Religious Naturalism Today

Religious Naturalism Today PDF

Author: Jerome A. Stone

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2008-12-18

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0791477916

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Previously a forgotten option in religious thinking, religious naturalism is coming back. It seeks to explore and encourage religious ways of responding to the world on a completely naturalistic basis without a supreme being or ground of being. In this book, Jerome A. Stone traces its history and analyzes some of the issues dividing religious naturalists. He includes analysis of nearly fifty distinguished philosophers, theologians, scientists, and figures in art and literature, both living and dead. They range from Ursula Goodenough, Gordon Kaufman, William Dean, Thomas Berry, and Gary Snyder to Jan Christiaan Smuts, William Bernhardt, Gregory Bateson, and Sharon Welch.

Connecting Christ

Connecting Christ PDF

Author: Paul Louis Metzger

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0849947243

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Encourages Christians to be open to communication with people of different faiths about religion and offers practical guidance for dealing with controversial topics such as Hell, fascism, and homosexuality.

American Naturalism and the Jews

American Naturalism and the Jews PDF

Author: Donald Pizer

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13: 0252092171

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American Naturalism and the Jews examines the unabashed anti-Semitism of five notable American naturalist novelists otherwise known for their progressive social values. Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser all pushed for social improvements for the poor and oppressed, while Edith Wharton and Willa Cather both advanced the public status of women. But they all also expressed strong prejudices against the Jewish race and faith throughout their fiction, essays, letters, and other writings, producing a contradiction in American literary history that has stymied scholars and, until now, gone largely unexamined. In this breakthrough study, Donald Pizer confronts this disconcerting strain of anti-Semitism pervading American letters and culture, illustrating how easily prejudice can coexist with even the most progressive ideals. Pizer shows how these writers' racist impulses represented more than just personal biases, but resonated with larger social and ideological movements within American culture. Anti-Semitic sentiment motivated such various movements as the western farmers' populist revolt and the East Coast patricians' revulsion against immigration, both of which Pizer discusses here. This antagonism toward Jews and other non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicities intersected not only with these authors' social reform agendas but also with their literary method of representing the overpowering forces of heredity, social or natural environment, and savage instinct.

Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze

Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze PDF

Author: Tim Flanagan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 3030663981

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​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy (to wit, in the respective forms by which thought is phrased, predicated, and proposed).The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility (as attested in its emblem-books) adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading (as St Jerome encountering Origen’s Hexapla).

Meaning and Mystery

Meaning and Mystery PDF

Author: David M. Holley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-11-19

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781444315622

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Meaning and Mystery offers a challenge to the way Philosophyhas traditionally approached the issue of belief in God as atheoretical problem, proposing instead a form of reflection moreappropriate to the practical nature of the issue. Makes use of abundant illustrative material, from bothliterature, such as Les Misérables, Edwin Abott’sFlatland, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and LeoTolstoy’s A Confession, and popular culture, such asadvertisements, the television series Joan of Arcadia andthe film Stranger Than Fiction Uses imaginative scenarios to offer explanations of centralconcepts Incorporates theories on human thought and behavior inexploring the formation of religious belief Written in a style that is accessible to readers with littlebackground knowledge of philosophy

The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism

The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism PDF

Author: Kelly James Clark

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 1118657608

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The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism provides a systematic introduction to philosophical naturalism and its relation to other schools of thought. Features contributions from an international array of established and emerging scholars from across the humanities Explores the historical development of naturalism and its ascension to the dominant orthodoxy in the Western academy Juxtaposes theoretical criticisms with impassioned defenses, encapsulating contemporary debates on naturalism Includes discussions of metaphysics, realism, feminism, science, knowledge, truth, mathematics, free will, and ethics viewed through a naturalist lens

Philosophy of Psychedelics

Philosophy of Psychedelics PDF

Author: Chris Letheby

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-08-05

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0192581090

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Recent clinical trials show that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin can be given safely in controlled conditions, and can cause lasting psychological benefits with one or two administrations. Supervised psychedelic sessions can reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and improve well-being in healthy volunteers, for months or even years. But these benefits seem to be mediated by "mystical" experiences of cosmic consciousness, which prompts a philosophical concern: do psychedelics cause psychological benefits by inducing false or implausible beliefs about the metaphysical nature of reality? This book is the first scholarly monograph in English devoted to the philosophical analysis of psychedelic drugs. Its central focus is the apparent conflict between the growing use of psychedelics in psychiatry and the philosophical worldview of naturalism. Within the book, Letheby integrates empirical evidence and philosophical considerations in the service of a simple conclusion: this "Comforting Delusion Objection" to psychedelic therapy fails. While exotic metaphysical ideas do sometimes come up, they are not, on closer inspection, the central driver of change in psychedelic therapy. Psychedelics lead to lasting benefits by altering the sense of self, and changing how people relate to their own minds and lives-not by changing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. The upshot is that a traditional conception of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality can be reconciled with naturalism (the philosophical position that the natural world is all there is). Controlled psychedelic use can lead to genuine forms of knowledge gain and spiritual growth-even if no Cosmic Consciousness or transcendent divine Reality exists. Philosophy of Psychedelics is an indispensable guide to the literature for researchers already engaged in the field of psychedelic psychiatry, and for researchers-especially philosophers-who want to become acquainted with this increasingly topical field.

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters PDF

Author: Robert E. Innis

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2022-04-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1438488262

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We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

Ernest Sosa Encountering Chinese Philosophy

Ernest Sosa Encountering Chinese Philosophy PDF

Author: Yong Huang

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-01-13

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350265799

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A major figure in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Ernest Sosa is a pioneer of contemporary virtue epistemology. Engaging with his important work for the first time, a team of renowned scholars of Chinese philosophy bring Western analytic epistemology into dialogue with themes and issues in the history of the Chinese tradition in order to reveal multiple points of connection. Drawing on thinkers and texts from Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese Buddhism, chapters explore issues central to virtue epistemology, such as the reliabilist and responsibilist divide, the distinction between virtues constitutive of knowledge and virtues auxiliary to knowledge, epistemic competence, and the role of testimony. Including Sosa's constructive and systematic responses to each scholar's interpretation of his work, this volume demonstrates the value of cross-cultural dialogue, advancing the field of virtue epistemology, and paving the way for further engagement between philosophical traditions.