Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

Gerald L. Bruns. the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work" (p. 80). The notion of a pure language, a language uncontaminated by mere speech, may be one of modernity's great unkillable ...

Thomas Reid claims to have learned of Idomenians, “an order of beings” in “sublunary regions” whose visual system is very much like ours except that they could detect only the direction of rays reaching their eyes, not the distance of origin. The properties of Idomenian vision are here examined in the light of the physiological optics of Reid’s time and of the scientific developments that have since augmented our knowledge of the discipline.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Rhetorik wird in der Forschungsliteratur meist als eines der Entgegensetzung und des wechselseitigen Ausschlusses beschrieben. Dabei wird dem überzeitlichen Wahrheitsanspruch der Philosophie die kontextabhängige Wirkungsabsicht der Rhetorik gegenübergestellt. Während Philosophie auf sicheres Wissen und Erkenntnis ziele, gehe es der Rhetorik nicht um Wahrheit, sondern um die bloße Wahrscheinlichkeit und Meinung. Das kann allerdings nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass Philosophie und Rhetorik auf grundsätzliche Weise aufeinander verwiesen bleiben. Denn allein in der Notwendigkeit, ihren Wahrheitsanspruch öffentlich durchsetzen zu (...) müssen und in der Frage nach der adäquaten Wahl der Ausdrucksmittel, muss sich Philosophie notwendig rhetorischer Verfahren bedienen. Entsprechend hinterfragt eine rhetorische informierte Philosophie das intellektualistische Ideal einer transparenten und selbstexplikativen philosophischen Sprache. Sie unterstreicht demgegenüber die Materialität, Literarizität, Performativität und Historizität philosophischen Sprechens. In diesem Sinne zielt das Handbuch Rhetorik und Philosophie auf ein Denken, das sich des paradoxen Verhältnisses von Philosophie und Rhetorik bewusst bleibt. (shrink)

Law bends the past of a community's common life towards its future.Precedent is one of law's favored tools for doing the bending, and legal systems that assign precedent a starring role seem especially mindful of time. Yet, mindfulness of time goes far deeper into law's DNA. It is not limited to the doctrine of precedent or unique to common‐law jurisdictions. Recognizing that time is an elemental dimension of human experience and basic ordering principle of practical agency, law utilizes and orders (...) time. Temporality is essential to law's distinctive mode of governance and guidance. (shrink)

The city of Jerusalem is the focal point of Augustine’s exegesis of the Psalms of Ascent. In Enarratio in Psalmum 121, Augustine presents Jerusalem as a collective unity contemplating God’s being. The city is thoroughly established in peace and love and participates intimately in the divine life. The essential features of the Jerusalem described in Enarratio in Psalmum 121 align neatly with the created intellectual realm of contemplation outlined in Confessiones Book 12. Both texts envisage a city that participates in (...) the divine idipsum. This city is a creature so intimate with God’s being that its creaturely mutability is checked. Both texts articulate this created intellectual realm as participating in God’s eternity. In both cases, this participation is realized in contemplation: through the constancy of its vision, it is conformed to that which it sees. Finally, both the aeterna Ierusalem and the caelum caeli are a communion—in fact, a city—united in love. In Enarratio in Psalmum 121, Augustine urges his congregants to join themselves to this edifice that is still under construction; in the Confessiones, he presents himself as a pilgrim groaning and longing with desire to be part of the Jerusalem that is above, his mother and patria. (shrink)

The physicist–philosopher Philipp Frank’s work and influence, especially during his last three decades, when he found a refuge and a position in America, deserve more discussion than has been the case so far. In what follows, I hope I may call him Philipp – having been first a graduate student in one of his courses at Harvard University, then his teaching assistant sharing his offices, then for many years his colleague and friend in the same Physics Department, and finally, doing (...) research on his archival holdings kept at Harvard. I also should not hide my large personal debt to him, for without his recommendation in the 1950s to the Albert Einstein Estate, I would not have received its warm welcome and its permission, as the first one to do historical research in the treasure trove of unpublished letters and manuscripts, thus starting me on a major part of my career in the history of science. (shrink)

Originally published by Ballinger, this book is a result of an Atlantic Council study of U.S. international relationships on energy. It examines the uncertainties of a political, strategic, economic, and technological nature that are involved in energy supply, as well as the unavoidable certainty of finite resources.

