This article presents in broad outline the theological concept of deep incarnation and brings it into dialogue with correlative ideas of deep history and deep sociality. It will be argued that neither Christology, nor evolution, can be properly understood from a chronocentric perspective. Evolution is not only about development but also about the exploration of ecospace. Likewise, a contemporary Christology should explicate incarnation as a divine assumption of the full ecospace of the material world of (...) creation. It will then be argued that an interactionist view of deep history is preferable to the evolutionary cognitive theory of religion. Against this background, the paper will explore Jesus of Nazareth's role in the context of post-axial mentalities. (shrink)

This article explores the relations between the idea of deep incarnation and scientific ideas of an informational universe, in which mass, energy, and information belong together. It is argued that the cosmic Christologies developed in the vein of Cappadocian theology (fourth century) and the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (thirteenth century) can be interpreted as precursors of an informational worldview by consistently blending “formative” and “material” aspects of creativity. Reversely, contemporary sciences of information can enlarge the scope of the contemporary (...) view of deep incarnation. I propose three hypotheses for showing how and why. First, mass, energy, and information have an equal causal importance for explaining reality. Second, just as transformation presupposes communication, so communication presupposes information. Third, contemporary science can elucidate seminal concerns of the idea of deep incarnation, insofar as informational structures pave the way for information capture, communication, and transformation. At the level of organismic life, new features of embodied cognition and emotion come up, important for understanding the organismic depth of the concrete incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. (shrink)

By utilizing the concept of quantum decoherence, augmented by the novel theory of quantum Darwinism, to understand the transition from the quantum to the classical worlds, the scaling up of the concept of quantum entanglement2018 to the biological level offers a fascinating metaphor for the presence of the creative spirit in nature and the “flesh” of Incarnation. This in turn provides helpful theological metaphors for articulating divine presence at the level of life in theistic evolution, partially addressing the issue (...) of evolutionary theodicy by supporting the concept of deep Incarnation. The point of understanding the Incarnation as deeply entangled enfleshment is that it brings the suffering of creation into the life of the Redeemer as well as the Creator, facilitating redemption and hope through the divine life. (shrink)

Niels Hendrik Gregersen's 'Deep Incarnation' is opening up possibilities for engagement between science and theology. Recent discoveries, like that of Homo naledi, raise questions about how inclusive a Christian doctrine of Incarnation is. Is Jesus only God incarnate for Homo sapien sapiens, or is the incarnation inclusive of preceding hominid species as well? Does the incarnation stretch beyond the hominid line? This chapter engages Gregersen's understanding of Deep Incarnation in light of 1 Corinthians (...) 15:28 and emergence theory. It proposes that there is a direct correlation between worldview and how we believe in the inclusive nature of divine incarnation. (shrink)

As the detrimental effects of human agency loom large in the ‘Anthropocene’, theologians and philosophers have called for restraint by invoking the concept of kenosis. Although a ‘self-emptying’ form of life helps to counter the ways that humans are increasingly driving other species to extinction, we argue that such calls are often compromised by relying on notions of the Creator’s own attenuated or self-limited agency. They therefore trade in a competitive construal that is susceptible to the tendency of human agency (...) to either displace, or project itself upon, all other agencies, inadvertently perpetuating the ‘human epoch’. In their place, we critically develop the new direction in kenotic theology that speaks of divine self-realization in history through ‘deep incarnation’. Our constructive proposal argues for a more thoroughgoing recognition of both the transcendence of divine agency and, as a corollary, the diverse agencies of our fellow creatures. (shrink)

The Incarnate Ground of Christian Faith is addressed precisely to the epistemological questions posed by postmodernity. It begins by issuing an extended critique of one of the major approaches to pastoral theology and Christian education--Thomas Groome's Shared Praxis Approach. Martin's incisive analysis of shared praxis concludes that its implicit subjectivism and pedagogical narrowness cannot lend intellectual plausibility to the Christian faith among a postmodern generation. For an alternative vision of a holistic and plausible faith, Martin points in a different direction, (...) to an incarnational epistemology in which science and theology discover deep resonance in each other. The main features of this epistemological framework are developed by integrating the perspectives of scientist/philosopher Michael Polanyi and theologian Thomas F. Torrance. The resulting synthesis preserves the integrity of science and theology as distinct yet inherently related ways of making sense of the world, the purpose of which is to participate more fully in the world. The main thrust of the book is that a vibrant faith incarnationally grounded in experience and clarified theologically intensifies personal and social expressions of ecclesial life. In the midst of widespread confusion, conflict, and oppression in contemporary societies, Christians' faith in and commitment to the church's sacramental ministry of love and reconciliation could not be in greater demand. (shrink)

Should holiness be conceived as a predicate (an attribute), a state (a mode of being) or an event (a process)? It can certainly be understood as God‘s primary attribute. This is how much of classical Christian theology sees it. It can also be thought of as a particular modus of existence shared by God and the holy ones (the saints and the angels), as attested by much of Christian tradition and popular imagination. A more dynamic view of holiness can be (...) found in Scripture and throughout Christian theological tradition; and yet, in the modern era, it has been overshadowed by the first two tendencies. This article offers a tentative enquiry into an ‘evental’ account of holiness by drawing from (1) Niels Gregersen’s and Elizabeth Johnson’s reflection on ‘deep incarnation’ and ‘deep resurrection’ as well as (2) John B. Cobb’s and Marjorie Suchocki’s process theology of the Spirit. Firstly, the ‘from above’ approach to holiness, prevailing in modern Christian theology, is briefly discussed based on John Webster’s understanding of holiness as God’s personal moral relation to humanity. Secondly, I suggest an alternative ‘from below’ approach to holiness based on Gregersen’s and Johnson’s deep Christology. Thirdly, Cobb’s and Suchocki’s take on ‘creative transformation’ and Suchocki’s original appropriation of Cobb’s insights on process pneumatology are used as a hermeneutic key to reinterpret holiness as an ‘evental’ category. Finally, the notion of the holiness of life is reconsidered in light of my proposal. (shrink)

It is not surprising that in a time of intensified ecological awareness a new appreciation of nature and the inanimate world arises. Two examples are panpsychism and deep incarnation. Consciousness studies flourish and are related to nature, the animal world and inorganic nature. A metaphysics of consciousness emerges, of which panpsychism is a good example. Panpsychism or panconsciousness or speculative realism endows all matter with a form of consciousness, energy and experience. The consciousness question is increasingly linked to (...) the quantum world, which offers some option in bridging mind and reality, consciousness and matter. In this regard Kauffman's notion of 'triad' is referred to as well as the implied idea of cosmic mind. This is related to the notion of 'deep incarnation' as introduced by Gregersen. Some analogical links are made between panpsychism and deep incarnation. (shrink)

Present knowledge of evolutionary history challenges traditional concepts of the Christian salvation history. In order to overcome these challenges, theology needs to articulate a wider, more open and more universal approach to the understanding of God's salvific action. One way of doing this is to employ the notion of “deep incarnation” suggested by Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen. His suggestion may also blur the lines that mark a sharp distinction between the history of creation and the history of (...) salvation, in a way that safeguards some of the basic tenets of classical theology. (shrink)

The thought of contemporary North American theologian and ethicist Wendy Farley is an unflinching clarion call to justice and compassion. Farley invites us to discover ways of embodying the deep compassion capable of resisting pernicious distortions and traumatizing injustices that harm and dehumanize us all. This volume of essays embodies her invitation to awaken as beloved community. And when we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of struggle and despair, Farley reminds us that the powerful longing of hope, at times (...) against all evidence, refuses to give up on seeking justice and wholeness. Compassionate justice, radical hospitality, creative liberation, and deep listening emerge as more than ethical values for Farley; they are expressions of erotic faith, a praxis of faithfulness born of divine desire. These writings explore transformative perspectives and practices that have the capacity to help us recover and author our identity as the "god-bearers" we are. Erotic faith embodies the love-seeking persistence of divine faithfulness necessary to transform us from within; it meets the truth of human harm, vulnerability, and suffering by offering a complex, struggling, unscripted creativity capable of remaking us, and our world, until the beloved community is whole. (shrink)

