De nobis ipsis silemus: About ourselves — we keep silent. If we violate this prudent rule by the least modest of literary exercises — the autobiography — we must be able to say that we do so to bear witness. From my intellectual vocation of physician and philosopher, I have received the Chinese blessing of “living in interesting times.” I received two degrees in 1962 and spent thirty years developing a previously unimaginable encounter between medicine and humanism. That which (...) follows tells the story of the development of bioethics in Ibero-America from the perspective of a testifying witness. (shrink)

After deciding to terminate his authorship with the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard composed reviews as a means of writing without being an author. Two Ages, here presented in a definitive English text, is simultaneously a review and a book in its own right. In it, Kierkegaard comments on the anonymously published Danish novel Two Ages, which contrasts the mentality of the age of the French Revolution with that of the subsequent epoch of rationalism. Kierkegaard commends the author's shrewdness, (...) and his critique builds on the novel's view of the two generations. With keen prophetic insight, Kierkegaard foresees the birth of an impersonal cultural wasteland, in which the individual will either be depersonalized or obliged to find an existence rooted in "equality before God and equality with all men." This edition, like all in the series, contains substantial supplementary material, including a historical introduction, entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers, and the preface and conclusion of the original novel. (shrink)

After deciding to terminate his authorship with the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard composed reviews as a means of writing without being an author. Two Ages, here presented in a definitive English text, is simultaneously a review and a book in its own right. In it, Kierkegaard comments on the anonymously published Danish novel Two Ages, which contrasts the mentality of the age of the French Revolution with that of the subsequent epoch of rationalism. Kierkegaard commends the author's shrewdness, (...) and his critique builds on the novel's view of the two generations. With keen prophetic insight, Kierkegaard foresees the birth of an impersonal cultural wasteland, in which the individual will either be depersonalized or obliged to find an existence rooted in "equality before God and equality with all men." This edition, like all in the series, contains substantial supplementary material, including a historical introduction, entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers, and the preface and conclusion of the original novel. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments A Literary Review: Two Ages further reading.

This work admirably continues Thulstrup’s effort to set forth the philosophical, historical, and literary contexts of the works of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Johannes Climacus. Howard Hong admirably translated Thulstrup’s introduction and commentary to the Philosophical Fragments and Robert J. Widenmann has succeeded as well here.

