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The purpose of this research is to examine whether and in what sense one could identify an apophatic approach to the human being in Augustine’s writings. It also explores the relationship between the negative theology and the negative anthropology in Augustine’s thinking. Augustine’s conception of human interiority as dwelling place of the divine, his reflections on the deepness of the heart, on illumination, on transfiguration through love or divinisation of the human being, bring to light fundamental traits of a genuine apophatic discourse.
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The present contribution interprets the results of the statistic of explicit sources employed in the first volume of Pelbartus of Themeswar’s Rosarium. This author was a late 15th century Hungarian Observant Franciscan who wrote a number of texts that were real “bestsellers” in his time and in the century following his death. The Rosarium is his work of theoretic theology and the one closest to what might be called a medieval philosophical endeavor. By seeing who he quotes and in what way, we get to showcase his doctrinal preference for the Scotist school and, as a bonus, identify some of the works that the 15th century library of the “Saint John” Observant convent of Buda, where he worked during the last period of his life, owned.
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This paper offers an overview of the way in which Mircea Eliade used psychological language in his early work on religion, and places this early contribution in the context of the history of the psychology of religion. The first two sections comment on Eliade’s earliest mentions of psychological concepts, while the following two go into a more in‑depth analysis of the history of the concept of higher consciousness in psychology and into the history of the psychology of yoga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on these two sections, I analyse the uses of psychology in an unpublished manuscript from 1929 and in Eliade’s Ph.D. thesis.
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The paper discusses the issue of interpersonal understanding by comparing ordinary and cinematographic experience. Recent theories of interpersonal understanding turn out to be either inconclusive or insufficient to account for the heterogeneous ways in which we get mental and emotional states of other persons. The paper advances a view of the film medium by drawing on Stanley Cavell, which is reinforced by Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s convergent accounts of cinematographic perception. Against this background, interpersonal understanding turns out to be permeated by the expressivity of human appearance – something easily overlooked by the mentioned theories, which is yet brought forward most perspicuously by cinema.
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: If in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft the transcendental conditions of possibility of experience transcends the experience itself (sect.1), by Husserl these conditions become immanent to the experience itself and therefore knowable by experience (sect.2). This radical mutation introduces an ambivalence in Husserls phenomenology: that between the absolute character of transcendental subjectivity, an idealistic thesis according to which something is an object of the real world only if it is legitimated in the consciousness (sect.3), and the empiricist thesis of identification of the real world with the sensible (sensous contents) (sect.4). This ambivalence is ineliminable, and for this reason the thematization of the object balances between the two distinct philosophical options: idealist-phenomenological and realist-empirical.
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The most read Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev went through the conceptual path from Marxism, over idealism to Christianity. He was in prison four times and wasprosecuted twice because of his ideals. Initially he was imprisoned and prosecuted because of his Marxist ideas and later because of his Christian beliefs. Although he dismissed the Marxist worldview he kept a special sensitivity towards Marxism all his life.For this reason his criticism of Marxism as a secular religion, from the perspective of hisown experience and Christian philosophy, became well known for its inner invasion into Marxist theoretical thought and practice. By accepting Christian worldview Berdyaevdid not consider that he presents the official teaching of the church and he viewed himselfas a free Christian thinker. He was in a critical mood on many aspects towards historical Christianity and the church. His honest and open critical insight can contribute to abetter quality of church life. In relation towards Marxism, the life and thought of NikolaiBerdyaev give a powerful incentive for a serious, tolerant dialogue of the contemporaryChristian thought with this influential philosophical way and political ideology.
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In his existence, man thinks about what he is and what he should be, in a world inwhich it is called by its very essence to create itself. Self-realization is a call to seek meaning in the contemplation of the elements of the world which he himself is woven into. Thepath to oneself and the world is a relation, a relation which man confirms his existencethat he is metaphysical entity. So there will be transcendence, finite and infinite, presentand future, given and ordered, spiritually and physically. Nietzsche wondering about the“fate” of the future man of the modern world, contemplates the “spirit of the times” ofWestern Christian civilization in the relationship of man and God.
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The whole mankind history represents a constant human aspiration to attain the Divine truth and knowledge. However, it is not an easy job. Because of that, in order tosearch adequately for the Truth, it is necessary to primarly be satisfied a couple of scientific criteria (more precisely six) in order to one research would be called scientific,and in the same time to be true. Therefore, the aim of this article would be directed to theclaim that science, although is based on the philosophical principles, it has its own limitationts, while the real beauty and the mining of the life could be seen from the angle ofArt, Poetry and Religion. In support of that, there are the words of the famous philosopher Nietzsche, who once pointed out that, thanaks to the world of Art and Philosophy,man builds an “immortal intellect”.