The argument is offered as a challenge to ecumenical theologians such as John Hick. A consideration of the life and teaching of Krishnamurti gives rise to the following argument: (1) that the statement "K spoke from Unconditioned Insight" is a reasonable formulaic expression of K’s authority in soteriological matters; (2) that the statement is as intelligible as comparable statements about Jesus or Buddha; (3) that it is more reasonable to believe the statement about K; (4) that believing the truth of (...) the statement implies deep scepticism about the truth and the soteriological efficacy of established religions, and consequently renders an ecumenical theology irrelevant. (shrink)

Cosmic Christology, including deep incarnation, provides an ethical-theological framework for confronting environmental crisis. It criticizes ‘history’ as arrogantly anthropocentric and proposes a paradigm shift from Christ the Saviour of history to the Christ of the cosmos. Whereas I recognize these strengths for protecting nature, I argue that in its universal pretension Christ too often becomes an abstract reality and loses material grounding for social justice. In its eagerness to supplant the Christ the Saviour of history, cosmic Christology risks (...) stripping humanity from those deemed ‘non-persons’ and inadvertently reinforces the status of the oppressed as subalterns. Likewise, by de-legitimizing history, and by putting exploited nature and the oppressed as equivalents, struggles by subalterns for recognition and justice are diminished. To avoid this, I argue that the salvation of nature passes through the salvation of history. Only the Christ the Saviour of history can be the cosmic Christ. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a background to digital theology and its methodology, exploring especially aspects of transhumanism and metaphysical enquiry. The article moves on to engage with several articles given at the Science and Religion Forum at Birmingham in 2022, especially the Gowland Lecture given by Professor Niels Gregersen and the Peacocke Lecture by Andrew Jackson. Both offer a metaphysical approach to information linked closely to the concept of Logos drawn from the Prologue of John—Jackson focusing on Maximus the (...) Confessor's exploration of phylogenetic logoi; Gregersen on a further development of “Deep Incarnation” through the title “God with Clay” drawn from Bonaventure. The article extends this engagement with John by querying the model of incarnation in “deep incarnation” but building on the Logos/logoi to set out some initial building blocks for an alternative metaphysics of information. (shrink)

What reasons and resources can Christian theology find for developing a panentheist position that is also able to engage with contemporary science? By taking its point of departure in basic human experiences, Christian theology can, even in a Trinitarian fashion, be developed as a way to understand God's presence in the world as a presence where the actual occurrences point towards God's own work. This point is especially related to the experience of love. Furthermore, God's presence can be understood as (...) sacramental in the Augustinian sense. Moreover, the contributions of the Danish philosopher of religion Knud E. Løgstrup on God's presence and transcendence, as well as Niels Henrik Gregersen's elaborations on deep incarnation. Prove to offer important reasons for considering panentheism a viable option for the articulation of Christian theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacramental Wisdom:Humilitatio, Eruditio, Exercitatio in the Scholastics and TodaySr. Albert Marie Surmanski O.P.IntroductionThe relationship between human nature and the sacraments is often characterized in a way that takes away from the beauty and power of the sacraments. Sacraments are sometimes viewed today as something basically irrelevant to human life, an interesting spiritual "option" for those who find comfort in ritual. This view leads to a sacramental practice that is (...) occasional, irregular, or nonexistent. Many young people who fail to grasp religion as important to their reality implicitly embrace this perspective. The difficulty parishes have had in the past few years in convincing parishioners to return to liturgical prayer after each wave of the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates this viewpoint.In another perspective, the sacraments might be viewed precisely as expressions of what it means to be human, or one might say, to be human in a world in which God reveals himself at all times.1 In this view, the sacraments [End Page 1391] are our own graced self-expression as a community. They merely make thematic what already happens each moment. Alternatively, they celebrate who we are, and perhaps can be radically updated to reflect changing categories of social identity. 2Both of these viewpoints overlook the fallen state of human nature that cries out for healing from God. The first view does not preclude knowledge of human violence and fragility, but fails to recognize the sacraments as a medicine needed for the remedy of human ills. The second viewpoint, while professing a need for Christ, looks to the human person or community for healing rituals. This approach risks being enmeshed with human nature in a disordered state in such a way that it celebrates human disorder instead of healing it. Alternatively, the viewpoint may lead to the abandonment eschatological hope and wither into inanity.There are profound metaphysical and anthropological issues that play out in these two opposite but strangely united viewpoints. Rather than directly analyze these errors, this paper would like to propose the recovery of a medieval viewpoint that offers another perspective. This is Hugh of St. Victor's explanation that the sacraments fit and heal human nature through offering humanity humility, instruction, and exercise. 3 This paper will briefly survey Hugh's contribution, analyze its reception by several of the thirteenth-century Scholastics, shows its deep rootedness in biblical wisdom, and then show how it fruitfully opposes current-day challenges.Hugh of St. VictorHugh of St. Victor was a twelfth-century canon of the Parisian Abbey of St. Victor. The most influential writer of the Victorine school, his work is characterized by an Augustinian concern for the re-formation of the image of God in man, a sense of the wise ordering of salvation history, and an emphasis on both virtue and liturgical practice. In his masterwork, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, Hugh of St. Victor divides the works of God into two main periods: the work of creation and the work of restoration. Within the [End Page 1392] work of restoration, there are three periods: the period of the natural law, that of the Mosaic or written law, and that of grace, inaugurated by Christ.4 His book's division into two parts cuts across these distinctions: Part 1 of Hugh's text covers creation, the restoration in general, faith, sacraments in general, as well as particulars of the sacraments of the periods of the natural and written law. Part 2 includes the Incarnation, the Church, various Christian rituals, and the final restoration of Christ's return.Hugh is writing around the time when theologians began to list the number of the sacraments of the Church as seven. Emerging from the wider use of the term, Hugh uses the word "sacrament" in a wide sense, but distinguishes several categories of sacraments. Following Dominique Poirel, scholars recognize that Hugh uses the word sacramentum in five main ways.5 The first is a general definition: (1) any sign of anything sacred. The second through fourth are more specific usages, to which we do not commonly give the term "sacrament" today: (2) Scripture, which signifies sacred realities both through its text and the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a diversity (...) of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

Marilyn McCord Adams agrees with D. Z. Phillips that instrumental theodicy is a moral failure, and that sceptical theists and others are guilty of ignoring what we know now about the moral reality of horrendous evils to speculate about unknown ways these evils might be made sense of. In place of theodicy, Adams advocates ‘the logic of compensation’ for the victims of evil, a postmortem healing of divine intimacy with God. This goes so deep, she believes, that eventually victims (...) will see the horrors they suffered as points of contact with the incarnate, suffering God and cease wishing they had never suffered them. I argue Adams’s position falls foul of the very criticisms she and Phillips make against instrumental theodicy. (shrink)

I construct a tempting anti-physicalist argument, which sharpens an explanatory gap argument suggested by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson. The argument relies crucially on the premise that there is a deep epistemic asymmetry (which may be identified with the explanatory gap) between phenomenal truths and ordinary macroscopic truths. Many physicalists reject the argument by rejecting this premise. I argue that even if this premise is true, the anti-physicalist conclusion should be rejected, and I provide a detailed, physicalist-friendly explanation of (...) the relevant premise. Along the way, I sketch an account of a priori conceptual knowledge that is compatible with naturalistic accounts of intentionality. I conclude by noting that the resulting view is a version of the popular phenomenal concept strategy that avoids a potentially worrying dilemma facing earlier incarnations of this strategy. (shrink)

In his book on Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze puts forth an idiosyncratic interpretation of the eternal return: “However far they go, however deep the becoming-reactive of forces, reactive forces will not return. The small, petty, reactive man will not return.”1 The idea of eternal return is particularly suited to James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is because Joyce’s book concerns the return of the hero Ulysses in the person of Leopold Bloom. One way that the hero wanders is by incarnating as the (...) unlikely Bloom. What is to be the nature of Bloom’s relation to Ulysses? Joyce’s vision of an interpenetration of present and past corresponds to the terms Deleuze lays down. There is to be a return but not verbatim. Thus, Joyce .. (shrink)