Books Reviewed in this Article: Theological Investigations, Vol. XVIII: God and Revelation. By Karl Rahner. Pp.vi, 304, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984, £18.50. Theological Investigations, Volume XIX: Faith and Ministry. By Karl Rahner. Pp.vi, 282, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984, £18.50. Theological Investigations: Volume XX: Concern for the Church. By Karl Rahner. Pp.vi, 191, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981, £14.50. Concise Theological Dictionary. Edited by Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler. Pp.541, London, Burns & Oates, 1983, £12.50. A (...) New Dictionary of Christian Theology. Edited by Alan Richardson and John Bowden. Pp.xvii, 614, London, SCM Press, 1983, £19.50. The God of Forgiveness and Healing in the Theology of Karl Rahner. By J.N. King, Pp.93, Washington, University Press of America, 1982, $17.50, $6.75. In Search of Humanity, A Theological and Philosophical Approach. By John Macquarrie. Pp.vii, 280, London, SCM Press, 1982, £8.50. Faith and the Mystery of God. By Maurice Wiles. Pp.viii, 146, London, SCM Press, 1982, £4.50. Trinity and Temporality: The Christian Doctrine of God in the Light of Process Theology and the Theology of Hope. By John J. O'Donnell. Pp.xii, 215, Oxford University Press, 1983, £15.00. The Cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin: A comparative Study. By James A. Lyons and edited by Maurice Wiles. Pp.xii, 236, Oxford University Press, 1982, £13.50. Grounded in Love: Sacramental Theology in an Ecumenical Perspective. By Frans Josef van Beeck. Pp.x, 151, Washington, University Press of America, 1982, $19.50, $9.25. Justification: The Author's First Book reissued with a New Introductory Chapter and the Original Response of Karl Barth. By Hans Küng. Pp.xlvi, 332, London, Burns and Oates, 1982, no price given. Reality and Evangelical Theology. By T.F. Torrance. Pp.174, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1982, $8.95. The Quest for the Historical Israel: Reconstructing Israel's Early History. By George W. Ramsey. Pp.xiv, 193, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.50. Cantico del Cantici: Interpretatio Ludica. By Enrica Salvaneschi. Pp.140. Genoa, II Melangolo, 1982, 15, 000 Lire. Love Lyrics from the Bible: A Translation and Literary Study of the Song of Songs. By Marcia Falk. Pp.142, Sheffield, Almond Press, 1982, £14.95, £5.95. Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction. By James L. Crenshaw. Pp.286, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. The Sciences and Theology. Edited by A.R. Peacocke. Pp.xviii, 309, Stocksfield, Oriel Press, 1982, £14.00. Vision and Character: A Christian Educator's Alternative to Kohlberg. By C.R. Dykstra. Pp.viii, 160, Leominster, Fowler Wright Books, 1981, £4.45. Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, Books I, II & III. Translated with a commentary by Michael Woods. Pp.xii, 234, Oxford, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1982, £11.50. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. By Karl Ameriks. Pp.ix, 314, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, £15.00. Heidegger's‘Being and Time’and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. By Mark Blitz. Pp.260, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1981, £13.75. Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning. Edited by Mary Le Cron Foster and Stanley H. Brandes. Pp.xvi, 416, New York, Academic Press, 1980, £19.60. The God Within. By Harry R. Klocker. Pp.x, 147, Washington, University Press of America, 1982, $19.00, $9.25. The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D.M. MacKinnon. Edited by Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland. Pp.ix, 252, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £17.50. Jews, Pagans and Christians in Conflict. By David Rokeah. Pp.232, Jerusalem, The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, Leiden; E.J. Brill, 1982, 94 gld. Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150–1650. By Brian Tierney. Pp.xi, 114, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £12.50. St John of the Cross: The Life and Thought of a Christian Mystic. By Alain Cugno. Pp.vi, 153, London, Burns & Oates, 1982, £6.95. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense. Translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. Pp.xviii, 360, London, SPCK, 1981, £8.50. Francisco de Osuna: the Third Spiritual Alphabet. Translated by May E. Giles. Pp.xvi, 624, London, SPCK, 1981, £12.50. Rome and the Anglicans. Edited with a Postscript by Wolfgang Haase. Pp.301, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1982, 138 DM. The Westminster Confession in the Church today: Papers Prepared for the Church of Scotland Panel on Doctrine. Edited by Alasdair I.C. Heron. Pp.vii, 154, Edinburgh, Saint Andrew Press, 1982, £4.00. Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading. By John O'Neill, Pp.ix, 244, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £12.50. Rousseau after 200 years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium. Edited by R.A. Leigh. Pp.xv, 299, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £30.00 An American Experience of God: The Spirituality of Isaac Hecker. By John Farina. Pp.xii, 217, New York, Paulist Press, 1981, $11.95. Hecker Studies: Essays on the Thought of Isaac Hecker. Edited by John Farina. Pp.vii, 243, New York, Paulist Press, 1983, $6.95. (shrink)

In the Preface to The Chinese Dream: Education the Future I wrote:This is a work in narrative. It tells a story about modern China – a story of an economic and cultural miracle. But...

The cognitive sciences may be understood to contribute to religion-and-science as a metadisciplinary discussion in ways that can be organized according to the three persons of narrative, encoding the themes of consciousness, relationality, and healing. First-person accounts are likely to be important to the understanding of consciousness, the "hard problem" of subjective experience, and contribute to a neurophenomenology of mind, even though we must be aware of their role in human suffering, their epistemic limits, and their indirect causal role in (...) human behavior and subsequent experience. Second-person discussions are important for understanding the empathic and embodied relationality upon which an externalist account of mind is likely to depend, increasingly uncovered and supported by social neuroscience. Third-person accounts can be better understood in uncovering the us/them distinctions that they encode and healing the dangerous tribalisms that put an interdependent and communal world increasingly at risk. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