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The concept of autonomy has a long way to go as it is used as a synonym for the terms self-government or self-determination (Crudu, 2007). This concept is placed in the context of debates on morality, bioethics, law or political philosophy, and it also appeals to self-awareness, to the right of the individual to live life freely, in his own way, provided it does not harm other people. In this paper we will bring to the fore the Kantian perspective of the concept of autonomy, while making the connection with the concept of freedom.
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With this author writing from and working in a context that is partially indebted to process theology, the following essay does not defend the God of classical theism; that is, the omniscient, omnipotent, immutable God defended by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae, for example. In some very real sense, this essay may only make sense in the context of process theology as appropriated by some Wesleyan theologians, such as Thomas Jay Oord. For example, I make the contention that primordial chaos only makes sense in a process theology that denies of God creatio ex nihilo and instead asserts the co-eternality of the material universe and God. My overall inclination toward process theology will also become clear in that I describe the mediation of the Holy Spirit on and in the universe in ways that resemble the “persuasive power” of God as described by Alfred North Whitehead. As such, Peirce’s teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predetermined end; it is a devel-opmental teleology. Thus, final causes evolve, and they are not static. Teleology emerged out of the increasing complexification of life on earth. God gives himself away in act of uncontrolling love without any conditions regarding the potential responses to that love. The many and varied manifestations of complexity that (macro-)evolution has given rise to can be seen as a fulfillment of the teleological goals of God. The kenotic creating Spirit is present “in, with, and under” the processes of biological evolution.
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There has always been a question about a multitude of worlds, the existence of alienintelligences and the UFO has intrigued human thought. Through the centuries this phenomenon has been dealt with by many scientists, astronomers, philosophers, goddesses,sociologists, ufologists, historians of religions, and experts in paranormal activity. Manyof them considered that the question of the existence of life outside the earth, the theological, philosophical and scientifically founded, while others consider it to be a science fiction or quasi-science, and that this problem can not be seriously accessed, the sooner, ifto this is added the fact that Christian theology rejects all this with contempt and provesotherwise. In this article, the opinions and theories of the giants are chronologically presented in the field of philosophy, astronomy and theology, with the aim to show that thesediscussions with the advancement of science are still current.
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For Nae Ionescu, Romanian philosopher, logician and metaphysician, the problem of transcendence (the metaphysical issue) arises when man fails the connection with eternity and relapses into existence – in fact, he is heading for death. In his view, metaphysics is man’s preoccupation with harmonizing with the existence when he has failed salvation. The Romanian thinker states that for man there is only one way to access the fullness of being, when alive, after having lived all possible experience: giving to the community in which one lives, and through this, restoring the communion with God. From the moment he wanted to know, the man differentiated himself from Creation. Moreover, knowledge has made man alone in the universe, made him believe that he can establish a new order, of his own, different and opposite to that of God. Knowledge is man’s tendency to grasp existence in a logical concept or formula. Transcendence, however, cannot be seized normally through rational methods. It must be lived. Any system of metaphysics, says Nae Ionescu, is a lyrical offering, when man is pushed to the extreme limits of existence. The problem of metaphysics is an anthropological problem.
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Carl Schmitt has been famously pronounced the inventor of the state of emergency notion in his Political Theology (1928). This is only partly correct. By Ausnahmezustand Schmitt means both state of emergency and, notably, state of exception, or simply exception. The paper argues that it is the second meaning of the Ausnahmezustand that plays a central role in defi ning sovereignty. Schmitt has a place in the European modernity tradition as an author who deviates from the Kantian liberal tradition in a way the late Wittgenstein and Heidegger do. He is not interested in normative concepts but, as he states openly, in existential ones. His idea of the exception has to do with this orientation towards existential themes and the events of the political. The exception, as opposed to the state of emergency, defies by definition attempts to be legally regulated. It is an event of the political community’s collapse, disintegration, state of total anarchy. However, Schmitt is less radical than the late Wittgenstein in shaking the normative concepts and attempts at grounding the ethical structures of the political life. The late Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, demonstrates the originary indeterminacy of any rule and of any norm. Against this background Schmitt looks like a more moderate traditional conservative thinker.