Henry’s concept of transcendence is highly paradoxical. Most often it seems as though he had simply borrowed Husserl’s classical description of intentionality, as the act of aiming‐at‐something as an independent object, at something given or posited by consciousness outside itself, in the status of a worldly outwardness. This determination of transcendence belongs to Henry’s usual critique of what he calls the ‘ontological monism’ of classical metaphysics and ‘historical phenomenology’. Nevertheless, when Henry endeavours to define the ontological difference between life itself (...) and the living incarnate ego within the sphere of radically subjective immanence, particularly in his last works on truth and on Christianity, he cannot but refer to another concept of transcendence, the theological and metaphysical one. This is a transcendence which claims absolute ontological exteriority, as the being‐in‐itself of the ‘substance’, altogether free of any intentional dependence on the transcendental activity of consciousness. And he uses this last concept to assert, of course, that divine transcendence, as true to the Absolute, is none other than the most radical and deep immanence: the immanence of life itself. (shrink)

Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman's account of the intellectual trajectory of modernity, employs the trope “homeless” to articulate deep difficulties that affirmations of divine transcendence and of human capacities to acknowledge transcendence face in a contemporary context thoroughly marked by fragmentation, fragility, and contingency. The “hospitality” of the Incarnation, which makes a fractured world a place for divine welcoming of the human in all its contingency and brokenness, is proposed as locus for theological engagement with Neiman's appropriation (...) of a Kantian sense of hope as the readiness to resist evil in a world seemingly bereft of welcome. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Naomi Greene SARTRE, SEXUALITY, AND THE SECOND SEX Few would deny that Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of female sexuality plays a very important role in her book The Second Sex, widely regarded as one of the key works of modern feminist thought. At the same time, it is precisely her view of sexuality, and many of the conclusions it gives rise to concerning female behavior, which constitute some of (...) the most problematical areas in this vast and complex work. Margaret Walters echoes the concerns of many feminists when she remarks that de Beauvoir "attacks the mystique of femininity—by accepting a masculine mystique. In the end, it is she who equates the human with the male sex, who idealizes male values, sees life from a masculine perspective." So far, however, little attention has been paid to the ways in which de Beauvoir's view of female sexuality and behavior reveals the unmistakable influence of her life-long friend and companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. It is not difficult to discern in some of Sartre's central metaphysical ideas—ideas which de Beauvoir uses to create the theoretical framework of The Second Sex—a world view which is deeply anti-sexual (perhaps even anti-life, but then life itself appears symbolized by sex) and anti-female. Sartre's anti-sexual bias is more readily apparent in the metaphors of Nausea (1938), his philosophical novel, than in his strictly philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943). Nausea is, in fact, alive with metaphors since it seeks to render accessible, even tangible, some of the fundamental abstractions of Being and Nothingness. The feeling of nausea itself, for example, is essentially a metaphor for man's basic experience of Being: the nausea comes when man realizes that all the distinctions and orders (in particular, language itself) he has imposed upon the world are arbitrary (there is, for example, no necessary connection between words and things) and the real nature of Being unfolds itself as a vegetal, ever-changing, viscous, engulfing matter. Deprived of a "reason" for being, man is "de trop," part of the world of matter, and his unjustified existence is contrasted both with lifeless 199 200Philosophy and Literature and unchanging forms, such as minerals and stones, and with the abstract realms of mathematics and music, realms governed by inexorable laws. Unlike these lifeless or abstract realms, the world of matter, of Being, is in perpetual movement and metamorphosis. And it is when Sartre discusses these infinite, arbitrary metamorphoses, the revelation of which provokes the nausea, that his imagery betrays a distaste for sexuality. In one famous passage, for example, we are told that when the nausea takes over, a man may well awaken in a "forest of murmuring cocks, rising red and white towards the sky like the chimneys of Jouxtebouville, with great balls half out of the earth, shaggy and bulbous like onions. And birds will fly around those cocks and peck them with their beaks and make them bleed. Sperm will flow slowly, gently, from these wounds, sperm mixed with blood, vitreous and lukewarm with small bubbles." This implied link between unpleasant sexuality and a basic fear of engulfing Being is made even clearer in one of his early philosophical tales, "The Room" (1939), in which madness, like nausea, seems to stand for what we will experience when we become aware of the nature of Being. But it can hardly be arbitrary or coincidental that the form taken by this madness is that of a pathological, sexual nature. And in still another early tale, "Intimacy," a wife actually enjoys the relationship she shares with her impotent, disturbed husband. The distaste for sexuality suggested in Sartre's early works declares itself openly in the portrait of women found in his later fiction, indicating that the sexual metaphors of Nausea, far from being chosen at random, were inspired by deep and persistent feelings. In the trilogy The Roads to Freedom (1945-49), a historical fresco of France during the crucial years preceding World War II, women seem to incarnate all the attributes which disgust Sartre in matter or unjustified Being: they embody the viscous, passive, heavy world of the en-soi ("being-in... (shrink)

