Missional Discipleship in the Public Sphere: With Special Reference to Lordship, Followership and Christlikeness in the Concept of Public Discipleship

Missional discipleship is more than a movement seeking a new methodological and strategic mission paradigm. Missional discipleship is the essence of Christianity concerning the ontological foundation for the prime reason for existence as believers and the epistemological lens to see the world from the perspective of transformed values in Christ. In other words, missional discipleship requires acknowledging the lordship of Christ by demonstrating the ontological embodiment of who Christ is and epistemological resemblance by perceiving the reality as Christ does. These radical transformations in both ontological and epistemological areas can enable believers to authentically follow Christ as disciples and demonstrate Christlikeness in all spheres of their existence as missionaries. Christlike attributes and qualities are progressively cultivated in believers lives as they conform to the image of Christ, and the most profound nature of Christlikeness is holiness. Missional discipleship provides a platform to expand the concept of Christlikeness as holiness from the personal dimension to the public dimension to overcome the privatisation of discipleship and Christian religious dualism polarising things into the categories of the sacred and secular.

Ruminant Curiosity

The two subjects of this chapter are writers of German who did not live in Germany: Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald (a self-proclaimed devotee of Kafka). Kafka’s fiction has achieved the distinction of having generated a category that far exceeds its literary basis: the “Kafkaesque.” Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical investigations of literature in its ontological foundation is consistently worked out with reference to Kafka, under the telling phrase “literature and the right to death.” Perspectives by other theorists (Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Calasso) help refine Blanchot’s case, revealing that the “seasickness on dry land” of Kafka’s work takes on a life of its own apart from any particular work—precisely enabling the Kafkaesque to escape or exceed the thematic parameters articulated by the writer Kafka. Sebald then become the carrier of this viral affliction, portraying himself in peregrinations that hover indeterminately amidst various genres, from the premodern anatomy to the postmodern essayism evident in his Rings of Saturn. Sebald, like so many before him, finds that the engagement with history (World War Two and the Holocaust in his case) can only be truly undertaken by fictive means.

On Populist Illusion

Amplifying the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, Ernesto Laclau crowns his examination of the blind spots of the Marxist tradition with an encomium of populism. His project to re-centre ‘the political’ does not postulate a beginning marked by a great event. Instead, Laclau celebrates ontological foundation as the abyss of all politicity. This chapter critically assesses how Laclau invests the body of the populist leader with an extra-quotidian character. I will also show how the assumption that the body of the leader animates political beginnings and primordially channels them restrains Laclau’s previous ‘deepening of the materialist project’.

Reasons for the Method in Descartes’ Discours

In the practical philosophy of the Discours de la Méthode, before the theoretical metaphysics of Part Four and the Meditationes, Descartes gives us an inductive argument that his method, the procedure and cognitive psychology, is veracious at its inception. His evidence, akin to his Scholastic predecessors, is God, a maximally perfect being, established an ontological foundation for knowledge such that reason and nature are isomorphic. Further, the method, he tells us, is a functional definition of human reason; that is, like other rationalists during this period, he holds the structure of reason maps onto the world. The evidence for this thesis is given in what I call the groundwork to Descartes’ philosophical system, essentially the first half of the Discours, where, through a series of examples in the preamble of Part Two, he, step-by-step, ascends from the perfection of artifacts through the imposition of reason (the Architect Example) to the perfection of a constituent’s use of her cognitive faculties (the Wise-Lawgiver Example), to God perfecting and ordering reality (the Divine Artificer Example). Finally, he descends, establishing the structure of human reason, which undergirds and entails the procedure of the method (the Laws of Sparta Example).

Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.

A Proposal to Augment the Plausibility of William Lane Craig’s Deductive Moral Argument

The plausibility—though not the soundness—of William Lane Craig’s deductive moral argument for God’s existence has been insightfully challenged by David Baggett, who prefers to formulate the argument abductively. This paper proposes a way of couching and defending Craig’s argument so as to avoid the potholes Baggett identifies and preserve the value of the deductive form of the argument. Central to this proposal is justifying key criteria that any adequate ontological foundation for objective moral values and duties must possess, highlighting key insights in the history of moral apologetics that support these criteria. Defending the argument in this way both avoids the sting of Baggett’s critiques and offers what amounts to a cumulative case of ontologically focused moral arguments.

The ontological foundation for studying the future

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop an ontological foundation for future studies, based in part on integrating some prior albeit incomplete work in this area. Design/methodology/approach This manuscript is based on a literature review, as well as on conceptual and theoretical enhancements from this subject field. Findings As the future does not exist (it is always something yet to come), the ontological foundations for studying the future must be based on the current reality of the physical, biological and social-psychological worlds of experience and ideas. From this basis, 10 postulates are provided that are based on that current reality and are applied to studying the future. Thus, by characterizing the current reality and how it is understood by people, meaningful statements about the future are possible. Practical implications For each ontological postulate, one or more implications for the study of the future are provided as guidelines for practice. Originality/value This manuscript integrates and builds on prior offerings about ontological concerns into a comprehensive framework that legitimates and focuses the practices of studying the future.

HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF HERMENEUTICS M. HEIDEGGER

Hermeneutics of presence, developed by M. Heidegger, and possible ways of its further transformation are considered. This tendency was embodied and developed in the project of philosophical hermeneutics H.-G. Gadamer, who focuses not on the analytics of presence, but on the language as a horizon of meaning and understanding. A comparative analysis of these theories shows that the understanding of hermeneutics as an ontological interpretation of presence is completed not only in the framework of ontological discourse, but also in the representation of language as an independent agent, which is also the most developed topos of existence. The analytics of presence is the main content of Heidegger’s main work, and at the same time it should become the basis of the fundamental ontology, which grows directly from such hermeneutics and, in a sense, is its substantive mode. Such a theory is an understanding that is carried out not as an act of thinking, but as a way of staying, a special Dasein modus, which is given not so much epistemologically as existentially. Although Gadamer lacks the required hermeneutic analytics of the language, he never departs from his postulate of the linguistic nature of understanding. For him, the soil on which human existence is built as understanding is initially language, while Heidegger comes to language through speech, which is seen as the existential-ontological foundation of language. Language, according to Gadamer, is an a priori condition for any act of understanding, the space for its implementation and, at the same time, the result, expressed in the total “stipulation” of the world by the word.