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Here I deconstruct the terms ‘exception’ and ‘state of exception’ – as well as some of their substitutes – in the far right and far left discourses. In the line of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I show that Carl Schmitt defining 1) ‘the dictatorship’ and later 2) ‘the sovereignty’ through ‘exception’ revises the revolutionary Marxism of his time. But it is not just Walter Benjamin who plays the part of his left adversary in their nearly direct intellectual exchange. More than that, Schmitt inherits the exceptionalism and inverts the meanings of the Marxist terms ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘revolutionary situation’ as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky rework them in the second decade of 20th century. Schmitt shares wilt Lenin and Trotsky their anti-legalist and decisionist attitude presupposing ‘lawless power’ – a power eliminating the existing law and constituting a new law ex nihilo, in an exceptional situation. But Schmitt makes a dramatic change replacing the source of that power: no more the revolutionary masses illegally subverting the law from below but the sovereign legally reestablishing the law from above is the one who exercises ‘lawless power’. More generally and despite of the important differences, both, the far right and the far left discourses, are akin to use ‘exception’ as a totalized metaphor (as an empty signifier) justifying some kind of ‘lawless power’, i.e. terror. The revolutionary terror and the state terror (in its strict sense: as an exercise of power/violence beyond the law) are mirror concepts. Only as a hypothesis, we can suggest that they are interconnected vessels in practice: the more the terror increases, the more the exceptional measures fighting ‘against the terror’ increase; and vice versa.
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The article aims to shed light on the conceptual history of the notion of state of exception. The starting point of the analysis is the hypothesis of the relationship between the state of exception and the idea of foundational moment of politics, as it is developed by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Reinach, the author of the fundamental study On the State of Emergency and the Institutions of Public Salvation (1885). Reinach and Schmitt’s analyses lead to the conclusion that the state of exception – the response to a major threat for the state, was conceived as necessary, if not imperative tool for public salvation in modern politics, starting with the French Revolution. When the legal-political order is threatened in its principles, the state of exception appears as a possibility of maintaining its normative foundation beyond its established forms. Although the state of exception has traditionally been associated with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, Reinach’s historical analysis brings us to the conclusion that the state of exception is initially related to the very establishment of the Republic: it is the result of a juridical invention, which gives impetus to the development of its legal system. Does this mean that there is no substantial difference between a state of exception and a normative order? On such premises, how to tackle the specificity of the current situation of ‘sanitary emergency’? Proposing a metacritical overview of Walter Benjamin’sCrtical ontology of violence and its problematic recent re-reading by Giorgio Agamben, the article seeks to offer a few conceptual distinctions, allowing for positive analysis and experimental investigation of the present situation.
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This is an essay about addiction recovery based on a trading zone psychological methodology between an Aristotelian-Thomistic [A-T] psychology of addiction, particularly alcohol/drug addiction. It is an applied psychology where we cross over to other disciplines and exchange theories and practices with a specific target of addiction recovery in mind. We could say that we are interested in learning and borrowing for the sake of problem solving within complementary disciplines. The complimentary disciplines in this A-T psychology trading zone are psychoanalytical psychodynamics and a psychoanalytical ethnographic analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous. We use the terminology in the essay of module construction, i.e. module 1) The Habituation Perspective of the Addiction Trading Zone, 2) A-T Addiction Psychology and a Psychodynamics of the Searching-Recovering Soul, and 3) The Searching Recovering Soul, A Psychodynamic Conversion of Anxiety & Habituation. Each module contains psychological concepts that are considered as necessary for a synergistic action solution to the issue of alcoholic/addiction recovery. An A-T psychological trading zone module construction is hierarchical. It, therefore, requires that module one is grounded on an A-T metaphysical psychology that allows for a fitting exchange of principles, concepts, and techniques on the issue of addiction.
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The topic of this paper is the foundation for individual rights proposed by David Gauthier in his seminal 1986 book "Morals by Agreement", and particularly the role of conception of rationality in this foundation. The foundation of rights is a part of Gauthier’s broader enterprise: to ground morals in rationality – more specifically, in the economic conception of rationality. Because of the importance of this conception for the whole of Gauthier’s project, we reconstruct first the conception of rationality which can be found in decision theory and game theory, presenting simultaneously in a relatively non-technical way some basic concepts of the aforementioned disciplines. We proceed then to reconstruction of the foundation of rights itself – it turns on Gauthier’s interpretation of the so-called “Lockean proviso.” Lastly, we turn to the connection between rationality and foundation of rights. It is to be found in the narrow compliance – the disposition to enter only into cooperation which satisfies conditions of fairness set out in part by the "Lockean proviso".
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