Le rapport à l’altérité en général et à autrui en particulier condense un noyau de possibilités multiples qui, selon l’hypothèse esquissée, s’exprime et s’interprète dans le mode de penser et de vivre le Désir d’avenir. Oscillant entre hétérophagie et hétérophilie, ce type fondamental d’érotisme temporel s’incarne dans des configurations phénoménologiques dont la typologie idéale fait covarier une décision métaphysique (repérable au sein du spectre qui va de l’idéalisme constructiviste au réalisme affectif) avec une attitude éthique (située entre le scepticisme individualiste (...) et l’hétérodicée absolue). L’analyse des contrastes qui définissent les positions onto-éthiques de Sartre, Merleau-Ponty et Levinas devient une méthode heuristique pour mettre en évidence la topologie de l’incommensurable et de l’optatif. -/- The relation to alterity in general and to others in particular encapsulates a logical space of multiple possibilities which, according to the author’s hypothesis, may be expressed and interpreted in the manner of thinking and living the Desire of future. Oscillating between heterophagia and heterophilia, this fundamental type of temporal eroticism embodies various phenomenological configurations whose ideal typology reveals a deep correlation between a metaphysical decision (oriented towards either constructivist idealism or affective realism) with an ethical attitude (ranging from individualistic scepticism to absolute heterodicy). The analysis of mutual contrasts defining Sartre’s, Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’ onto-ethic stances is adopted as a methodological device in order to elucidate a broad topology of incommensurabilia and desiderata. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Michael Levin ROUSSEAU'S CURSE Pretext Rousseau is the author of a text he called his Confessions. ' But neither a text nor a confession can exist without a reader, or an other. Like it or not, we readers are participants in the rite of Rousseau's confessions. Do we have anything to confess? When the reading of a confession uncovers the spelling of a curse, so that the self-accused (...) author appears to accuse his readers, the discoverers of the curse can no longer pretend their neutrality and innocence. In fact, the detectives must assume the identity of the accused. In such a special case, then, the inevitable work of textual interpretation magically doubles as the story of a mysteriously elusive "crime" and its final, or anyway presumed detection. But, as in the very best of such stories, neither the skillfully executed crime nor its invisible author—if indeed these terms denote anything at all—need be what they seem. So perhaps the only thing we can say for sure here is that the spelling of the curse is the curse of spelling. And this puts us on the track of a mystery as ancient as the art of writing itself—a mystery whose story the scholars of hermeneutics have thus far preferred to ignore. The mystery I have in mind is the secret affinity between writing and death. A careful hermeneutic approach to Plato's critique of writing, however, may give us a crucial clue. For what binds written language to the power of death is its role in mourning, its incarnation in the form of shadows: black configurations of shadows placed for visibility against the white of the paper. In Plato's Myth of the Cave, the crime of writing is dimly adumbrated. Writing is idolatry, worship of false images, shadows. Rousseau's Confessions, written near the end of his life in the shadow of death, does not escape the shadows of doubt and suspicion which we, his readers, having discovered our own selves inscribed into the darkness of the text, cannot easily refrain from casting. But as soon as we recognize in the shapes of these shadows a suspicion for which 76 David Michael Levin77 we are responsible, we must confess our fatal complicity in the closing of the hermeneutical circle. Commentary on the Text If Rousseau's Confessions does not read like the typical memoir, neither does it read like the typical confession. A final twist awaits us. We read with a certain innocence, or faith, not prepared for the transitive conclusion: the text, as it happens, will bequeath a monstrous and impossible burden. What is the reader to do? How could it be that this man, who seemed to honor us, and won our trust with the candor of his revelations, should so boldly, by one cross conceit, vanish, only to leave us double-crossed and within a labyrinth which, as he would have us believe, we ourselves have wrought? What are we to make of his work? At first, the Confessions appears to be a work of light: with dazzling clarity of mind and courage no less prismatic, Rousseau proposes to take his readers into the gloomy chasms of his soul. "My purpose," he declares, "is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray is myself" (p. 17). That this, however, is not the whole of his intention, we learn through a neighboring sentence. For he says: "Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done'..." (p. 17). And yet, even this does not fully disclose his design, since he concedes, somewhat later, that "it is as if, feeling my life escaping from me, I were trying to recapture it at its beginnings" (p. 31). But in the end, as in the beginning, darkness and light are one. And indeed, deep into the Seventh Book, we see that the author's light does begin to dim, and that he no longer speaks with much assurance. Nor is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jesus, Man of Sin: Toward a New Christology in the Global EraSoho MachidaSin as the Common GroundThe blasphemous title of this article is likely to outrage more than a few devout Christians. I am aware that most Christians view Jesus as the most immaculate and beautiful person who ever lived. As a Buddhist scholar and practitioner, however, I cannot extinguish a long-held question from my mind. Was Jesus really (...) free from sin? I do not object to the view of those Christians who see him as the greatest living expression of compassion and courage. But the Christian construction of an untainted, perfect image of Jesus, the Son of God, raises certain problems that I would like to address. Although Jesus, the Anointed, could have had a special mission in the human world, the Son of Man did not appear as the Holy Ghost. He was incarnated in human form: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only son from the Father” (John 1:14).It is important to carefully consider the meaning of the Incarnation. The fact that Jesus came to be born with flesh in this world means that he chose to stand on the common ground of sin with us. The sin that I refer to here is the most ontologically fundamental sin that is at the core of human experience. What links us with Jesus is none other than so-called Original Sin.To be sure, as a man who comes from a different religious tradition, I do not make this outrageous claim because I want to dispute the value of the divine personhood of Jesus, or because I am cynical about the most sacred object of Christian faith. I have a deep respect for the greatness of the Christian tradition that has developed around this very unusual person, Jesus Christ.On a personal level too, I do not think of Jesus as a distant figure, as merely the god of another religion. During my boyhood in Japan, I often attended an Episcopal church; and the first academic degree I earned in the United States was in theological studies. In light of all that I have learned from my own personal involvement with Christianity, I still believe that Jesus was a person who suffered like us as a sinful human being.If I were to choose the most important of Jesus’ words from the Bible, I would not hesitate to point to the following passage: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you deserted me?)” (Mark 15:34). It is surprising how few Christian scholars have offered persuasive interpretations of these words, which Jesus is said to have uttered in the final moments of his life. Many Christians would rather not hear such contradictory, despairing words come from the mouth of Jesus. Yet [End Page 81] these words of extreme suffering contain the key message at the core of Christian faith.Though I am also interested in Jesus’ historical background and the political role he played in a tiny corner of the Roman Empire, it is not the purpose of this article to investigate the historicity of Jesus’ life, as many theologians and historians have attempted to do in recent years. I will focus instead on the philosophical implications of Jesus’ life and his physical body, and why I believe it is important to develop a new Christology for the coming global era.The Karmic Body of JesusFirst, why did Jesus have to experience the suffering of crucifixion? The evident answer might be explained this way: because he sacrificed himself to redeem the human race, which has been sinning since the time of Adam and Eve. I would like, however, to suggest a totally different answer: Jesus was crucified to atone for his own sin. He courageously showed the way each of us must take responsibility for our own lives. He deserves our high admiration, but not excessive mystification.I do not mean that Jesus committed any specific sin in his lifetime, but rather that as the Son of Man he too was... (shrink)

