William Blake and film noir apparently had the same problem with the urban landscape. While Blake attempts to create a mental world within language that would give a new face of religion to offer comfort to the inhabitants of London, film noir in Los Angeles finds noise and nihilism in the absence of faith. Both struggle with Immanuel Kant, who claimed that reason actively makes the world worthwhile. Hickey and Boggs, a relatively obscure neo-noir movie from 1972, represents the meaninglessness (...) and noise of language, bereft of the religion of Blake and the reason of Kant. (shrink)

An edited collection of lectures delivered by the late H. H. Joachim on the subject of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics.

Change happens to us. It's measured in gains or losses: you find a spouse or lose a loved one; you receive a promotion or lose a job. Change happens around us. It's marked by natural and social factors: a good harvest, a natural disaster; an economic boom, a stock market plunge. Change is initiated by us. It's weighed by its outcome: you make a decision that improves your life; you make a choice that shatters your dreams. Transitional tides-whether personal or (...) cultural-can bring on stress, confusion, and even panic. Only a small percentage of people respond to change in truly effective ways. Yet how we deal with change determines whether it will ultimately be a positive or negative force in our lives. Best-selling author Dr. Myles Munroe explains how we can tap into the positive power of change-no matter what the source of that change-enabling us to thrive while fulfilling our God-given purposes in life. (shrink)

"Henry Corbin's works are the best guide to the visionary tradition.... Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend the principal Western traditions of esoteric spirituality."--From the introduction by Harold Bloom Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) was one of the great mystics of all time. Through the richness of his personal experience and the constructive power of his intellect, he (...) made a unique contribution to Shi'ite Sufism. In this book, which features a powerful new preface by Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin brings us to the very core of this movement with a penetrating analysis of Ibn 'Arabi's life and doctrines. Corbin begins with a kind of spiritual topography of the twelfth century, emphasizing the differences between exoteric and esoteric forms of Islam. He also relates Islamic mysticism to mystical thought in the West. The remainder of the book is devoted to two complementary essays: on "Sympathy and Theosophy" and "Creative Imagination and Creative Prayer." A section of notes and appendices includes original translations of numerous Su fi treatises. Harold Bloom's preface links Sufi mysticism with Shakespeare's visionary dramas and high tragedies, such as The Tempest and Hamlet . These works, he writes, intermix the empirical world with a transcendent element. Bloom shows us that this Shakespearean cosmos is analogous to Corbin's "Imaginal Realm" of the Sufis, the place of soul or souls. (shrink)

I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I removed the wrapper from the “Race,” Writing, and Difference issue of Critical Inquiry and observed the word “race” in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Who,” he asked me, “has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow, or brown?” . There was a (...) question that spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was, crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy. Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence—of denying the individuality of all of God’s creation—not only by referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word “race” in quotation marks? Why not every single word in the entire issue of Critical Inquiry? For to refer, it seems, is to colonize, to take things over for one’s own brutal use, to turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in the academic’s favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down. Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many years in university English departments. He has published articles on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory, politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the Brontës. (shrink)

This anthology on creativity represents a lifetime of reading and study by the late Charles Dewey Tenney, a philosopher who had been a student of Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. In a series of fourteen essays Tenney considers the various factors that can be identified in creativity, followed by the recorded testimony of philosophers, artists, historians, explorers, scientists and others, both theorists and practitioners. The contributors extend in time from Aristotle and Sophocles to Buckminster Fuller and May Sarton. They include (...) such diverse thinkers as Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Julian Huxley, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead. In all, more than 300 of the world's most creative individuals are included. Contents: Discovery, Invention and Creation; Roots of Discovery; Environs of Discovery; Agents of Discovery; Hinderances to Discovery; Observation and Discovery; Reason in Discovery; Reverie Discovery; Imagination in Discovery; Sensibility and Discovery; Method in Discovery; Artistry in Discovery; Diffusion; and Foresight and Discovery. (shrink)

The article presents and analyzes different approaches of U.S. bioethicists in comprehending the Nazi medical crimes after 1945. The account is divided into two sections: one dealing with discussions on research ethics and the Nuremberg Code up until the 1970s and the other ranging from the 1970s to the present and highlighting bioethics' engagement with Nazi analogies. The portrayal of different bioethical scholars, institutions, and documents—most notably Henry K. Beecher, Jay Katz, the Belmont Report, the Hastings Center, Arthur L. (...) Caplan, and Robert M. Veatch—provides a nuanced interpretation of the motives that bioethicists held and the strategies that they applied to establish an understanding of the Nazi medical crimes and their relation to contemporary bioethical issues. In this, the different approaches shared a common goal: To integrate the Nazi medical crimes into an ethical framework by means of selective acknowledgments and representation of their history. (shrink)

