scholarly journals L’ESEGESI CORANICA, IL SUFISMO SCIITA E LA METAFISICA DI IBN ʿARABĪ: CONSIDERAZIONI SULLA STORIA INTELLETTUALE DEL SUFISMO SCIITA NEL XIX SECOLO

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Cancian
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Main Ideas

Riassunto: Ibn ʿArabī ebbe una influenza profonda e duratura sulla tarda filosfia del mondo dell’Islam, in particolare nelle sue regioni orientali. La sua influenza fu talmente pervasiva che temi, vocabolario e concetti di origine ‘akbariana’ divennero comuni e prevalenti nella letteratura religiosa per moderna e moderna. Questo articolo tocca alcune di queste idee e concetti, in particolare l’approccio di Ibn ʿArabī alla nozione di ‘unità’ così come rialaborato nel lavoro di un importante, ancorché poco studiato sino ad oggi, maestro sufi sciita, Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh Gunābādī (m. 1909). Questo studio del lavoro di Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh dimostra come il maestro iraniano negozi la sua lealtà ideale nei confronti dello Shaykh al-Akbar, mantenendo al contampo una cristallina consapevolezza della delicatezza dei temi trattati prendendo le necessarie distanze dalla lettera della teoria, ove ciò fosse necessario, eppure nello stesso tempo corroborando la propria adesione intellettuale e spirituale al cuore della metafisica del maestro andaluso. Abstract: Ibn ʿArabī had a profound influence on later Islamic philosophy and mysticism, in particular in the Muslim East. His influence was pervasive to the point that Akbarian themes, vocabulary and main ideas are common currency in early modern and modern Iranian religious literature. This article covers the issue of some of these themes and ideas, namely Ibn ʿArabī’s understanding of ‘unity’ (waḥda), as exposed in the work of a prominent, albeit understudied, Shiʿi Sufi Master, Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh Gunābādī (d. 1909). This survey of Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh’s work shows how the Iranian master negotiates his allegiance to the Shaykh al-Akbar while maintaining a sharp awareness of the sensitivity of his main ideas, distancing himself from the letter of the theory when needed, while at the same time reinforcing his theoretical adherence to the core of the Andalusian master’s metaphysics.

Possessing the Iconic Book

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 309-329
Author(s):  
Claudia V. Camp
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Woman Wisdom ◽  
Martin Marty

I propose that the notion of possession adds an important ideological nuance to the analyses of iconic books set forth by Martin Marty (1980) and, more recently, by James Watts (2006). Using the early second century BCE book of Sirach as a case study, I tease out some of the symbolic dynamics through which the Bible achieved iconic status in the first place, that is, the conditions in which significance was attached to its material, finite shape. For Ben Sira, this symbolism was deeply tied to his honor-shame ethos in which women posed a threat to the honor of his eternal name, a threat resolved through his possession of Torah figured as the Woman Wisdom. What my analysis suggests is that the conflicted perceptions of gender in Ben Sira’s text is fundamental to his appropriation of, and attempt to produce, authoritative religious literature, and thus essential for understanding his relationship to this emerging canon. Torah, conceived as female, was the core of this canon, but Ben Sira adds his own literary production to this female “body” (or feminized corpus, if you will), becoming the voice of both through the experience of perfect possession.

Benedict de Spinoza’s Virtue

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Columbus N. Ogbujah ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
Ethical Egoism ◽  
Absolute Truth ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Seminal Roots

Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was about the most radical of the early modern philosophers who developed a unique metaphysics that inspired an intriguing moral philosophy, fusing insights from ancient Stoicism, Cartesian metaphysics, Hobbes and medieval Jewish rationalism. While helping to ground the Enlightenment, Spinoza’s thoughts, against the intellectual mood of the time, divorced transcendence from divinity, equating God with nature. His extremely naturalistic views of reality constructed an ethical structure that links the control of human passion to virtue and happiness. By denying objective significance to things aside from human desires and beliefs, he is considered an anti-realist; and by endorsing a vision of reality according to which everyone ought to seek their own advantage, he is branded ethical egoist. This essay identified the varying influences of Spinoza’s moral anti-realism and ethical egoism on post-modernist thinkers who decried the “naïve faith” in objective and absolute truth, but rather propagated perspective relativity of reality. It recognized that modern valorization of ethical relativism, which in certain respects, detracts from the core values of the Enlightenment, has its seminal roots in his works.

Devolution processes and the theory of historical development by S. Sanderson

2021 ◽  
pp. 72-77
Author(s):  
A.V. Verkhoturov ◽  
◽  
A.A. Obukhov
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
World System ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Evolutionary Trend ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Main Ideas

Analyzed is one of the most comprehensive modern approaches to the problem of the existence of evolution of human society as such and of specific human communities, i.e. “General Theory of Historical Development” by American historian and sociologist Stephen Sanderson. While agreeing, in general, with its main ideas, we believe that it is important to note that the issue of existence of individual communities demonstrating devolution (regression to an earlier historical state), stagnation or degeneration at certain historical stages is practically ignored in the framework of the theory under consideration. This creates its vulnerability in the face of specific empirical data, indicating a deviation from the evolutionary trend. We believe that overcoming this theoretical difficulty is possible in the process of comprehending the theory of S. Sanderson in the context of ideas of the world-system approach of Immanuel Wallerstein. We want to show that examples of devolution, stagnation and degeneration of societies do not deny general progressive evolutionary tendencies, characteristic for the world-system as a whole, but only indicate the transition of a particular society to a lower level within the world-system (from the core to the semi-periphery, or from the semi-periphery to the periphery).

