“The Bodhisattva’s Practice of Enlightenment” interprets a Los Angeles Times newspaper opinion piece by Thich Nhat Hanh as a contemporary image of enlightenment with far-reaching implications. Written in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King and not intended for a Buddhist audience, this brief newspaper article nevertheless provides glimpses into the contemporary meaning of enlightenment. The chapter considers Thich Nhat Hanh’s comments in relation to the basic principles of Buddhist ethics before turning to the Vimalakīrti sūtra, a classical (...) Mahayana Buddhist scripture, to extend an understanding of what it would mean to experience the world through an in-depth awareness of “no-self.” Dwelling on the bodhisattva’s effort to cultivate generosity of spirit, the chapter considers the kinds of human relations that Thich Nhat Hanh’s sense of enlightenment entails. (shrink)

Despite his enormous bibliography of written works, Ricoeur has never devoted an entire tome to either moral philosophy or ethics per se. Three chapters of one work, Oneself as Another, do, however, encompass what he calls summarily his “little ethics.” To understand Ricoeur’s ethical project, it is important to see its genesis in his earlier anthropological studies and to follow its evolving nature into a hermeneutical poetics. Ricoeur’s ethical orientation is teleological. He makes a strong distinction between ethics and morality, (...) with ethics being comprised of three inseparable components: the “good life,” the other, and justice. The essential hermeneutical nature of his ethics becomes fully apparent in his discussion of practical wisdom. (shrink)

Time and narratice technique compared. Two novelists, Heliodorus, 3rd century author of the novel Aethiopica and Sigrid Combüchen, contemporary Swedish novelist using a dystopian Europe around 2050 as a scenic setting. In both stories girls and women are captured and killed by soldiers. Both narrators are external to the story being told, presented in the past tense. But Combüchen´s narrator adopts it as a confession, and a turning point in his career as a commanding general, characterized by"double-bind".

The biblical image of Wisdom as the power who “orders all things well” in nature and in human life can be read in the light of contemporary information theory. Some current scientific speculation offers an interpretation of reality as a vast information‐processing system, in which informational situations are continuously transformed through algorithmic operations. This interpretation finds a metaphysical counterpart in the distinction between “nature natured” and “nature naturing” in the philosophical theology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This confluence of religious, metaphysical, (...) and scientific imagery suggests a picture of the world in which the processes of “nature naturing,”“human humaning,” and “God Godding” inform and recur in each other. (shrink)

Islamic education; Islamic ethics; thesis.

Maistre’s Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg is modeled on Plato’s Laws. Plato and Maistre both demand the political control of natural inquiry, and implement these controls through theodictic conversation. Maistre, following the lead of Plato’s legislator, publishes an exemplary conversation about providence between a young man tempted by an atheistic Enlightenment and two older, wiser, and more learned men of affairs. Maistre defends providentialism from materialist interpretations of natural science even as Plato defended it from ancient materialism.

A.P. Martinich's interpretation that in Leviathan Thomas Hobbes believed that the laws of nature are the commands of God and that he did not rely on the Bible to prove this has been criticized by Greg Forster in this journal (2003). Forster uses these criticisms to develop his own view that Hobbes was insincere when he professed religious beliefs. We argue that Forster misrepresents Martinich's view, is mistaken about what evidence is relevant to interpreting whether Hobbes was sincere or not, (...) and is mistaken about some of Hobbes's central doctrines. Forster's criticisms are worth discussing at length for at least three reasons. He takes the debate about Hobbes's sincerity to a new level of sophistication; his misinterpretations of Hobbes may become accepted as correct; and his criticisms raise issues about the proper method of interpreting historical texts. (shrink)