This article critiques Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe’s “Ontology, Realism and the Persistence of Ancestral Persons” response to Katrina Flikschuh’s “The Arc of Personhood” argument on the theoretical grounding of ancestors in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s work. Flikschuh argues that ancestors are uncertain and redundant such that one can only account for them practically. Contrastingly, Oyowe defends Menkiti’s concept of ancestors as social kinds in his innovative attempt to theoretically ground them. The article argues that the dialogue between these thinkers reflects an exogenous reading (...) of African experiential reality, effectively lending itself to epistemic erasure. In the end, the existence of ancestors is ambiguous at best in both their accounts. The article first questions Flikschuh’s view and suggests that it is paradigmatic of white solipsism. Thereafter, the article contends that while Oyowe’s social ontology injunction challenges Western realism, he fails to account for mind-independent ancestral persons. In the end, he only partially captures African experiential reality, thereby reflecting Western ways of being. (shrink)

Se busca presentar y analizar críticamente la filosofía interpretacionista de Günter Abel como una de las reflexiones más recientes y originales sobre el fenómeno de la interpretación. Al recoger atisbos provenientes de diversos horizontes teóricos (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Goodman, Davidson), Abel ..

It is commonly argued that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics rests upon a criticism of the method of natural sciences that, by establishing a monopoly of what might be deemed as true knowledge, would exclude different forms of non-scientific experiences of truth. Thus, the article aims first at examining this assumption based on an analysis of his hermeneutic dialectics and ontology of language, which he develops in the third part of Truth and Method. This analysis reveals that his criticism of scientific method (...) rests upon the idea that the being is related to the happening of meaning and of human beings as individuals whose understanding of the world is questioned and caused by such happening. These ontological approaches make possible to characterize what might be thetrue method of thinking and access to truth. Secondly, the article aims at identifying three methodologicalprinciples that would guide a genuine exercise of hermeneutic thinking: a) The principle of determining the topos of understanding, which demands to reveal the relations of meaning that connect us to what we desire to understand; b) Principle of correction, which makes possible that understanding continuously “improves” both our interpretations and self-descriptions that actors provide of their own actions; and c) Principle of sensitivity towards happening, which demands to carefully listen to every possible relation of meaning that shape phenomena, as well as to the variations and mutations of meaning they experience. (shrink)

The Reliquary of the Manger in the Church of São Roque in Lisbon was created in the early seventeenth century to house supposed fragments of the crib in Bethlehem, given to the Jesuits in Lisbon by Pope Clement VIII. The gilded and silvered bronze reliquary was paid for in part by a donation of c. 1615 from Donna Maria Rolim de Moura, wife of Luís da Gama, a great-grandson of Vasco da Gama. The size of the donation—specifically, the (...) coin involved--has been variously reported and this investigation argues for a correct value, as well as presenting its equivalence in modern currency. The argument is backed up by the discovery in Lisbon of an early seventeenth-century inventory which records the donation. (shrink)

Sūkṣmāgama: Volume III, Chapters 54 to 85. Critical Edition. By S. Sambandhaśivācarya, B. Dagens, M.-L. Barazer-Billoret, and T. Ganesan with the collaboration of J.-M. Creisméas. Collection Indologie, vol. 114.3. Pondichéry: institut FranCçais de Pondichéry, 2018. Pp. cxcviii + 348.

Sūkṣmāgama I: Chapters 1–13. Critical Edition. Edited with an introduction by S. Sambandhaśivācārya and T. Ganesan. Collection Indologie, vol. 114, no. 1. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry / École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2010. Pp. l + 203. 650 Rs., € 28. Sūkṣmāgama II: Chapters 14–53. Critical Edition. Edited with an introduction by S. Sambandhaśivācārya, B. Dagens, M.-l. Barazer-Billoret, and T. Ganesan. Jean Filliozat Series in South Asian Culture and History, no. 3. Pondicherry: institut Français de Pondichéry, 2012. Pp. clxiii + 403.

This book takes a bold new look at ways of exploring the nature, origins, and potentials of consciousness within the context of science and religion.