The present research work highlights the basic concepts of Ethics and Philosophy of the Visistadvaita School of Thought of Ramanuja. The Sankalpasuryodaya an Allegorical drama is composed by Vedanta Desika [1268-1369 AD] a great exponent in the history of the field of Visistadvaita School. This work contains Date, Life and Works of the Author; Place of Allegorical Dramas in Sanskrit Literature; Summary of Sankalpasuryodaya; A Literary Analysis of the Drama, Philosophical Doctrines Reflected in the Drama; and An Evaluation. This (...) detailed research study of the Sankalpasuryodaya contributes a systematic symbolism by which abstractions of ethics, religion and philosophy of Ramanuja Vedanta are represented as accurately as possible through significant characters, plots and contexts with identification of comprehensive names. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Literary Common GroundLee Rust BrownLet me make note of a few things that have occurred to me during this conference. Some of these will be observations; some will be practical inferences. One of them, though, involves the crossing of an expectation, or maybe a fear, I had brought with me to Minneapolis. Since this has to do with the whole tone of the conference, we might as (...) well begin with it.It, of course, was the question of the polemical nature of this gathering. Would this conference be diagnostic and denunciatory in nature, or would it seek to start something truly new? Certainly we all feel the need of something new—not new, either, in the sense that movements or ideological positions claim to be new, but in the sense of a fresh gathering of common attention in the place where literature is, the place where each of us who loves literature already goes alone. This would be a possibility for something original rather than just another novelty—which makes the question of polemics all the more urgent. An association that founded itself in complaint would be only one more identity-group making a virtue out of its grudge. And the grudge, in that case, would have been a sad reflex of feeling superseded and powerless.But where have the polemics against current orthodoxies been? I am delighted not to have heard them in any strenuous capacity. Even their relative absence hasn’t commanded any extended attention, and that may be an even more telling point. I take this to be partly the result of foresight and good sense. But the clean air here has been more than a reward for our mutual constraint. Instead, it seems evidence of the fact [End Page 193] that, when literature occupies our attention, there is no need for self-defense. Justice, or justification, happens by itself when we “do our own work,” as Socrates recommended.What is our own work, then? This association has made a point, it seems, of declining to prescribe what it should be. The only thing we are absolutely sure of is that its subject is literature, and that its standards and rewards should be of a literary nature. From there the field opens up—and this conference has succeeded in keeping it open in some very concrete ways.Let’s think briefly about the two panels we attended yesterday. The morning panel on “Intellectual Craftsmanship” seemed unified in its concern with the disciplined ways by which we commit ourselves to literary experience. Literature itself, as well as what we do with it, teaches us this discipline, which is “aesthetic” in every sense of that word. Roger Shattuck set the tone when he described the discipline of reading as an issue of preparation and assimilation on the one hand, and as a kind of complete perceptual openness on the other. Such openness, in our normal experience, allows us to be surprised, to see actual things, perhaps, instead of their institutional categories. But literature also requires that we craft our receptivity. The surprises we prepare ourselves to undergo are achieved breakthroughs, which makes them no less unpredictable but all the more deeply affecting.Criticism cultivates such surprising experience. (I think experience is the crucial word, by the way, since everyone on that first panel seemed to be devoted to a kind of free empiricism.) The spectacular moments of visionary power that Robert Alter isolated in Dickens are places that startle and disturb us—and we track our own surprise, and intensify it, when we look closely at how those dark places of power emerge from Dickens’s refiguring of a world where darkness otherwise tends toward an entirely unredeemable opacity. We have to read “synesthetically,” as Shattuck says, “with both eyes open,” to let ourselves be for a moment blinded by such literary places.Once again, the discipline of reading—devotedly and resistantly—frees us for the achieved experience. Slowing down, in Sven Birkerts’s sense of “retardation and deceleration,” is precisely a matter of stepping into a field of experience shaped (or, in an auditory sense, fostered and conserved) by the special demands of literature. It... (shrink)

Professor Kahn says that Plato and the Socratic Dialogue “presents a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato’s early and middle dialogues as a unified literary project, displaying an artistic plan for the expression of a unified world view”. To this end, Kahn argues that “[w]hat we can trace in these dialogues is not the development of Plato’s thought,” as Aristotle and others seem to have thought, “but the gradual unfolding of a literary plan for presenting his philosophical (...) views to the general public”. This “unfolding” begins shortly after the Gorgias. Kahn argues that Plato then “created an essentially new form, the aporetic dialogue with a pseudo-historical setting” in order to bridge the psychological distance between the ordinary conception of the world and the radically new world view he would present in the middle dialogues. Kahn calls his interpretation “the hypothesis of ingressive exposition” and says that this hypothesis is “the claim that the seven threshold dialogues [Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis, and Euthydemus] are designed to prepare the reader for the views expounded in the Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, and that they can be adequately understood only from the perspective of these middle dialogues”. (shrink)

