Surveys the history of biblical interpretation and considers its implications for theology. Bibliogs.

A very practical purpose must be essayed, namely, aid in evaluating, selecting, and using that most frequently consulted tool, the commentary.

Alan Turing is often portrayed as a materialist in secondary literature. In the present article, I suggest that Turing was instead an idealist, inspired by Cambridge scholars, Arthur Eddington, Ernest Hobson, James Jeans and John McTaggart. I outline Turing’s developing thoughts and his legacy in the USA to date. Specifically, I contrast Turing’s two notions of computability (both from 1936) and distinguish between Turing’s “machine intelligence” in the UK and the more well-known “artificial intelligence” in the USA. According to my (...) proposed historical interpretation, Turing did not view computations in the real world to be exhaustively and deterministically characterized by his automatic machines from 1936. (shrink)

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the “human.” This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism's (...) most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called “humanists” of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human. (shrink)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

La mort est ce qui identifie l'homme à l'animal et ce qui l'en différencie. Comme tout être vivant, l'homme subit la mort. A la différence de tout être vivant, il nie la mort dans ses croyances en un au-delà. Edgar Morin dégage les attitudes fondamentales des hommes et des cultures à l'égard de la mort. Il examine l'horreur de la mort, le risque de mort, le meurtre, et les deux grands mythes originaires de la mort : celui de la (...) survie et celui de la renaissance. Il dégage les croyances concernant la mort dans les grandes civilisations historiques pour en arriver à la crise contemporaine de la mort et aux nouvelles conceptions biologiques sur les relations entre vie et mort. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen (b. 1842, d. 1919), more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the orthodox neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until the end of the First World War. Earlier German philosophers finding inspiration in Kant tended either towards speculative, metaphysical idealism, or sought to address philosophical questions with the resources of the empirical sciences, especially psychology. In contrast, Cohen’s seminal interpretation of Kant offered a vision of philosophy that decisively maintained its independence (...) from empirical psychology, without at the same time simply lapsing back into uncritical metaphysics. Cohen brought these attitudes to bear on a wide range of topics, writing systematically about epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, law, political theory, and aesthetics. His anti-psychologism became a defining commitment not only of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, founded by Cohen himself, but of orthodox neo-Kantianism more generally. Indeed, that commitment ultimately defined the philosophical context from which, in the early twentieth century, both phenomenology and logical positivism emerged. No less significant than his influence on academic philosophy, Cohen was his generation’s preeminent German-Jewish public intellectual and religious philosopher. His philosophical ethics and political theory provided the foundation for a non-Marxist, Kantian democratic socialism that informed his more popular and topical writings. He argued publicly for universal suffrage and for the rights of workers to organize democratically-constituted collectives. He also saw deep points of connection between ethics and religion, and developed a view of Judaism as a fundamentally ethical system of belief and practice. He argued that monotheism was the historical source of the idea of universal ethical laws, and thus that Judaism offered the world its first model of a universalist morality. This view of Judaism’s ethical significance ultimately informed Cohen’s public defense of the Jews’ place in Germany not only against anti-Semitic attacks, but also against the arguments of early twentieth-century Zionists. However, Cohen’s influence on Jewish thought extends far beyond debates within Imperial Germany: his late religious writings inspired a broad renewal in twentieth-century Jewish ethics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

L'esthétique, avant d'être le caractère propre de l'art, est une donnée fondamentale de la sensibilité humaine. Le sentiment esthétique est un sentiment de plaisir, qui peut s'intensifier en émerveillement et bonheur. Il peut être suscité par un spectacle naturel, une oeuvre d'art, mais aussi par des objets ou des oeuvres que nous esthétisons. D'où vient la créativité artistique? Qu'appelle-t-on inspiration ou génie? De la transe du chaman à celle du poète, de la mimesis de l'écrivain à celle du comédien, quelle (...) est l'expérience in vivo de l'artiste? De Lascaux à Beethoven, de Dostoïevski à Orson Welles, Edgar Morin convoque les oeuvres et les artistes qui l'ont marqué et accompagné pour démontrer la profondeur de l'expérience esthétique. Les grandes oeuvres ne sont pas que "divertissements" : elles nous donnent compréhension de la condition humaine, dans ses comédies et ses tragédies."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

If we consider human thought as the, so far, ultimate, if not supreme, stage in the evolution of life on Earth, we must also try to understand the evolutionary conditions that allowed it to emerge, and that leads us to look again at living organization.Whatever the origins of life (cf. the text of Jacques Reisse, p. 53), it is clear that the oldest living organization, that of a protobacteria, is extremely complex in its functional and complementary association of extremely diverse (...) macro-molecules, and that this complexity includes in particular: a) the organization of exchanges with an environment from which it draws both matter-energy and organization ; b) a permanent process of self-reorganization through the replacing of molecules that have deteriorated and through the production of new ones; c) the organization of the self-reproduction of the creature through division. An organization of this kind includes a quasi-informational dimension (the hereditary message inscribed in the genes and the capacity to extract information from the environment), a quasi-computational dimension (the processing of data, via indices or quasi-signs from the interior and exterior), and a communicational dimension (internal RNA-protein communication and external communication with its congeners). In short, from the beginning, a living being is the product/producer of a self-eco-organization the nature of which is at the same time computational, informational, and communicational. In other words, within every living organization, there is a cognitive dimension, but this cognitive dimension is undifferentiated within it. (shrink)