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Tracey A. Sowerby ◽  
Joanna Craigwood
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Theoretical Import

The Introduction outlines the inter-penetration of literary and diplomatic cultures within European and some non-European diplomatic practices, emphasizing the wide-ranging and sophisticated ways in which early modern diplomats utilized literary motifs. It introduces readers to existing research within the emerging field of diplo-literary studies and those areas of the ‘new diplomatic history’ which are most pertinent to the core thematic focus of the collection. While situating contributions within this literature, it also outlines the collective methodological and theoretical import of the volume. Paying particular attention to literary representations of diplomacy, diplomacy, and translation, the diplomatic dissemination of texts, and the texts used in diplomatic practice, it draws out a series of findings for the field.

Bunster, Patricio (1924–2006)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Richard Giersdorf
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Corporeal Awareness

Patricio Bunster’s career was emblematic of a Latin American engagement with European modernism and unique in its exchange with German modern dance (Ausdruckstanz). Trained in Chile by immigrant German members of Kurt Jooss’s company, Bunster merged a local vocabulary with globalized movements—such as modern dance vocabulary derived from Ausdruckstanz and ballet—with the goal of restructuring existing nationally defined movement. This merger was utopian in its rethinking of national culture toward a global artistic expression. Such a utopian understanding of the capacity of movement as a global unifier and transformer recalled early modern dance’s vision for a changed world through corporeal awareness and choreographed emancipation. Influenced by Laban as well as Jooss and Leeder, Bunster observed and deployed movement found in manual labor, leisure, daily rituals, nature, and the structure of architecture. In Bunster’s opinion, all of these sources carried traces of future choreographies that could express a new transnational, (Latin) American, and utopian society. Different utopian models, such as the radical rethinking of political structures through a breakdown of the barrier between art and life or the embracing of technology in relation to design for the bettering of society were at the core of modernist conviction that the world needed to be fundamentally changed.

The Ontological Status of Causal Powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hill
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Core ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
Popular View

Benjamin Hill seeks to initiate deeper contemporary discussion of the ontological challenges that drove early modern philosophers (namely, several early Cartesians, Berkeley, and Hume) to accept the negative thesis of occasionalism, that no physical object can truly be an efficient cause. He argues that we should be looking past Hume and his empiricist’s approach to secondary causation to bring the core metaphysical, issues he believes are still lingering, into sharper focus. Hill walks us backwards from Hume’s empirical critiques of powers in the Enquiry and Treatise to Locke’s presentation of the ‘popular’ view that experience lead us to postulate powers as a response to occasionalism. This, he suggests, reveals that the early modern debate about causal powers tracked not the divide between scholastics and mechanical philosophers but the divide between realists and occasionalists and revolved around a confusion between them regarding what was the underlying question of the debate. For the occasionalists, it was not really about whether or not causal powers did exist, but about explaining how they could exist. This leads Hill to explore the metaphysical worries animating seventeenth-century occasionalists.

REBELLION, RESISTANCE, AND A SWISS BRUTUS?

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDRIES RAATH ◽  
SHAUN DE FREITAS
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Divine Justice

Early sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland witnessed, amongst their peasants, a growing dissatisfaction with economic exploitation and the increasing power of political rulers. The Protestant Reformation at the time had a profound influence on the moulding of this dissatisfaction into a right to demand the enforcement of divine justice. The Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, provided parallels for the demands of the peasants, while the German reformers, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, criticized the rebellious methods of the peasantry. Against this background the young Swiss reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, responded more positively towards the claims of the peasants by opposing the views of the Lutheran reformers in his play ‘Lucretia and Brutus’. In this drama, Bullinger propounds the first steps towards the development of his federal theory of politics by advancing the idea of oath-taking as the mechanism for transforming the monarchy into a Christian republic. The idea of oath-taking was destined to become a most important device in early modern politics, used to combat tyranny and to promote the idea of republicanism.

THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE CULTURE OF HUMANISTS AND THE COMMUNICATIVE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

scholarly journals Missionaries as bridge builders in Buddhist kingdoms: Amity amid radical difference

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Eva M. Pascal
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Core ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
The World

Buddhism and Christianity are major world religions that both make universal and often competing claims about the nature of the world and ultimate reality. These claims are difficult to reconcile and often go to the core of Buddhist and Christian worldviews. This article looks at the age of encounter in the early modern period for ways Christians and Buddhists forged friendship through common spiritual commitments and action. Beyond seeking theological and philosophical exchange, convergences along spirituality and practice proved important vehicles for friendship. With the examples of Christian–Buddhist friendship from historical case studies, this article explores the ways contemporary Christian expressions of spiritual practice and advocacy allows Christians to connect with Buddhists. Early modern encounters have important lessons for furthering Christian–Buddhist friendship that may also be applied to other religious traditions.

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