Les interprétations causalistes de l’inconscient ne permettent pas de comprendre le sens de la découverte psychanalytique. La recherche de Merleau-Ponty sur la perception comme dimension symbolique teintée d’imaginaire en ouvre une interprétation nouvelle en évitant cet écueil. Ni représentation profonde de l’âme, ni manipulateur secret de nos désirs, l’inconscient incarne un processus symbolique qui intervient dans tous types de perception. L’ambivalence inhérente à l’inconscient n’est pas un obstacle à la connaissance de l’expérience, mais au contraire ce qui fait son sens (...) et même ce qui la rend possible. Il s’agit alors de comprendre comment la notion de réversibilité permet de décrire ce processus et pourquoi elle interdit toute conception de l’inconscient comme originaire. Cette interprétation est ensuite mise à l’épreuve dans la reprise du « cas Dora » par Merleau-Ponty.Causalistic interpretations of the unconscious prevent us from really understanding the meaning of the psychoanalytical discovery. Merleau-Ponty’s research on perception as a symbolical dimension opens a new interpretation of the psychoanalytical concept and avoids determinist approaches. Neither a deep representation of the soul, nor a secret manipulation of our desires, the unconscious embodies a symbolical process which intervenes in every kind of perceptions. The ambivalence inherent to the unconscious is not an obstacle to the knowledge of experience, but what creates its meaning and its condition of possibility. We try to understand how the notion of reversibility allows describing this process and why it forbids any conception of unconscious as primary. Such an interpretation of the unconscious as reversibility is then questioned with a new approach of Freud’s « Dora » by Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, CultureRoger CorlessOn Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture. By Robert Magliola. Preface by Edith Wyschogrod. American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, edited by Cleo McNelly Kearns, Number 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997. xxii + 202 pp.How does one review a deconstructionist book—a book that seeks not only to discuss deconstruction but to be deconstructionist, a book that simultaneously takes books seriously and mocks (...) both the author and the reader for imagining there could ever be such a thing as a book, a something that is written and then read, a writing that says that everything is Writing but that all Writing/writing is written under erasure and so is (as p. 202 explicitly, self-reflexively proclaims itself) an empty page that is, by that very emptiness, marked? Derrida derides the Introduction, for, he asks (without speaking, parlant avec dénégations, denying that he is expressing denials) what is being Introduced? What do we think we are doing when we lead a reader into (introducere) something that is not there to be lead into until a reader is lead or leads himself or herself into it? Do we not, thus, need an Introduction to the Introduction, and another Introduction to that Introduction, a regressus ad infinitum introductionum? Edith Wyschogrod writes a Preface. Does she mean us to think that the book has a Face, and that it therefore needs a pre-Face? Does she think that she/we face toward the book, or does the book face toward her/us, or does/do she/we both together face toward the putative subject matter, which itself has two faces, Buddhism and Christianity? And who am I, the reviewer?This cannot be a review (a looking-over), but it might be a re-view (a looking-again), which informs (in-forms, incarnates) itself so that you, dear Introducer of Yourself, can review (look over) your presuppositions about Buddhism, Christianity, life-worlds, and reality in general, and re-view them (re-visit them, look again at them) so as to reform (re-view, see-again, as formless, and thus re-form) them.One draws a circle, says Charles Fort, beginning anywhere. So let us open the book at random. On page 84 we find: “Taiwan has over 25,000 students studying in the United States, the largest foreign contingent in American universities.” This aggressively logocentric sentence is provided with a footnote: “Statistic of 1987. Since then, the proportion of Chinese from the People’ [sic] Republic has become much more noticeable.” Hmm—a little typo, but nevertheless we are, to our surprise, deep in the overheated hotel conference rooms of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. So, why are we told this? It is part of a section that cuts (“Lt. sect-, cut”, we are reminded on p. 175) across (cross-hatches) Magliola’s life/lives run/runs (Curriculum Vitae, Curricula Vitae, Curricula Vitae Novae, Curricula Vitarum, as the chapter headings have it) as an academic, a Catholic, an almost-priest, a Buddhist meditator, a husband, a divorcé, an Italian, an American, [End Page 216] a resident of Taiwan. All these spill out from the overstuffed closet of Magliola’s life/lives, which, without warning, he opens upon us and then sits among the salade challenging the reader to become bricoleur. But if we do, we feel we have missed the point. Or we have seen the point—which is just as bad.Crosshatch: that’s the theme, I think. Cross, “X” (both the Roman character “eks” and the Greek character “chi”), crucifix, saltire, cross-religions, cross-cultures, cross-countries, cross-country, crossing-out (rature), and finally, revelation by relationis oppositio under/through four forks (“Il ne s’écrit que sous la grille des quatre fourches”—p. 177, quoting Derrida).Magliola is on this cross, he is cross (angry/mad), he is crucified by it, he hopes to cross over by means of it. “This book is not written for the arrived by the arrived” (p. xix), yet he is “on the water, not at sea” (p. xx).It may not be incorrect to say that the book is in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 183-187 [Access article in PDF] The 2001 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies Edward L. Shirley St. Edward's University The annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies met in Denver, Colorado, on Friday and Saturday, November 16 and 17, 2001. This year's papers addressed the question of "dual belonging" from both Buddhist and Christian perspectives.On Friday afternoon, two papers were delivered, the first (...) paper by Catherine Cornille, who suggested three categories of dual belonging: syncretism, drawing elements from both traditions; belief that both traditions point to a higher reality, which may not be expressible in itself; and inculturation, incorporating local symbols and rituals into a tradition that is being transplanted from elsewhere. She then focused on the issue of inculturation.Inculturation, she argued, assumed an essence of a religion that had independent existence from cultural expressions. The people involved in the process of inculturation may not, in fact, believe that they are dual practitioners, but rather that they are simply expressing the essence of a tradition through new symbols. She understands this as belonging to a symbol from one religious tradition (e.g., Christ) while using the hermeneutical tools of another.The caveat that must be acknowledged in this process, according to Cornille, is that it is impossible to separate religious developments from their roots. For example, while there has been some talk of a "Christian Vedanta," the fact is Vedanta was developed in a particular context, and cannot be separated from its Vedic roots. At the same time, however, it must be admitted that religious traditions have, in fact, historically developed in such a manner. As Cornille points out, Greek expressions are not in themselves Christian, but have in fact helped to shape Christianity, as, for example, in the Nicene Creed.Ruben Habito, who focused more on his personal journey, delivered the second paper. In his late twenties, while still in Jesuit formation, he was sent to Japan and there was introduced to the practice of Zen. He spoke of his meditation on the mu koan, and his first experience of kensho, direct insight. He went on to further koan meditation from there.As he was preparing for ordination as a Jesuit priest, he began to wonder: How did [End Page 183] he still deal with Jesus, the Trinity, Incarnation, and the Paschal Mystery if he was committed to Zen practice? He found his answer in his Jesuit training: He was being called to continued metanoia, the continual movement from self to love. In Zen terms, he was undergoing a continuing process of transformation.In Buddhism, it is said that the myriad beings are one's true self. This is the meaning of the phrase "to be awakened by the myriad beings." In the Buddhist tradition, one of those myriad beings who assist in awakening is the bodhisattva Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In the Christian tradition, this function is often associated with the Virgin Mary. The iconography of these two figures is often quite similar, to the point that early Jesuits took the figure of Kanzeon to be the Virgin Mary. During times of persecution, Japanese Christians would use a double-sided figure, with Kanzeon on one side and Mary on the other. This composite of Maria-Kannon has become, for Habito, a symbol of the potential of being nourished by the two traditions.The first response was from Jay McDaniel, who drew an analogy from biology. Some trees have two sets of roots, one a deep taproot and the other a secondary root system. Could this be an image for those drawing from two paths?McDaniel's response was based on his personal encounters with two traditions. He spoke of how reading Thomas Merton twenty-five years ago changed his life and helped him overcome a fundamentalist Christian background. He spoke of how Ruben Habito has helped him understand what it means to walk two paths. Like Whitehead, he feels that he can say "yes" to both a Personal God and to the Ultimate Reality of Emptiness... (shrink)

Autopoietic societies have produced three major images of civilization: the Greco-Roman, the Eurocentric Western, and the Settler Society type. The most important incarnation of the latter to date has been America. This article explores the deep-going differences between American and European ideas of civilization. It examines how the American kind of autopoietic civilization expresses itself in preternaturally distinctive conceptualizations of nature and freedom, life and death, order and chaos, city and ecumene. The article discusses the political and social (...) implications of this. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Prospects for a Mahāyāna Theology of EmptinessA Continuing DebateJohn P. KeenanTwo articles in recent issues of Buddhist-Christian Studies—Lai Pan-chiu’s “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan” 1 (2004) and Thomas Cattoi’s “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation” 2 (2008)—discuss my book The (...) Meaning of Christ: A Mahāyāna Theology (1989),3 prompting me to add my voice to the conversation.In “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan,” Lai Pan-chiu reads from the perspective of a Chinese Christian thinker my formulation of a Christology informed by Indian Mahāyāna philosophy. He would prefer to configure a rather different Mahāyāna theology, wherein the polarity expressed in traditional Chalcedonian theology would be reinvested in a Chinese Mahāyāna dynamic, with its ability to hold in creative tension what are often seen as exclusionary opposites. Lai proposes to take as leitmotif for this project the Chinese Mahāyāna theme of Buddha Nature (C. fóxìng ) and its Indian precursor of Tathāgatagarbha (Skt. “matrix of the Buddha”) thought. Although—for reasons I will discuss below—I would not myself choose this approach in writing Christology for a western audience, I certainly would commend Lai Pan-chiu’s effort to do so for a Chinese audience and beyond.In “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation,” Thomas Cattoi contends that Lai has not gone far enough in responding to The Meaning of Christ. Cattoi himself then proceeds with a critique of Mahāyāna theology that reveals both his own unwavering commitment to traditional ontological theology and his apparent disinterest in engaging Buddhist Mahāyāna philosophy in depth. He makes little or no reference to the Mahāyāna philosophical themes that I discuss in detail in The Meaning of Christ—themes that I then employ to enunciate a Mahāyāna Christology. Moreover, the alternative “Tibetan Christology” that Cattoi proffers in this article also appears to avoid any deep or detailed engagement [End Page 3] with Mahāyāna thought. He seems satisfied to employ Tibetan Buddhist terminology simply to reaffirm what we have long affirmed in the Greek, emphasizing the embodiment of Christ as the unicum, the one and only embodiment of God, and the transformation of the very fabric of the universe effected thereby.4 His Christology functions as a description of that transformation and, to my lights, leaves scant room for any Trinitarian theology of the Spirit. He argues against the notion that any discourse can empty the ontological claims of “the Christian position.” For him, only the ontological theology of our Greek ancestors is adequate—apparently culturally privileged because providentially inspired.I will address herein some of the many, often convoluted, issues raised, for these issues are basic to Mahāyāna theology and to critiques against its viability. I choose not to detail the many instances in which Thomas Cattoi misreads, mischaracterizes, and misrepresents my work; I must only trust that those who have read The Meaning of Christ are well aware that Cattoi’s characterizations of that book reflect neither its content nor its tone.5 I shall use this space instead to further clarify the shape of a Mahāyāna theology that employs the principal themes of Mādhyamika and Yogācāra, and will discuss in a more general way Cattoi’s fundamental inattentiveness to those themes and to the manner in which they inform Mahāyāna theology.6 I shall also discuss Lai Pan-chiu’s very interesting proposal for a Chinese Mahāyāna theology.Ontology and MahĀyĀna Realms of UnderstandingMahāyāna theology is not Cattoi’s “Mādhyamika dualism.”7 Mahāyāna theology does not represent a Buddhist “position,” but rather the emptiness of all... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Old Orders for New Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of HumanismCary Wolfe (bio)Luc Ferry. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.1Early on in The New Ecological Order, the French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is thatit can call (...) itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought.... At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal.[xx]As we shall see, for Ferry—a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not quite Cartesian tradition—this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism. Ferry’s concern is that such “world visions,” incarnated in contemporary environmentalism in movements such as Deep Ecology and ecofeminism, threaten “[o]ur entire democratic culture,” which “since the French Revolution, has been marked, for basic philosophical reasons, by the glorification of uprootedness, or innovation” [xxi]. Ferry’s thesis—it becomes quite explicit in his comparison of environmental legislation under the Third Reich with tenets of Deep Ecology in the book’s second section—is that Deep Ecology and its ilk have moved in to occupy the space left open by the passing of the political imaginaries of fascism and communism, so that denunciations of liberalism (and its corollary in political praxis, reformism) may now be unmasked for what they are: critiques “in the name of nostalgia, or, on the contrary, in that of hope: either the nostalgia for a lost past, for national identity flouted by the culture of rootlessness, or revolutionary hope in a radiant future, in a classless and free society” [xxvi]. To which Ferry responds—literally—“Grow up!” Late in the book, he tells us that we must see through “the adult development of the secular and democratic universe” [137] by rejecting totalizing revolutionary visions of the sort purveyed by Deep Ecology, and by adhering instead to liberal reformism, “the only [End Page 21] position consistent with leaving the world of childhood” [138].Ferry is certainly right to draw our attention to the often uncritical nostalgia and romantic holism of some varieties of environmental thought—problems that have been noted before by critics from points on the map very different politically from Ferry’s avowed liberal humanism. And it is certainly understandable, given the historical context, that he would join a long list of other European intellectuals in pointing out the manifold dangers to democratic society of totalizing moral schemes—dangers often represented for liberal intellectuals like Ferry by the rise of the Greens in European politics. 1 We do well to remember, too (as Fredric Jameson and others have pointed out), that for European intellectuals such as Ferry, liberalism retains, for understandable historical reasons, a viability and a promise about which many American intellectuals are skeptical or even jaded. European intellectuals, conditioned by the experience of fascist authoritarianism and the strong but problematic presence historically of the Communist party in social and intellectual life, may find in liberalism a refreshing and indeed radical democratic openness and dynamism, while American intellectuals, conditioned to the absence of any other major political contenders, have long since grown accustomed to liberalism as the name for that “end of ideology” position which, as Jameson puts it, “can function more effectively after its own death as an ideology, realizing itself in its most traditional form as a commitment to the market system that has become sheer common sense and no longer a political program” [249, my emphasis].But in defending democratic difference, everything hinges, of course, on precisely how such terms are framed and how difference is articulated—an index of which often may be found in how its imagined... (shrink)

