Language about God in Whitehead's Philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-218
Author(s):  
Palmyre Oomen ◽  

The way Whitehead speaks of God in his "philosophy of organism," and the evaluation thereof is the subject of this article. The background of this issue is the position—broadly shared in theology, and here represented by Aquinas—that one should not speak "carelessly" about God. Does Whitehead violate this rule, or does his language for God express God's otherness and relatedness to the world in a new, intriguing way? In order to answer this question, an introduction into Whitehead's philosophy is given, and especially into his category of existence, the "actual entity." For Whitehead, God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence. His perception of the similarity and greater dissimilarity between God and the worldly actual entities (and clusters thereof) is analyzed. In the main andfinal section of this article, these insights are used as tools to decrypt Whitehead's God-language. Here, I compare the status of Whitehead's and Aquinas's statements about God, discuss Whitehead's ideas concerning the analogical character of concrete language, and argue that in Whitehead's philosophy too there is no discourse about God without a shift or breakdown of the "ordinary" meaning of language

Open Theology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Palmyre M.F. Oomen

AbstractThe way Whitehead speaks of God in his ‘philosophy of organism,’ and the evaluation thereof, is the subject of this article. The background of this issue is the position - broadly shared in theology, and here represented by Aquinas - that one should not speak ‘carelessly’ about God. Does Whitehead violate this rule, or does his language for God express God’s otherness and relatedness to the world in a new intriguing way? In order to answer this question an introduction into Whitehead’s philosophy is given, and especially into his category of existence, the ‘actual entity.’ For Whitehead God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence. His perception of the similarity and greater dissimilarity between God and the worldly actual entities (and clusters thereof) is analyzed. In the main and final section of this article these insights are used as a tool to decrypt Whitehead’s God-language. Here the status of Whitehead’s and Aquinas’ statements about God are compared, Whitehead’s ideas concerning the analogical character of concrete language are discussed, and it is argued that in Whitehead’s philosophy too there is no discourse about God without a shift or breakdown of the ‘ordinary’ meaning of language.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-56
Author(s):  
Feruza Mamatova ◽  

The present paper aims to compare the principles of choosing a marriage partner and analyse the status of being in the marrriage in the frame of family traditions that are totally inherent to the both of the nations: English and Uzbek. It is known that interconnection and cross-cultural communication between the countries of these two nationalities have been recently developed. The purpose to give an idea about these types of family traditions and prevent any misunderstanding that might occur in the communications makes our investigation topical one. The research used phraseological units as an object and the marriage aspects as the subject


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
Dominic Bryan

This article examines the way in which the availability of cheaply produced polyester flags has changed the symbolic landscape in the public places of Northern Ireland. The “tradition” of flying flags to express identity is common throughout the world and an important feature of an annual marking of residential and civic spaces in Northern Ireland. Such displays have been a consistent part of the reproduction of political identities through commemoration and the marking of territory. However, the availability of cheaply produced textiles has led to a change in the way the displays take place, the development of a range of new designs and helped sustain the control of areas by particular paramilitary groups. It highlights how the “symbolic capital” of the national flags can be used by different social groups having implication on the status and value of the symbol.


Author(s):  
Petya Pachkova

The subject of study is the Bulgarian women, who for different, mainly economic, reasons emigrate to other countries and how this affects their social and psychological status. During the transition, immigration processes in Bulgaria accelerated. A special feature is the feminization of emigration. With this peculiarity, we get into the general flow of feminization of emigration around the world. Similar are some consequences of this feminization - breaking down families; keeping the children in the hands of spouses and parents who too often fail to cope with the challenge; bribery of children with dry money, which accustom them to laziness and to unacceptable and criminal activities; staying with the status of a non-married woman; loneliness etc.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Verónica Heredia Ruiz

Netflix, a platform with more than 100 million users in the world, has forever changed the way television is produced and consumed. This article analyzes how this new television model convergent with Internet has transformed the concept of programming and teleclairvoyance through intensified viewing or binge watching. A conceptual review identifies the main theoretical displacements on television, programming and audiences generated by the platform, as well as a documentary analysis of news articles on the subject, and the visualization of the Original contents published until May 2017.Netflix, una plataforma con más de 100 millones de usuarios en el mundo, ha cambiado para siempre la forma como se produce y se consume la televisión. Este artículo analiza como este nuevo modelo de televisión convergente con internet ha transformado el concepto de programación y televidencias a través del visionado intensificado o binge watching. A través de una revisión conceptual se identifican los principales desplazamientos teóricos sobre televisión, programación y audiencias generadas por la plataforma, además de un análisis documental de artículos noticiosos sobre el tema, y la visualización de los contenidos originales publicados hasta mayo de 2017.