My aim in this article is threefold: First, I wish to challenge the view put forward by A. Flew and H. L. A. Hart which has won widespread recognition, namely, that the concept of punishment entails a legal or quasi-legal system of punishment. In my view all that is necessary for a case of punishment to occur is that a person inflicts deliberately and not primarily for the sake of any beneficial consequences which may flow from his action, anything likely (...) to cause discomfort to a victim who is capable of experiencing it, provided that the person inflicting the discomfort would claim, if asked to give a reason for his action, that he is inflicting it because of something for which he holds the victim accountable. If I am right it follows that punishment is not necessarily retributive, and that utilitarian ‘punishment’ like reformative and compensatory ‘punishment’ is not true punishment, since the discomfort inflicted in these cases is merely ancillary to another end. Secondly, I hope to show that Hart does not succeed in discrediting the retributive theory, and that his treatment of punishment, though functional in aim, perpetuates the confusion between the meaning of punishment and its justification. Thirdly, I shall contend that retribution is not a proper aim of a legal system, whatever place it may actually have or ought to have in our moral code. Looking to the future, I shall venture to predict that the legal institution of punishment will sooner or later give way to a system designed to reduce crime and to rehabilitate offenders. Such a system will be adjusted to the needs of the community and of individual offenders, and will not involve the infliction of discomfort as an end. Hence, it would be wrong to call it a system of punishment. (shrink)

How far from the optimism of eighteenth-century philosophes and their nineteenth-century heirs ought we to let the disasters of twentieth-century European history push us? An encounter with the profoundly pessimistic socio-political theoretician Georges Sorel can help us gauge that. But in assessing Sorelian thought, we ought to adopt the same analytical strategy he himself prescribed when approaching complex and multi-faceted subjects: a deliberately partial, indirect approach he called 'diremption'. This diremption of Sorelian morality addresses his concepts of 'work' and 'love' (...) specifically; and it accesses them not directly, through his own works, but indirectly, through fictional works he found particularly meaningful: Daniel Halevy's science-fiction novel History of Four Years and Paul Claudel's verse drama The Hostage. (shrink)

Ostensibly, A Literary Review is a straightforward commentary by Søren Kierkegaard on the work of a contemporary novelist. On deeper levels, however, it becomes the existential philosopher's far-reaching critique of his society and age, and its apocalyptic final sections inspired the central ideas in Martin Heiddeger's influential work Being and Time. Embraced by many readers as prophetic, A Literary Review and its concepts remain relevant to our current debates on identity, addiction, and social conformity.

The word of rūznāme means diary in the Persian language. In the historical records it refers to special diaries written by the secret clerks of Ottoman sultans. Apart from that there are various different types of rūznāmes. In some rūznāmes were described repetitious behaviors that they are a suitable or an unsuitable for each day of the week or month. This article aims to investigate a manuscript named “The Book of Rūznāme” contains suitable and unsuitable behaviors for each day of (...) month. (shrink)

Grotesque imagery is widely used by all genres and movements of art and literature without exception, but its historical development and theoretical aspects have not been sufficiently studied. This study seeks to define and diagnose the main aspects of the development of the grotesque as a literary problem. The leading methods of researching this problem are methods of analysis, deduction, induction, and comparison of approaches. The research covers the approaches to the study of the grotesque phenomenon; the interpretation of (...) this trope is provided, its origin is described, in whose works it is widely used; the forms of grotesque and its specific features are described; various theoretical concepts of the question are demonstrated; the codes of grotesque poetics and their levels of display in the artistic system of works are identified; the qualities and features of Poe’s literary activity are diagnosed, and the components of the grotesque aesthetics are defined. The material in this study is of practical and theoretical value to students and literary scholars who study literature and its artistic features. (shrink)

The literature of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Adichie teaches a risky, self-giving way of reading that brings home the dangers and the possibilities of suffering as an ethical good. Working the thought of feminist theologians and philosophers into an analysis of these women's writings, Cynthia R. Wallace crafts a literary ethics attentive to the paradoxes of critique and re-vision, universality and particularity, reading in suffering a redemptive or redeemable reality.