Le rapport à l'alténté en général et à autrui en particulier condense un noyau de possibilités multiples qui, selon l'hypothèse esquissée, s'exprìme et s'interprète dans le mode de penser et de vivre le Désir d'avenir. Oscillant entre hétérophagie et hétérophilie, ce type fondamental d'érotisme temporel s'incarne dans des configurations phénoménologiques dont la typologie idéale fait covarier une décision métaphysique avec une attitude éthique . L'analyse des contrastes qui définissent les positions onto-éthiques de Sartre, Merleau-Ponty et Lévinas devient une méthode heuristique (...) pour mettre en évidence la topologie de l'incommensurable et de l'optatif. The relation to alterity in general and to others in particular encapsulates a logical space of multiple possibilities which, according to the author's hypothesis, may be expressed and interpreted in the manner of thinking and living the Desire of future. Oscillating between heterophagia and heterophilia, this fundamental type of temporal eroticism embodies vanous phenomenological configurations whose ideal typology reveals a deep correlation between a metaphysical decision with an ethical attitude . The analysis of mutual contrasts defining Sartre's, Merleau-Ponty s and Lévinas' onto-ethic stances is adopted as a methodological device in order to elucidate a broad topology of incommensurabilia and desiderata. (shrink)

George Molnar’s contention that some dispositional properties are displayed without the aid of any activating conditions poses a challenge to the conditional analysis of dispositions. Since the invocation of activating conditions is regarded as a crucial feature of the analysis, spontaneous dispositions are believed to expose its inadequacy by eluding its scope. The challenge goes to the very heart of the conditional approach to dispositions, allegedly revealing a deep flaw in all its incarnations. Granting that there may be spontaneously (...) manifestable dispositions, I argue that the conditional analysis can successfully accommodate them by elevating the potential causal relation between a disposition and its manifestation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Math Anxiety:Making Room to BreatheValerie Allen (bio) and Todd Stambaugh (bio)"Don't do that to me, Professor," the student said, and everybody laughed, for by this late in the semester, the atmosphere was relaxed. The instructor in question had just reached the point in a worked problem when they could move from reasoning about specific numbers to stating a general principle: x≤y≤z, meaning that y—the value we sought—was always going (...) to be greater than or equal to one value (x) and less than or equal to the other (z). The student who had spoken had earned everyone's affection over the weeks, open about their difficulties with math, ready to risk being wrong, and to ask obvious questions that others may have been reluctant to owning. They had hung in there, despite presenting a classic case of math anxiety, a syndrome long recognized in the scholarship of teaching and learning.Among math anxiety's many symptoms, breathing disruption ranks high: hyperventilation (rapid breathing) and hypoventilation (barely or not breathing). When the energy-conserving parasympathetic nervous system is overtaken by the energy-expending sympathetic nervous system, the long exhalations that decelerate the heart rate are replaced by short, panting puffs from the upper lungs. The timed test provides the perfect environment for math anxiety to flourish. Stress diverts cognitive resources needed for procedural execution, so working memory consequently shrinks.Self-rated metrics for math anxiety have been in place for decades (Richardson and Suinn). Relatively trivial interventions can yield nontrivial results: deep breathing exercises and positive affirmations have a beneficial impact, as does writing about one's nerves immediately prior to an exam (Brunyé et al.). More systemic changes require a reorientation in teaching whereby conceptual mistakes are positively rewarded as opportunities for learning; students compose questions instead of answers; students solve problems together rather than perform solo (Boaler).Return now to that opening scenario to watch it become stereotype incarnate: the student was mature, Black, and female; the teacher, younger, white, and male; her comment was triggered by his shift from a specific [End Page 217] set of numbers into symbolic notation. There is robust evidence to demonstrate that certain demographics are consistently underrepresented in the U.S. math community: women and "African-Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islanders," according to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) ("Resources for Minority"). Routinely feeling that they do not belong, such groups are particularly vulnerable to math anxiety.Several remedies for such disparity suggest themselves: appointing more women and people of color in the profession; one-on-one tutorial assistance; research projects about the students' personal environment; privileging pre-test, low-stakes work over timed tests; assigning group rather than individual work. When all is said and done, however, such strategies "have little to do with mathematics content" (Martin 304). Mathematicians still need to be able to conceptualize, describe, and manipulate abstract objects, and there seems to be a suspicion that, at heart, abstraction is gendered masculine and colored white.It is possible that the rhetorical immediacy and context-dependence of Black English has misguidedly reinforced such a perception. For poet June Jordan, Black English "devolves from a culture that abhors all abstraction" (Jordan 367). Psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint asks, "Is there a way to say metamorphosis in Ebonics?" (O'Malley). Yet, despite Black English's avoidance of nominalization and similar verbosities that afflict academic prose, abstract logical reasoning flourishes in vernacular idiom, as linguist William Labov demonstrated half a century ago. Our aim is not to explain the asymptote in Black English but rather to consider a feature characteristic of those very minority cultures historically underrepresented in math—storytelling—and to ask how it may be foregrounded in mathematics, where it is decisively sidelined. Storytelling has been claimed by every culture and ethnic group at some point as the repository of wisdom, practical skills, religious beliefs, and shared identity and values; but when it gets corralled into the category of "fiction," and when it gets opposed to "fact," a narrowed concept of truth dispatches storytelling to kindergarten and recreational math. Word problems may supply scenarios but offer none of a plot's satisfactions... (shrink)

