Either/Or: The Therapeutic Disciplines versus Philosophy and Religion

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
Lydia Amir ◽  

I trace Shlomit Schuster’s main ideas about the practice of philosophy, and fol­low with a critical characterization of her thought which bears on philosophy’s relation to psychology and psychiatry, on the one hand, and to religion, on the other, as well as on her basis of claiming philosophy’s suitability for non-philosophers. I argue that Shlomit could be unnecessarily uncompromising in implementing her either/or yet not sufficiently discerning of philosophy’s difference with religion. The most conspicuous tenet of Shlomit’s thought – the relation between philosophy and the therapeutic disciplines – has been abundantly debated within the practical philosophy movement. As far as I know, the tacit assumption of her thought regarding the relation of religion with philosophy and its prac­tice, in contradistinction, has not been addressed within this movement. Shlomit’s life and death urges us to tackle this delicate yet significant subject.

2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rein Bos

Of whom does the prophet say this? A single question and a multifaceted answerTheologians seeking to preach Old Testament texts meaningful way in Christian congregations face a great challenge. On the one hand, very little has been written in homiletical textbooks about hermeneutical problems facing those who wish to read the Old Testament from the perspective of Christ’s life and death. On the other hand, advances in biblical criticism seemed to have made any such attempt problematic to begin with. In this article, the author attempts to provide a practical-theological contribution to this hermeneutical challenge by reconsidering the heuristic value of mediaeval fourfold interpretation of scriptural passages. By focussing on the servant song of deutero-Isaiah (53) in light of its reinterpretation in Acts 8, this paper aims to provide some suggestions on how Christological interpretation of the Old Testament can be done in a way that takes the original context seriously and is able to read the text from a Christian perspective without the one reading infringing on the other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. e055005
Author(s):  
Elena Theodoropoulou

The connection between a non philosophical work and its reception in education through its transformation into a learning/teaching material and a possible philosophical reading, in order to recognize and define the philosophical stance of this very material, could not but be a challenge for philosophy of education itself, namely, in its relation to (or as) practical philosophy. This kind of reduction to the state of material could instrumentalize the latter raising practical, ethical and methodological issues about the pedagogical intention itself; subsequently, the art, literature, philosophy, and science lying behind materials become equally instrumentalized and evacuated. This article attempts, on the one hand, to circumscribe and describe this movement of “becoming material” as a question philosophically and pedagogically challenging and, on the other, to reflect about a critical understanding of this very question as an example of research in practical philosophy. 


Author(s):  
Stephan F. De Beer

This article reflects on the unfinished task of liberation – as expressed in issues of land – and drawing from the work of Franz Fanon and the Durban-based social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. It locates its reflections in four specific sites of struggle in the City of Tshwane, and against the backdrop of the mission statement of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, as well as the Capital Cities Research Project based in the same university. Reflecting on the ‘living death’ of millions of landless people on the one hand, and the privatisation of liberation on the other, it argues that a liberating praxis of engagement remains a necessity in order to break the violent silences that perpetuate exclusion.


Author(s):  
Patricia Mindus

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics, and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the Web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics who warn that cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This chapter sets the problem, “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?,” into the broad context of practical philosophy by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy.” The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. The chapter's claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fail or succeed. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work.


1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-490
Author(s):  
Gerd Rodé

AbstractThis paper gives a new characterization of the dimension of a normal Hausdorff space, which joins together the Eilenberg-Otto characterization and the characterization by finite coverings. The link is furnished by the notion of a system of faces of a certain type (N1,..., NK), where N1,..., NK, K are natural numbers. It is shown that a space X contains a system of faces of type (N1,..., NK) if and only if dim(X) ≥ N1 + … + NK. The two limit cases of the theorem, namely Nk = 1 for 1 ≤ k ≤ K on the one hand, and K = 1 on the other hand, give the two known results mentioned above.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 260-264
Author(s):  
Wei Cui

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) recently emerged as the site of unprecedented, multilateral, and seemingly high-stakes negotiations about the future of international business income taxation. Judging by the political resources deployed in these negotiations, international tax has entered unchartered territory. Ruth Mason offers a timely and balanced portrayal of the OECD process so far. But explanations of this process remain eminently contestable. On the one hand, international institutions that address externalities from uncoordinated actions and produce mutual benefits for participating nations can be highly stable. On the other hand, the OECD has struggled, whether in its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) and post-BEPS initiatives or during the pre-BEPS era, to articulate the goals for which international coordination in taxation is needed. By many accounts, recent discussions at the OECD are motivated mainly by the desire to stop foreign imposition of taxes on U.S. companies, or, as the other side of the same coin, to avert the wrath of the single hegemonic power in international tax. What is the best characterization of this conflict? I believe that understanding the underlying subject matter for international coordination, as opposed to merely the institutions that might facilitate such coordination, is required for identifying the coming transformation of international tax.


