Download or read book Effing the Ineffable written by Wesley J. Wildman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A meditation on how religious language tries to limn the liminal, conceive the inconceivable, speak the unspeakable, and say the unsayable. In Effing the Ineffable, Wesley J. Wildman confronts the human obsession with ultimate reality and our desire to conceive and speak of this reality through religious language, despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. Each chapter is a meditative essay on an aspect of life that, for most people, is fraught with special spiritual significance: dreaming, suffering, creating, slipping, balancing, eclipsing, loneliness, intensity, and bliss. These moments can inspire religious questioning and commitment, and, in extreme situations, drive us in search of ways to express what matters most to us. Drawing upon American pragmatist, Anglo-American analytic, and Continental traditions of philosophical theology, Wildman shows how, through direct description, religious symbolism, and phenomenological experience, the language games of religion become a means to attempt, and, in some sense, to accomplish this task. Wesley J. Wildman is Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics at Boston University. His many books include Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion and Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century, both also published by SUNY Press.
Download or read book Aliens written by George Edgar Slusser and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and when does there come to be an "anthropology of the alien?” This set of essays, written for the eighth J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Fantasy and Science Fiction, is concerned with the significance of that question. "[Anthropology] is the science that must designate the alien if it is to redefine a place for itself in the universe,” according to the Introduction. The idea of the alien is not new. In the Renaissance, Montaigne’s purpose in describing an alien encounter was excorporation--mankind was the "savage” because the artificial devices of nature controlled him. Shakespeare’s version of the alien encounter was incorporation; his character of Caliban is brought to the artificial, political world of man and incorporated into the body politic "The essays in this volume . . . show, in their general orientation, that the tribe of Shakespeare still, in literary studies at least, outnumbers that of Montaigne.” These essays show the interrelation of the excorporating possibilities to the internal soundings of the alien encounter within the human mind and form. This book is divided into three parts: "Searchings: The Quest for the Alien” includes "The Aliens in Our Mind,” by Larry Niven; "Effing the Ineffable,” by Gregory Benford; "Border Patrols,” by Michael Beehler; "Alien Aliens,” by Pascal Ducommun; and "Metamorphoses of the Dragon,” by George E. Slusser. "Sightings: The Aliens among Us” includes "Discriminating among Friends,” by John Huntington; "Sex, Superman, Sociobiology,” by Joseph D. Miller; "Cowboys and Telepaths,” by Eric S. Rabkin; "Robots,” by Noel Perrin; "Aliens in the Supermarket,” by George R. Guffey; and "Aliens 'R’ U.S.,” by Zoe Sofia. "Soundings: Man as the Alien” includes "H. G. Wells’ Familiar Aliens,” by John R. Reed; "Inspiration and Possession,” by Clayton Koelb; "Cybernauts in Cyberspace,” by David Porush; "The Human Alien,” by Leighton Brett Cooke; "From Astarte to Barbie,” by Frank McConnell; and "An Indication of Monsters;” by Colin Greenland.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Music written by Roger Scruton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is music, what is its value, and what does it mean? In this stimulating volume, Roger Scruton offers a comprehensive account of the nature and significance of music from the perspective of modern philosophy. The study begins with the metaphysics of sound. Scruton 7istinguishes sound from tone; analyzes rhythm, melody, and harmony; and explores the various dimensions of musical organization and musical meaning. Taking on various fashionable theories in the philosophy and theory of music, he presents a compelling case for the moral significance of music, its place in our culture, and the need for taste and discrimination in performing and listening to it. Laying down principles for musical analysis and criticism, this bold work concludes with a theory of culture--and a devastating demolition of modern popular music. "A provocative new study."--The Guardian
Download or read book Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry written by Wesley J. Wildman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-11-05 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can philosophy contribute to the study of religion? This book argues that the study of religion needs philosophy in the form of multidisciplinary comparative inquiry. Contradicting the current tendency to regard philosophical reflection and the academic study of religion as independent endeavors best kept apart, Wesley J. Wildman brings them together, offering a broader vision than that of traditional "philosophy of religion" and surmounting many of its difficulties. His newer conception of "religious philosophy" is well suited to the modern, multicultural, secular university. Through multidisciplinary comparative inquiry, religious philosophy allows for a variety of approaches—from historical and analytical work to evocative description and theoretical evaluation of truth claims—and both secular and religious thinkers participate. The tasks and varieties of religious philosophy as they arc across the world's religions and philosophies are discussed along with religious philosophy's modern and postmodern contexts. Wildman's thoughtful and thought-provoking book will be essential reading for all those concerned with the study of religion, present and future.