Nos connaissances sur l'humain, sur la vie, sur l'univers, sont en pleine expansion. Elles sont aussi séparées et dispersées. Comment les relier? Comment affronter des problèmes qui sont tout à la fois complexes, fondamentaux, intellectuels et vitaux? Comment nous situer dans l'aventure de la vie et dans celle de l'univers, en tenant compte du fait que l'humain est intérieur à l'univers et que l'univers est intérieur à l'humain? La réponse d'Edgar Morin, avec ce livre, est lumineuse d'intelligence et accessible (...) à tous. L'auteur nous invite, à sa façon, à penser global, c'est-à-dire à considérer l'humanité dans sa nature " trinitaire ", puisque chacun est à la fois un individu, un être social et une partie de l'espèce humaine. L'humanité est emportée dans la course effrénée de la mondialisation : la réflexion d'Edgar Morin nous propose de scruter son avenir et son devenir sans céder aux facilités de l'air du temps ni aux injonctions de l'actualité. (Quatrième de couv.). (shrink)

Edgar Morin prône une refonte profonde de l'éducation, centrée sur sa mission essentielle telle que l'envisageait Rousseau : enseigner à vivre. Il s'agit de permettre à chaque individu d'acquérir une autonomie, de se prémunir contre l'erreur et l'illusion, de pratiquer la compréhension d'autrui, d'affronter les incertitudes, en somme de le préparer à affronter les problèmes du “vivre”. (4e de couv.).

Nietzsche's Posthumanism explores the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche's philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche's reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology, Edgar Landgraf provides both fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies.

This book addresses a key issue in Hegel's philosophical legacy - his account of purposiveness and teleology - that has often been wrongly criticised and misunderstood. Its re-examination of the issue has implications for the whole of Hegel's philosophical legacy.

The most outstanding feature of this book is that here, for the first time, is made available in a single volume all the important historical essays Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) published during WWII on the emergence of modern science. This edition also contains one previously unpublished essay and an extended version of an essay published earlier. In these essays, Zilsel developed the now famous thesis, named after him, that science came into being when, in the late Middle Ages, the social (...) barriers between the intellectuals and the artisans were eroded, due to the fact that the rapidly expanding commercial classes of that period had a keen interest in improvements in technology. This class was city-based and stimulated a social environment in which men of learning came to regard the craftsmen and technicians with a new respect, in which they no longer felt any contempt for manual work and in which theory and practice were eventually combined to produce modern science. This critical edition also carries a long introduction in which much new material about Zilsel's life and work is presented. It suggests that a radical new look at Zilsel's project needs to be taken. Zilsel's essays on the history of science look like a standard case study to substantiate a particular position on the origins of modern science, but they were also an attempt to show that lawlike explanation in history and social theory is possible. It is claimed that Zilsel's historical essays were a part of another project he was working on which focused on the idea that social phenomena were open to causal explanation as much as physical phenomena. Hence the volume also contains the essays Zilsel wrote in relation to this other project. Previously there have been published a German and an Italian edition of the Zilsel essays. This edition is the first in English; compared to the other two editions this one is the first that includes unpublished material and the first to undertake a serious effort to research Zilsel's life and work. What is special about this volume is the well-articulated social perspective it takes on the origins of modern science. Audience: Students in early modern social history/history of science as well as professional philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science. (shrink)

Time passed after the commission of a wrong can affect how we respond to its agent now. Specifically it can introduce certain forms of complexity or ambivalence into our blaming responses. This paper considers how and why time might matter in this way. I illustrate the phenomenon by looking at a recent real-life example, surveying some responses to the case and identifying the relevant forms of ambivalence. I then consider a recent account of blameworthiness and its development over time that (...) purports to account for this ambivalence. Blameworthiness, on this account, consists in a psychological flaw; time matters because it brings the possibility of change in the agent, and ambivalence arises because it is hard to know to the extent of such change. This account, I argue, mischaracterises responses to the case and misidentifies the source of their ambivalence. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of emotion, I sketch an alternative approach. Our responses, I suggest, make sense within processes through which we address wrongdoing. Time matters because these processes take time and because time’s having passed raises the question whether and how the wrong has been addressed. Unaddressed wrongs can elicit ambivalence of a specific form. (shrink)

This essay discusses four definitions of beauty from Western philosophy in light of recent experimental work from the more modern fields of psychology and biology. The first idea, derived from Plato, that beauty consists of relationships between parts, is partially confirmed by recent psychological experiments on infants and adults. The second idea, that beauty consists of one salient feature amid a mass of details, is more recent, perhaps from Hume, and is confirmed by some experiments on adults, but this finding (...) has not been replicated in non-Western cultures. The third idea, that beauty is based on utility, occurs in Plato but is more difficult to support through experiments; biology suggests that a longing for beauty, not merely for survival, is an evolutionary target. Finally, the fourth idea, that beauty is a type of cognitive pleasure, is a constant thread from Plato through the work of Aquinas and Kant and seems to confirm a preference for an optimum level of complexity by adults, but cannot explain a parallel preference for complexity in human infants. (shrink)

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing into a radical ontology when he died prematurely in 1961. Merleau-Ponty identified this nascent ontology as a philosophy of incarnation that carries us beyond entrenched dualisms in philosophical thinking about perception, the body, animality, nature, and God. What does this ontology have to do with the Catholic language of incarnation, sacrament, and logos on which it draws? In this book, Orion Edgar argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is dependent upon a logic of incarnation (...) that finds its roots and fulfillment in theology, and that Merleau-Ponty drew from the Catholic faith of his youth. Merleau-Ponty's final abandonment of Christianity was based on an understanding of God that was ultimately Kantian rather than orthodox, and this misunderstanding is shared by many thinkers, both Christian and not. As such, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy suggests a new kind natural theology, one that grounds an account of God as ipsum esse subsistens in the questions produced by a phenomenology account of the world. This philosophical ontology also offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight.. (shrink)