and the human sciences. Dilthey’s philosophy of life also leaves room for a kind of anthropological reflection whereby we attempt to do justice to the ultimate riddles of life and death. Such reflection receives its fullest expression in worldviews, which are overall perspectives on life encompassing the way we perceive and conceive the world, evaluate it aesthetically and respond to it in action. Dilthey discerned many typical worldviews in art and religion, but in Western philosophy he distinguished three recurrent types: the worldviews of naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism.


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