Download or read book Confessions of a Heretic Revised Edition written by Roger Scruton and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised edition of the Notting Hill Editions essay collection by the late Sir Roger Scruton with a new introduction by Douglas Murray. Confessions of a Heretic is a collection of provocative essays by the influential social commentator and polemicist Roger Scruton. Each “confession” reveals aspects of the author’s thinking that his critics would probably have advised him to keep to himself. In this selection, covering subjects from art and architecture to politics and nature conservation, Scruton challenges popular opinion on key aspects of our culture: What can we do to protect Western values against Islamist extremism? How can we nurture real friendship through social media? Why is the nation-state worth preserving? How should we achieve a timely death against the advances of modern medicine? This provocative collection seeks to answer the most pressing problems of our age. In his introduction, the bestselling author and commentator Douglas Murray writes of what it cost Scruton to express views considered unpalatable, and of the importance of these ideas after Scruton’s death.
Download or read book God Is written by Wesley J. Wildman and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-02-27 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your God is too small--way too small! What if God is not a human-like personal being but the God Beyond God of the Christian mystical traditions? What if God is the ultimate reality beyond all beings, including beyond all divine beings, indeed beyond all Being? It's a mind-bending idea. Speaking of God as a human-like personal being is much easier but people who care about the deepest mystical understandings of God within our traditions need to make the effort to speak about the God Beyond God, despite the difficulties. This book makes the attempt to speak of the God Beyond God in the language of the sermon, using metaphor and potent imagery tuned to the existential intensities of human life. The God Beyond God is closer to us than our jugular veins, vividly present in every moment of our lives. These sermons are practical and moving, and they also resonate with the most rigorous theological understandings of ultimate reality. Their deconstruction of our convenient fantasies about a divine being make these sermons emotionally intense and perhaps not suitable for beginners in the journey of faith. But veteran believers can breathe deeply in the air of these meditations, relaxing into the bliss of engaging ultimate reality without delusions, without deflections, and without controlling the object of our worship.
Download or read book Ultimate Realities written by Robert C. Neville and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores ultimate realities in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.
Download or read book Religious Truth written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores religious truth in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.
Download or read book Fidelity with Plausibility written by Wesley J. Wildman and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtually all human endeavors can be analyzed and modeled and understood through computer-aided study, and that is very much at the core of operations research, game theory, and decision science.Understanding the potential impact of any action is critical to the success of that action, and in ESTIMATING IMPACT Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum, with a stellar group of contributors, demonstrate how military or humanitarian interventions (or the decision not to intervene) can be rigorously analyzed beforehand and their likely impacts and ramifications predicted at levels appropriate to their scope. A wide range of modeling programs are available that support plan assessment and impact forecast, and they allow accurate prediction within an interdependent set of political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure systems, and experts involved in the use and development of these tools demonstrate how, when, and why they should be used.
Download or read book Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy written by Gregory Benford and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature—long held at the University of California, Riverside—have been a major influence in the study of science fiction and fantasy for thirty years. The conferences have attracted leading scholars whose papers are published in Eaton volumes found in university libraries throughout the world. This collection brings together 22 of the best papers—most with new afterwords by the authors—presented in chronological order to show how science fiction and fantasy criticism has evolved since 1979.
Download or read book Understanding Music written by Roger Scruton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Understanding Music and The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Roger Scruton set a new standard of rigour and seriousness in the philosophy of music. This collection of wide-ranging essays covers all aspects of the theory and practice of music, showing the significance of music as an expression of the moral life. The book is split into two parts, the first is devoted to the aesthetics and theory of music and the second consists of critical studies of individual composers, thinkers and works including essays on Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven's Ninth, Janácek & Schoenberg, Szymanowski and Adorno. Understanding Music will appeal to specialists in philosophy and musicology and also to music lovers who wish to find deeper meaning in this mysterious art. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new preface from the author.