For Ivan Illich, a twentieth-century critical thinker driven by deep faith, sin is a denial of the dignity of another who calls out to me, and a betrayal my own vocation to respond, which were revealed by the Incarnation and the Gospel. Illich thus holds that the criminalization of sin, that is to say, its transformation into a violation of Church law through the imposition of compulsory confession in the thirteenth century, is a perversion of what has been (...) opened by the Gospel. This article explains Illich’s conception and explores its strength, not as historiography of the past, but as carrying a unique resonance with the present. (shrink)

Airuijiena is a medieval philosophy in the ninth century AD, the rise of a peak, it is the essence of mystical experience with God or with God, God included two adults and people of God into history. This article focuses on the Gospel of John describes Airuijiena Introduction sermons, also known as "Eagle Spirit Music," which contains the secret Qisi think, to be explored, but also involves its philosophy, theology and intellectual history of some of the relevant problem. This article (...) will first discuss the Airuijiena inherited traditions, such as the Irish spirit, Seven Arts in humanities education, Augustine Xing Greek Fathers, etc., and in "On the distinction between natural" will include them in a large integrated system. His "Gospel of St. John preaching preamble", or "Eagle Spirit Music," is a delicate little synthesis, which contains a wealth of secret Qisi want. This article will focus on St. John that he admired the mystical soul, show the people must continue to run away, until all finite things out, into the infinite God. This is a "self out of the" meaning of "extrapolation" of the most extreme, the most profound example. Then this paper to discuss Airuijiena by Zhu Zhong Jing's knowledge of God, to God and experience God together with their philosophical significance, particularly to understand the basis of the theory of divine light and darkness, which indicates not only the Word is the light itself, and all things even one grain of sand stone, they are the beacon. However, their theory of the divine darkness, God is also revealed that he is the ultimate person. In short, Airuijiena extrapolation of ideas and filled with the spirit of comparison, the system's deep and majestic, worthy I inspired. In the development of mediaeval philosophy, Johannes Scotus Eriugena stood like a "lofty rock in the midst of a plain", as Copleston puts it. His mysticism emphasized the union of God and Man in the double process of incarnation and deification. This paper will focus on his mysticism and its philosophical and historical implications in his Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John, also know as Vox Spiritualis Aquilae. We will discuss, first of all, what Eriugena had received from his Irish tradition, Neo-Platonism as interpreted by Greek fathers and St. Augustine and how he synthesized them into his Periphyseon. His Homily, as a marvelous work of synthesis in miniature, is very rich of mystic insights. We'll focus fist on his understanding of St. John's speculative mind, as a mind always going beyond itself that finally reaches the divine and thereby becomes deified in order to know God in himself. For me this is an extreme case of strangification. Then we will proceed to discuss Eriugena's mystic and philosophical concept of gnosis and theosis, and also his understanding of Logos as Light and that all things, even so tiny and low, are lights too. By contrast, his notion of Darkness of God leads us to the concept of God as totally Other , or the Ultimate Other. In sum, Eriugena's system of mystical philosophy is always deep and magnanimous, enough to inspire more generations to come. (shrink)

Although not ignored, Rahner’s theology has not played a significant influence on the interdisciplinary scholarship between Catholic theology and literature, perhaps because Rahner’s thought is often considered to lack a theological aesthetics. This article encourages a reevaluation of this impression by bringing Rahner’s theology of symbol and his argument for the anonymous Christian into dialogue with the last novel of the acclaimed Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, Deep River. Endo’s novel challenges theologians to consider Rahner’s insights in concrete, multi-cultural, and (...) non-Christian contexts, and demonstrates the importance of thinking about Rahner’s theology of symbol in terms of narrative. At the same time, Endo’s novel prompts a reconsideration of Rahner’s controversial argument for the anonymous Christian, for Rahner’s thought and Endo’s novel present two different approaches to the issue of religious pluralism. In this dialogue between novelist and theologian, the Incarnational foundation of Rahner’s argument for the anonymous Christian emerges more clearly, a foundation that can be easily missed amidst his abstract rhetoric. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Christian Liberation Theology and Buddhism Need to Learn from Each OtherJohn MakranskyBoth Christian liberation theologians and engaged Buddhists seek to empower the deepest personhood of people by liberating them from conditions of suffering that hide their deeper identity and impede their fuller potential.1 Christian and Buddhist liberation theologies differ in what they identify as the main conditions of suffering, and in the epistemologies they use to disclose those (...) suffering conditions and to address them. Through their differences, I argue, each tradition points out an epistemological weakness in the other that would otherwise have remained unnoticed and, by exposing it, helps correct it.In terms of Christian liberation epistemology, even taking into account the historical situation that liberation theologians speak from, one weakness is a tendency to construct and reify a duality between those who are preferred by God and those who are not, a duality that makes it difficult, practically speaking, actually to love each person unconditionally in the way that Jesus taught. This is exacerbated by insufficient attention to layers of suffering in people that drive their unjust actions against others. I draw on Buddhist epistemology to uncover these problems by critically analyzing some of the language of a few liberation theologians.On the other hand, Buddhist epistemology lacks the concept of a God who chose to incarnate uniquely among the most marginalized and rejected, and the related Christian concept of social sin. This focus of liberation theology can sharpen Buddhist attention on “nonpersons” in our midst and to the social forces behind their marginalization and suffering. Christian liberation theology thus informs and helps reframe Buddhist understandings of compassion and its cultivation, and stimulates new insights into current social implications of ancient Buddhist teachings of karma, interdependence, and bodhisattva practice.This essay begins with Buddhist ideas, but it is not a religious studies analysis of them concerned with their diverse developments through history. Rather, this essay is the Buddhist equivalent of an exercise in comparative, constructive theology, which speaks from within a specific location in a Buddhist tradition to explore how dialogue with part of another religious tradition, here Christian liberation theology, may stimulate fresh insights. [End Page 117]buddhist epistemological principles relevant to christian liberation theologyIn what follows I will briefly summarize and draw on elements of Tibetan Buddhist theory and practice from the Nyingma tradition, the most ancient Tibetan Buddhist tradition. According to the theory and practice of this tradition, all of our experiences of self, others, and world possess two essential qualities: emptiness and cognizance. The mind’s cognizance is the knowing, aware quality within each experience. The mind’s emptiness is the basic space in and through all experiences that permits everything we experience to be as impermanent as it is. Emptiness is also described as the basic space of dependent arising that permits each thing to arise in dependence upon, and as an expression of, other things. Emptiness is thus also the lack of any isolated, autonomous being in anything we experience. The essence of enlightenment dawns when the mind’s cognizant quality recognizes the emptiness of all experiences, the basic space of dependent arising in and through all things. Emptiness then becomes the space of freedom for our cognizance, much more fully, to express its latent capacities of loving connection, compassion, and wisdom. These are qualities of a Buddha’s enlightenment.2 Please note, therefore, that the term “emptiness” should not be misunderstood to imply that we do not exist. Indeed, to have insight into the emptiness of our being is to have insight into our deep interdependence with others, permitting our fuller humanity to manifest: our underlying capacity for much greater love, care, discernment, courage, and creative responsiveness to the world. Such insight recognizes that our limiting thoughts of self and other, which we tend to mistake in the moment as fully defining persons, are merely relative, limited constructs, not fully defining of anyone.The Buddha disclosed this possibility of enlightenment because we are, by and large, not enlightened in this way, but caught in an entrenched delusion that affects everything we think, feel, and do, a delusion that binds us into layers of individual and social... (shrink)