Author(s):  
Oleksandr Dzhuzha ◽  
◽  
Dmytro Tychyna ◽  
Valeriy Syuravchik ◽  
◽  
...  

The relevance of the article is due to the need to clarify the historical aspect, the genesis of victimology, as well as the content of its conceptual apparatus, the formulation of hypotheses and the improvement of its scientific tools. The concept of victimization is a reflection of essential means and relationships, phenomena and processes that are directly related to crime. The problematic aspects of the relatively complex nature of the conceptual apparatus of victimology have been identified, as a result of which a large number of concepts of non-legal origin in criminology are fraught with the danger of destroying the mechanism of legal assessments and conclusions on crime, its causes, the identity of the offender and the victim, and prevention measures. Elucidation of the historical aspect, genesis of victimology, as well as the content of its conceptual apparatus, is a dynamic process of reconciling hypotheses and positions, thoughts and views of criminologists, victimologists, lawyers, sociologists and psychologists, the results of which form the doctrinal basis of victimology. The stated positions are an attempt to somewhat streamline the diversity of scientific approaches to the content of individual elements of the subject of victimology, which, in turn, forms the motivation for further discussion of representatives of domestic and foreign criminological schools. Justification of the genesis and content of the conceptual apparatus of victimology, its individual theoretical provisions is an integral part of the development of the concept of combating crime and has not only scientific, but also important practical importance. Consequently, the tasks of victimology include the study of not only those who was the victim, but also those who have never acquired the status of a direct victim of the crime. The purpose of such studies are to identify a complex of certain properties capable of imported in criminal manifestations, which allows to carry out the victimological forecast for both individual and mass levels. The study of crime victims is necessary to solve many problems, especially related to the organization of their physical protection.


Author(s):  
Brian Barry

This chapter argues that in the study of politics, numbers make a difference: a discipline with a hundred or so members must behave in a different way from one with over a thousand. It divides the century in the middle, in 1950, the date of the PSA’s founding. The first period, then, is one of gradual expansion to the small base from which the massive expansion of the second period was launched. The chapter traces through the implications of professionalization for the way in which politics is studied, looking at the relations among subdisciplines within the subject and relations between the discipline in Britain and in the rest of the world. Britain has scarcely embraced the project of modernism with enthusiasm, so there is less provocation to fuel postmodernism. Perhaps resistance to intellectual fashion will continue to be the distinctive British trait – for better and for worse.


Author(s):  
Neal Robinson

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/ad 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ad 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/ad 1231 and the other in AH 636/ad 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus, which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/ad 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries. Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ (fana’) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ (baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God.


Tekstualia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 325-339
Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Starnawski

The author of the articles shows that the grotesque is one of the most interesting ways of diagnosing changes and crisis in the anthroposphere (as a continuation of thinking about the subject from the middle of the seventeenth century through to postmodernity). According to Thomas Mann, the grotesque is one the most active notions in contemporary art. Its productivity results from the subject’s tendency to self-fulfilment, self-cognition, and self-definition; it is an independent vision and position in the “me – the world”, “me – community” relations. The grotesque is a strongly philosophical proposition, which bases its discourse on a conscious protest against present values and on transgressing all limiting and oppressive conventions. Therefore, the grotesque enhances the status of the subject, but it neither defends nor affi rms the subject in a direct manner. Apart from the social dimension, the grotesque also has numerous metaphysical references, the expression of which can be found in Kierkegaardian understanding of the metaphysical crisis as despair. Facing piercing emptiness, the human being tries to find some support and resorts to anything only to make a leap into the future. Laughter is only a manifestation of horror vacui, a specific dialectic moment devoid of any prospect of purification or comfort. What dominates a grotesque work is its open structure. The motifs which shape the spatiotemporal order do not always form a cause-and-effect system. Deliberately incoherent themes (logical coherence is not an aim) seem to be rather “deconstructors”, not constructors of the plot; they are intermittent, provoke the impression of a secret, a gleam, the absurd.


Author(s):  
Chris Vanden Bossche

Dickens employs a range of class discourses to imagine possibilities of social being defined in terms of middle-class selfhood. This self seeks social inclusion represented as the achievement of the status of the gentleman or gentlewoman. The nineteenth-century shift of gentility from inborn quality to a quality of character that is earned through self-making in turn raises the possibility of mere self-invention and along with it the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others. This problematic accounts for the repeated plot structure in which a protagonist is excluded from genteel society and can only re-enter it through earning his or her way in the world. In the late novels, Dickens focuses in particular on the way in which the desire for social inclusion is generated by gestures of exclusion and thus questions gentility as a viable category for defining social being.


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