The overall concern of this issue is not really to question whether there is such a thing as “African philosophy.” Any question concerning “African philosophy,” i.e. a specifically pan-African discipline with its own methods and forms, is partly different from that of “African thought” in general, for the latter includes not only processes of consciousness that reflect on the natural and human fields, but also practices whose very nature is to create or express specific cultural textures. The choice of “African (...) Thought” – rather than “African Philosophy” – in this series of essays is a way of leaving the door open to thought-practices that would be considered as foreign or simply borderline to what is usually considered as philosophy by the Western establishment, that is, by those who have come to believe and persuade the rest of the world that the love of wisdom is the love of logos. (shrink)

This essay explores the nihilistic nature of the idea of postmodern aesthetics in the Western world by highlighting its historical and cultural specificity in contrast with non-Western postmodernities, in particular in East Asia, and this in spite of their formal similarities. We then have to question the nature, possibility and implication of Western postmodern aesthetics overcoming itself within the context of globalisation.

During its most vigorous period, the Vienna Circle movement was, by and large, kept rather marginal by the political and academic forces in its European home; they tended to see it as a dangerous search, in the Enlightenment tradition, for a world conception that would be free from metaphysical illusions, free from the kind of clericalism that had a strangle-hold on state and university, and free from the romantic madness of the rising fascist ideology. The wonder, in fact, is that (...) in its day, against such opposition, the Vienna Circle commanded adherence by such an array of distinguished intellectuals, even if they were only a small fraction of the total intelligentsia. (shrink)

A shorthand symbolism for the relational mapping of categories is introduced and developed on the basis of Nelson Goodman's structural methodology. Through a reconstruction of extensional isomorphism that Goodman introduces as a criterion for definitional accuracy, and a brief reminder of the argument structure behind his ‘new riddle of induction’, Goodman's radical ontological relativism is turned into a protological principle of what I call ‘domain constituting philosophy’. MSS is demonstrated with reference to Goodman's symbol theory, particularly his notion of exemplification, (...) as well as in a final structured comparison of Frege's ‘sense’ with Goodman's straightforward construction of ‘secondary extension’. (shrink)

Alienation as an aspect of the human condition has a long and storied history. Much of the attention has been focused, however, on alienation among humans themselves. Yet it is increasingly clear that we are in the process of alienating ourselves from the world and all of the creatures and objects in it. This discussion examines the second choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone and some analyses of the content and formal aspects of Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, in the context of Adorno’s (...) concept of “distinctness without domination,” as means of providing a brief analysis of the problem of alienation considered in this larger sense. Theseconsiderations enable the isolation of several important factors that have inhibited our insight into the seriousness of this form of alienation: First, alienation among humans has effectively distracted us from the increasing urgency of our alienation from the world and the things in it. Second, blinded by our spectacular illusion of “progress,” we continue to pay for it by wreaking destruction upon the planet, the very fount of our existence. Third, morality has only too often been seen as being located in rationalized (hierarchical) relationships among humans rather than as an equally shared, spiritual relationship among the human community,the rest of the biosphere, and the very rocks and water upon which we exist. This final point suggests changes in attitude and behavior that could help us avoid the most devastating effects of this more broadly conceived form of alienation. (shrink)

Hill and Levine offer alternative explanations of these conceivabilities, concluding that these conceivabilities are thereby defeated as evidence. However, this strategy fails because their explanations generalize to all conceivability judgments concerning phenomenal states. Consequently, one could defend absolutely any theory of phenomenal states against conceivability arguments in just this way. This result conflicts with too many of our common sense beliefs about the evidential value of conceivability with respect to phenomenal states. The general moral is that the application of such (...) principles of explanatory defeat is neither simple nor straightforward. (shrink)