2007 ◽  
Vol 09 (04) ◽  
pp. 473-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID CHIRON

The purpose of this paper is to relate two notions of Sobolev and BV spaces into metric spaces, due to Korevaar and Schoen on the one hand, and Jost on the other hand. We prove that these two notions coincide and define the same p-energies. We review also other definitions, due to Ambrosio (for BV maps into metric spaces), Reshetnyak and finally to the notion of Newtonian–Sobolev spaces. These last approaches define the same Sobolev (or BV) spaces, but with a different energy, which does not extend the standard Dirichlet energy. We also prove a characterization of Sobolev spaces in the spirit of Bourgain, Brezis and Mironescu in terms of "limit" of the space Ws,p as s → 1, 0 < s < 1, and finally following the approach proposed by Nguyen. We also establish the [Formula: see text] regularity of traces of maps in Ws,p (0 < s ≤ 1 < sp).


1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. van der Veen ◽  
Philippe Van Parijs

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick contrasts entitlement theories of justice and “traditional” theories such as Rawls', utilitarianism or egalitarianism, and advocates the former against the latter. What exactly is an entitlement theory (or conception or principle) of justice? Nozick's book offers two distinct characterizations. On the one hand, he explicitly describes “the general outlines of the entitlement theory” as maintaining “that the holdings of a person are just if he is entitled to them by the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer, or by the principle of rectification of injustice (as specified by the first two principles of just acquisition and transfer)” (Nozick, 1974, p. 153). On the other hand, his famous “Wilt Chamberlain” argument against alternative theories is first said to apply to (all) “non-entitlement conceptions” (p. 160), and later to any “end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice” (p. 163) — which amounts to an implicit characterization of an entitlement conception (theory, principle) as a conception of justice which is neither end-state nor patterned.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agostino Cera ◽  

Abstract: While putting forward the proposal of a “philosophy of technology in the nominative case,” grounded on the concept of Neoenvironmentality, this paper intends to argue that the best definition of our current age is not “Anthropocene.” Rather, it is “Technocene,” since technology represents here and now the real “subject of history” and of (a de-natured) nature, i.e. the (neo)environment where man has to live.This proposal culminates in a new definition of man’s humanity and of technology. Switching from natura hominis to conditio humana, the peculiarity of man can be defined on the basis of an anthropic perimeter, the core of which consists of man’s worldhood: man is that being that has a world (Welt), while animal has a mere environment (Umwelt). Both man’s worldhood and animal’s environmentality are derived from a pathic premise, namely the fundamental moods (Grundstimmungen) that refer them to their respective findingness (Befindlichkeit).From this anthropological premise, technology emerges as the oikos of contemporary humanity. Technology becomes the current form of the world – and so gives birth to a Technocene – insofar as it introduces in any human context its ratio operandi and so assimilates man to an animal condition, i.e. an environmental one. Technocene corresponds on the one side to the emergence of technology as (Neo)environment and on the other to the feralization of man. The spirit of Technocene turns out to be the complete redefinition of the anthropic perimeter.While providing a non-ideological characterization of the current age, this paper proposes the strategy of an ‘anthropological conservatism,’ that is to say a pathic desertion understood as a possible (pre)condition for the beginning of an authentic Anthropocene, i.e. the age of an-at-last-entirely-human-man.


2001 ◽  
Vol 700 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Cremer ◽  
D. Neuschütz

AbstractIn this paper, the deposition and characterization of laterally graded materials libraries (composition spread) is presented. The films have been deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering, using two or three metallic targets at a low angle to the substrate surface as well as a system of apertures. To illustrate the advantages of combinatorial approaches for the development of advanced materials, the multicomponent metastable hard coatings (Ti,Al)N and (Ti,Al,Si)N were investigated with respect to the relations between structure and composition on the one hand and the oxidation resistance of these coatings on the other.


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