Agents’ self-reports in cases of reactive heroism often deny the optionality, and hence the supererogatory status, of their actions, while conversely supporting a view of these actions in terms of nonselfsacrificial existential necessity. Taking such claims seriously thus makes it puzzling as to why such cases elicit strong approbation. To resolve this puzzle, I show how this necessity can be understood in the predispositional embodied terms of unreflective ethical expertise, such that the agent may be said literally to incarnate generally (...) accepted norms of a shared ethical environment. On this basis I argue that the object of the relevant approbation is the agent’s embodied predispositionality itself—expressing a deep continuity with her social context, it is in virtue of this alone that her action can be both spontaneous and ethically outstanding. By way of conclusion I briefly discuss how this suggests an important categorial distinction between heroism and saintism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Ethics of HistoryBrian FayDavid Carr, Thomas R. Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel, editors. The Ethics of History. Northwestern University Topics in Historical Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Pp xvi + 263. Paper, $29.95.It is rare that every essay in a collection is well worth reading, but that is the case in this illuminating and stimulating volume. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since its contributors (...) comprise a virtual "Who's Who" of philosophers and intellectual historians who have contributed significantly to the philosophical enterprise in general and to the philosophy of history in particular. Adding to the volume is the fact that the contributors come from varied perspectives: from the so-called 'analytic' tradition (Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis) to the so-called 'continental' tradition (Jean-François Lyotard, John D. Caputo, Joan Copjec), [End Page 677] and to all manner of approaches along this continuum and that arguably even subvert it (Frank Ankersmit, Edith Wyschogrod, Allan Megill, Jörn Rüsen, Rudolf Makkreel, Thomas R. Flynn, and David Carr). The editors of the volume not only should be congratulated for putting it together (and for sponsoring the conference at Emory University on which it is based), but also for contributing important essays to it.So what are the issues addressed under the rubric of the "ethics of history"? One way to answer this is to focus on the questions the authors ask as they explore this topic:• What is the relationship of moral and political values to historical truth? (Ankersmit);• What is the relation between the ethical posture of historians and their role as narrators? (Wyschogrod);• How should the epistemology of historical investigation connect to the ethics of historical investigation (and what are these ethics)? (Megill);• "What basis in morality can we identify that makes truth a duty?" (Danto, 81);• "How are we to console the dead who are long since dead? How are we to repair their irreparable loss?" (Caputo, 93);• How can the lives or stories of the past still morally concern or speak to us today? (Copjec, who asks this question regarding Antigone);• How to represent transcendent moments—theophanic occasions of incarnational grace and saintly joy? That is, "Where can an absolute visit be situated or placed, in relation to a biography?" (Lyotard, 157, who asks this question by examining Augustine's Confessions);• Does the fact of our historicity (that, as selves, we are artifacts of history and understand ourselves as such) place peculiar ethical demands on us both as historical agents and as historical interpreters? (Margolis);• What are the responsibilities of historians to their profession? To their audience? To their subjects, those who have lived in the past? (Rüsen);• Is there any "inner connectedness" between the ethical and the historical that "justifies the idea of an ethics of history"? More specifically, what are the ethical conditions that make a hermeneutical history possible? (Makkreel, 214);• Can one be a "committed" historian? (Flynn);• Do the ways history resembles fiction (both make use of narrative and the imagination) render the moral obligation to tell the truth irrelevant for, or unrealizable by, history?. (Carr)In addressing these questions, the authors explore a number of central concepts that appear over and over in the volume, including truth, historicity, autonomy, objectivity, subjectivity, commitment, suffering, remembrance, and responsibility.Two general questions, posed in different ways by different authors, hold the center of the collection. First, given that objectivity conceived in terms of a simple correspondence in which historians empty themselves in order to record the past as it was is no longer intellectually tenable, what are the norms and values of history as a discipline that help distinguish it from propaganda? Second, given that history is about those who are dead, can historians be said to have obligations or responsibilities to them? For instance, should historians offer moral judgments about the evils that people have perpetrated on each other as a way of respecting those who have suffered? Is this a way historians can act responsibly toward their subjects? If not (and many in fact think not), then how else can we honor their suffering?Answers to these questions sometimes reveal deep disagreement (Flynn... (shrink)

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is distributed over a number of actors and artifacts and is mediated by a weaving notation called talim. The script encodes entire design in practice-specific symbols. This encoded script is decoded and interpreted via design-specific conventions by weavers to weave the design embedded in it. The cognitive properties of this notational system are described in the paper employing cognitive dimensions (CDs) framework of Green (People and computers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989) and Blackwell (...) et al. (Cognitive technology: instruments of mind—CT 2001, LNAI 2117, Springer, Berlin, 2001). After introduction to the practice, the design process is described in ‘The design process’ section which includes coding and decoding of talim. In ‘Cognitive dimensions of talim’ section, after briefly discussing CDs framework, the specific cognitive dimensions possessed by talim are described in detail. (shrink)

The concept of lived experience plays a significant role in the social sciences in general and in philosophy in particular. The idea of lived experience as a social reality has been philosophized and given prime importance in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. However, the work of Alfred Schutz, one of the phenomenologists on lived experience, has not been given adequate attention by either sociologists or philosophers. This paper attempts to understand how lived experiences are not merely individual or subjective experiences (...) but are also collective or social. Firstly, it suggests that lived experiences need to be understood in a broader context, namely that of the social and inter-subjectivity, which can be found in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Thus, there is an attempt to show how Schutz’s philosophy broadly helps us understand lived experience as a social reality. Secondly, to justify how lived experiences are social and collective experiences, illustrations of the studies related to race, gender, and caste are given as a marker for lived experiences throughout the paper. So far, lived experience has been understood within the domain of individual or the subjective or merely in the first-person perspective. Hence, this paper provides some insights into investigating lived experience from the third-person perspective. (shrink)

Computational imagination (CI) conceives imagination as an agent’s simulated sensorimotor interaction with the environment in the absence of sensory feedback, predicting consequences based on this interaction (Marques and Holland in Neurocomputing 72:743–759, 2009). Its bedrock is the simulation hypothesis whereby imagination resembles seeing or doing something in reality as both involve similar neural structures in the brain (Hesslow in Trends Cogn Sci 6(6):242–247, 2002). This paper raises two-forked doubts: (1) neural-level equivalence is escalated to make phenomenological equivalence. Even at an (...) abstract level, many imagined and real actions turn out to be dissimilar. More so, some imagined actions have no corresponding real actions and vice versa, even though neural regions involved in imaginings and real action-perception are the same (Sect. 1). (2) At the implementation level, the hypothesis presents a mutually exclusive view of imagination and perception whereby imagination functions in the absence of the sensory feedback and is action based. Both these issues are contested here: Neither imagination functions in the absence of perception nor all forms of imaginings are action based; it is, rather, about conceiving possibilities which emerge during the perceptual stage itself (Sect. 2). For the modal aspect to arise, it is submitted that an integrative framework is required which Kant can provide for whom imagination is an indispensable part of perception. Kant’s views on concept-formation are presented here to illustrate this aspect (Sect. 3). The Paper is concluded with emphasizing the relevance of Kant’s views to the problems identified in the two sections. (shrink)

Consumer complaining behavior (CCB) is an important stream of research and practice, as it links the domains of service failure and service recovery. CCB research, although extensive and temporally wide, exhibits a lack of concern for the underlying assumptions of scholarly inquiry. Researchers neither explicitly mention, nor consciously indicate their ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. We systematically identify the extant CCB literature and map it to two well-accepted paradigmatic classifications (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz Organization Science 7(2): 191–207, 1996). Normative (...) or functionalist paradigm with the assumptions of an objective external reality, a positivist epistemology, a determinist view of human nature, and nomothetic methodology emerges as the dominant CCB research paradigm. The implications of this dominance are discussed as a barometer of the future of CCB research and practice. (shrink)

Cognition is predominantly seen as information processing in multidisciplinary landscape of cognition studies, despite having had a formidable opposition from embodied and embedded perspectives in the last few decades. This paper analyses cognitive processes involved in different task domains of Kashmiri carpet weaving practice from the theoretical frameworks of cognitivism and situated-distributed cognition. After introducing the practice and its task domains (Section −1), paradigmatic cognitive activities involved in them are discussed and how these are explained by the two theoretical paradigms (...) and why the latter framework explains these processes better (Section-2). During this discussion (Section – 3), a way via culture impacts the practice and resultant cognitive operations turns out to be workspace of the actors. (shrink)