A literary approach to scientific practice: Essay Review of R.I.G. Hughes' _The Theoretical Practices of Physics_.

Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork provides a unique foundational introduction to the depths and glories of literature and its study. It is a book about why literature matters, and why it always will. Readers will explore the roots of literature and art in the interplay between life and language, actions and events, and culture and texts. This is not a book about theories, but a book about our complex engagement with language and literature, from which theories, interpretations, and (...) insight arise. As a ground work, confusions are dissolved, and analytical tools for thinking are developed and honed. Readers will discover that their ways of talking about literature can powerfully contribute to their ways of talking about life. The book re-situates literary studies within fundamental arguments about language, knowledge, and ethics. Thinking with Words is essential reading for anyone interested in not just literature but in art, culture, and language. (shrink)

Zechariah Aldāhirī's maqāma collection, Sefer hamusar , is a literary work modeled on the Arabic Maqāmāt of al-Harīrī and the Hebrew Tahkemoni of Alharizi. Although largely fictional in nature, the work offers intriguing evidence of the transmission of kabbalistic thought to Yemen in the sixteenth century. This paper argues that Aldāhirī exploited the text's lighthearted belletristic framework to bring kabbalistic theosophy, literature, and liturgical customs to the attention of a largely uninitiated public in Yemen. But Aldāhirī also conveys an (...) ambivalence towards his project when he parodies the new taste for kabbalistic learning by embedding mystical ideas in complex narratives. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the question of how far Polybius fulfilled that part of an historian's duty which consists of acquiring information; it gives an instance, small in itself no doubt, where he definitely neglected to obtain good information which lay to his hand, and preferred to repeat a commonplace untruth of the literary hacks.

This article is a postscript to Bem's (1996) theory of sexual orientation, which claims that an individual's sexual orientation is more directly the result of childhood experiences than of inborn biological factors. The possibility that the theory provides a successful strategy for preventing gender-nonconforming children from becoming homosexual adults is considered and rejected. So, too, is the thesis that biological explanations of homosexuality are more likely than experience-based explanations to promote gay-positive attitudes and practices.

If Milton is the grand expositor of human culture as a middle realm, Williams can be seen as in many respects his secular heir, an heir careful to work out how the poetic imagination serves to make man's expulsion from Edenic origins bearable and even invigorating. Williams' poetics begins, as Riddel makes clear, in the awareness that there is no inherent or even recoverable correspondence between words and facts in the world, but Williams then devotes most of his energies to (...) denying the metaphysical alternative to that position—the claim that all language can do is reflect on and play with the emptiness or fictiveness of its signifiers. If words do not copy but produce meanings, then they can be used significantly to focus our attention on the activities of the artist and his constructed characters as they engage in that process of production. The act of producing meanings can be the process by which to achieve another kind of reference, for the act of expression can itself become the focus generating a poem's significance by calling attention to the various ways authors and characters station themselves in relation to specific situations. Fiction then is not so much a term describing the ontological status of certain kinds of language but a term characterizing a particular way of using language to reflect upon forms of behavior in which we are not fully conscious of the quality of our activities. Williams' position on the artist's language is clearest in his frequent metaphor of the artist as farmer. The initial activity of both men is a kind of violence, an assertion of the difference between human desires and indifferent "blank fields." But what begins as antagonism does not result in the creation of self-referential fictive structures or the gay wisdom of maintaining and disseminating differences. Rather antagonism is the precondition for what Williams richly labels "composition": the farmer-poet organizes the blank field into a fertile, life-sustaining set of relationships which are not simply linguistic.1 · 1. Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott , pp. 98-99. Williams' image of arts as antagonistic composing has important parallels with the Russian Formalist concept of "defamiliarization," but for Williams it is not simply a scene but a total human act that is revealed by this process. Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory in the English department at the University of Washington. The author of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s, he has just completed a study of literary meaning. "Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer" was contributed to Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1979 issue. (shrink)

What is the relation between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’, especially where literary texts are concerned? This essay explores the question by recalling the author's experience with radio plays in the 195...