This essay reflects on 25 years since Christian Bioethics began publication and, in somewhat autobiographical fashion, engages two core concerns. First, although “non-ecumenism” may often appear a pretext for contention and division, I suggest that a respectful non-ecumenism may provide the opportunity for dialogue and the occasion for employing certain tools from religious studies. Second, although many are skeptical about the possibilities of identifying a “common morality,” a defense of that notion provides a plausible explanation for the development of limited (...) consensus on some issues in bioethics. (shrink)

Do we remember what pain feels like? Investigations into this question have sometimes led to ambiguous or apparently contradictory results. Building on research on pain memory by Rohini Terry and colleagues, I argue that this lack of agreement may be due in part to the difficulty researchers face when trying to convey to their study's participants the type of memory they are being tasked with recalling. To address this difficulty, I introduce the concept of 'qualitative memory', which, arguably, is the (...) sort of memory we have of what red looks like yet lack with respect to pain. I also briefly address a number of consequences the acknowledgment of qualitative memory would potentially have for philosophy, arguing that if we fail to have qualitative memories of certain sensations, such as pain, the standard philosophical accounts of experience, rational choice, and the sources of moral action may all need revision. (shrink)

This paper examines the standard conceptualizations of the notion of hallucination in light of various non-ordinary phenomenological patterns associated with altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive agents. It is argued that in general, the conceptualizations encountered in the literature do not do justice to the richness and complexity that the psychological phenomenology actually exhibits. A close inspection of this phenomenology reveals some pertinent distinctions which are usually not made in the scientific literature. On the one hand, the discussion is (...) based on first-hand experiences and, on the other hand, it is grounded in empirical and theoretical cognitive investigations of the phenomenology of human consciousness. Theoretically, the discussion is grounded in an approach highlighting the centrality of experience, meaning and action in cognition. (shrink)

What is human reason, how did it arise, how is it connected to animal reason? In The Enigma of Reason (ER) Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017) suggest that reason evolved driven by the need to support communication and coordination in small human groups. They contrast this to the idea that the function of reason is to enable humans to make better decisions and develop more accurate beliefs. After a summation of the ER argument, the theory is critiqued and two (...) of their assumptions -- that human cognition is based on massive modularity and that reason co-evolved with and is dependent upon language -- are challenged. Alternatives to these assumptions are presented from the perspective of pattern matching processes in neural dynamical systems, which it is asserted provides a more realistic approach to the functioning of the brain and mind. (shrink)

Stephen Law’s evil-god challenge is the argument that since an evil god is just as likely as the God of theism, there is no reason to believe that theism is true over believing there is a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnimalevolent. There have been several attempts to answer the challenge, but recently John Collins has defended the evil-god challenge and also extended the argument past Law’s original formulation. In this article, I defend the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (...) against the evil-god challenge. In particular, I explain how Aquinas’s theodicy involving God’s goodness and Aquinas’s privation view of evil avoid the challenge. (shrink)

El artículo pone de manifiesto, en primer lugar, la escasa bibliografía que existe en español sobre el tema de la ecología en las obras y el pensamiento de san Agustín. Posteriormente, señala los tres peligros que existen al abordar este tema, a saber, el del anacronismo, el de la tergiversación de los textos agustinianos y el de la excesiva espiritualización del tema. Después hace una breve reseña de los aciertos de la obra de Scott Dunham The Trinity and the Creation (...) in Augustine. An ecological analysis, destacando que el Dios creador es el mismo que el Dios trino, y que en el pensamiento agustiniano sobre la creación no está ausente la cristología y la pneumatología. Se presentan a continuación las líneas ecológicas agustinianas, destacando, en primer lugar, la importancia de la Sagrada Escritura en el pensamiento del doctor de Hi¬pona. Luego se pone de manifiesto cómo la creación es comparable a un libro, en el que es preciso leer la presencia y la obra redentora de Dios. Se destaca que la naturaleza tiene un valor sacramental en un sentido lato y por ello su cuidado es necesario. Por otro lado, se muestra la figura del ser humano como un “villicus”, es decir, como el administrador o el guardián de la creación, prolongando en los escritos de san Agustín el mandato bíblico del libro del Génesis. Se señala asimismo la interrelacionalidad de todos los seres en el cosmos, la idea de una creación continuada y la importancia de la conversión ecológica. (shrink)