Download or read book Believing Bullshit written by Stephen Law and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies eight key mechanisms that can transform a set of ideas into a psychological flytrap. The author suggests that, like the black holes of outer space, from which nothing, not even light, can escape, our contemporary cultural landscape contains numerous intellectual black-holes—belief systems constructed in such a way that unwary passers-by can similarly find themselves drawn in. While such self-sealing bubbles of belief will most easily trap the gullible or poorly educated, even the most intelligent and educated of us are potentially vulnerable. Some of the world’s greatest thinkers have fallen in, never to escape. This witty, insightful critique will help immunize readers against the wiles of cultists, religious and political zealots, conspiracy theorists, promoters of flaky alternative medicines, and others by clearly setting out the tricks of the trade by which such insidious belief systems are created and maintained.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy written by Tomás McAuley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-04 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, or an inescapably embodied human practice, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. In turn, musicians of all stripes have called on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement, and scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into music and into the worlds that sustain it. In this Handbook, contributors build on this legacy to conceptualize the rich interactions of Western music and philosophy as a series of meeting points between two vital spheres of human activity. They draw together key debates at the intersection of music studies and philosophy, offering a field-defining overview while also forging new paths. Chapters cover a wide range of musics and philosophies, including concert, popular, jazz, and electronic musics, and both analytic and continental philosophy.
Download or read book The Making of Buddhist Modernism written by David L. McMahan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great deal of Buddhist literature and scholarly writing about Buddhism of the past 150 years reflects, and indeed constructs, a historically unique modern Buddhism, even while purporting to represent ancient tradition, timeless teaching, or the "essentials" of Buddhism. This literature, Asian as well as Western, weaves together the strands of different traditions to create a novel hybrid that brings Buddhism into alignment with many of the ideologies and sensibilities of the post-Enlightenment West. In this book, David McMahan charts the development of this "Buddhist modernism." McMahan examines and analyzes a wide range of popular and scholarly writings produced by Buddhists around the globe. He focuses on ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity, for example in the realms of science, mythology, literature, art, psychology, and religious pluralism. He shows how certain themes cut across cultural and geographical contexts, and how this form of Buddhism has been created by multiple agents in a variety of times and places. His position is critical but empathetic: while he presents Buddhist modernism as a construction of numerous parties with varying interests, he does not reduce it to a mistake, a misrepresentation, or fabrication. Rather, he presents it as a complex historical process constituted by a variety of responses -- sometimes trivial, often profound -- to some of the most important concerns of the modern era.
Download or read book Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective written by F. LeRon Shults and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective provides the first comprehensive treatment of the work of Wesley J. Wildman, one of the most inventive thinkers in the field of religious studies. Scholars with expertise in philosophical, theological, and scientific approaches to the study of religion offer critical and constructive engagements with Wildman's astonishingly creative and integrative oeuvre. The essays address themes that will be of interest to those concerned with the current state of scholarship on religion from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, ethics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others. The volume concludes with a response by Wildman.
Download or read book The Promise of Artificial Intelligence written by Brian Cantwell Smith and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.
Download or read book Spirit Tech written by Wesley J. Wildman, Ph.D and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring a Foreword by Mikey Siegel, founder of Consciousness Hacking. Technology can now control the spiritual experience. This is a journey through the high-tech aids for psychological growth that are changing our world, while exploring the safety, authenticity and ethics of this new world. We already rely on technology to manage our health, sleep, relationships, and finances, so it’s no surprise that we’re turning to technological aids for the spiritual journey. From apps that help us pray or meditate, to cybernauts seeking the fast track to nirvana through magnetic brain stimulation, we are on the brink of the most transformative revolution in the practice of religion: an era in which we harness the power of “spirit tech” to deepen our experience of the divine. Spirit tech products are rapidly improving in sophistication and power, and ordinary people need a trustworthy guide. Through their own research and insiders’ access to the top innovators and early adopters, Wesley J. Wildman and Kate J. Stockly take you deep inside an evolving world: - Find out how increasingly popular “wearables” work on your brain, promising a shortcut to transformative meditative states. - Meet the inventor of the “God Helmet” who developed a tool to increase psychic skills, and overcome fear, sadness, and anger. - Visit churches that use ayahuasca as their sacrament and explore the booming industry of psychedelic tourism. - Journey to a mansion in the heart of Silicon Valley where a group of scientists and entrepreneurs are working feverishly to bring brain-based spirit tech applications to the masses. - Discover a research team who achieved brain-to-brain communication between individuals thousands of miles apart, harnessing neurofeedback techniques to sync and share emotions among group members. Spirit Tech offers readers a compelling glimpse into the future and is the definitive guide to the fascinating world of new innovations for personal transformation, spiritual growth, and pushing the boundaries of human nature.