This very unique, useful, and original book is a study of the relationships between mathematics and Christian theology, written by a professor trained in both disciplines. At least since the Pythagoreans, and extending from Plato to Whitehead, Husserl, and Wittgenstein, there has developed an intimacy between mathematics and the universal logos, as well as mathematics and God, which Henry explores in considerable depth. The development of Euclidean mathematics not only seriously influenced the elaborations of Greek philosophy, but when this (...) encountered Hebrew-Christian thought and theology there was extensive impact on religious categories of God, Word, Objectivity, and universal unity. The Greek theory of reason was heavily influenced by the Greek understanding of mathematics. Consequently, the mathematical aspects of the classical meeting of Athens and Jerusalem, which have been seriously neglected, were central to the interpretation of the faith-reason controversy. That is, however, but the beginning of the story. The development of mathematical thought until the present has exerted and continues to exert serious influence on philosophical and theological interpretation, and the import of that dialectic is the burden of Henry's treatise. (shrink)

Both editors have long been known for their work on Plotinus. Schwyzer has published important articles on the MSS A, V, and D, on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Theology and its relation to Porphyry's edition of the Enneads, on Plotinus' interpretation of Timaeus 35 A, and on the relation of Plotinus' triad of hypostases to his interpretation of Parmenides 139-145 ; and he is the author of the new article on Plotinus in the Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie. Ever since 1933 Henry has been (...) publishing a series of books and articles dealing with the text of Plotinus, its constitution, influence, and transmission. Of these works three books are especially important, since they were meant to constitute a critical introduction to the edition of the Enneads. The first of these, Recherches sur la Préparation Évangélique d'Eusèbe et l'Édition Perdue des Oeuvres de Plotin Publiée par Eustochius, undertakes to establish the fidelity of Porphyry, the first editor of the Enneads, to the autographs of Plotinus from which he made his recension. The second, Études Plotiniennes I: Les États du Texte de Plotin, a detailed study of the indirect tradition, reinforces this conclusion and establishes the authority of the archetype of the direct tradition. That archetype, Henry concludes, was as faithful to the recension of Porphyry as Porphyry was to the original written by Plotinus, and the indirect tradition is rather a guarantee of the faithfulness of the Porphyrian edition reproduced by the archetype than a source of corrections for the text of our MSS. The third volume, Études Plotiniennes II: Les Manuscrits des Ennéades, an exhaustive study of the character and history of the extant MSS, has for its purpose the determination of the necessary and sufficient evidence for the reconstitution of the archetype, the common ancestor of all the MSS of the direct tradition. No attempt is made to establish a stemma leading from the original to the extant MSS. Henry is here concerned rather to identify in the mass of material all the representative elements of the direct tradition and so to establish the apparatus of the critical edition on a basis broad enough to be forever independent of any hypothesis concerning the ultimate relations of the families represented by the extant MSS. In four chapters he studies the MSS of groups w, x, y, z respectively, in a fifth the MSS which Perna used for the editio princeps, and in two Appendices four lost MSS of which some record remains and the fragment of Eusebius in Vaticanus Rossianus 986. The volume is equipped with a detailed inventory of the MSS, a table of water, marks, and an index of proper names. One of the most important results of this study of Henry's is the identification of the MSS derivative from A, several of which had been used as independent witnesses to the arche- typal text but which Henry has shown to have no textual authority whatever. The results of this volume, however, are to be corrected in the light of three pages of "Corrections et Compléments" at the end of the second edition, which save for this list is an exact reimpression of the first. In 1946 Henry and Schwyzer began their collaboration in the preparation of the critical edition, and their study of the variants led them to certain conclusions different from those that Henry had printed in Les Manuscrits. In particular, they decided that D, which Henry had, though with some hesitation, treated as a member of family y, does not belong to y or to any other of the recognized groups of MSS but constitutes a family of its own; and they distinguished in the hand which Henry had hitherto called A1 and Schwyzer A2 two separate hands: one, hereafter to be called A1, which they believe to be that of the scribe of A himself correcting his MS from a source different from any extant MS and different also from the sub-archetypes of these MSS, so that the readings of A1 must represent a separate family or another archetype ; and a second, hereafter to be called A2, the corrections of which appear to be conjectures and so to have no authority for the text. (shrink)