Download or read book The ineffable and what that has to do with humanity written by M.R. Holt and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the identities of godship, the nature of reality, utility of belief, and the understanding of consciousness. This book is designed for those leaving or renegotiating their faith and redefining or reappraising their identities and by extension that of god’s. And thus it functions as A critique of societies and the gods who created them. From neuroscience and biological anthropology to social injustice and the history of modern culture this book will attempt to help the reader deconstructing the socioeconomic, political, patriarchally religious identities they’ve adopted from their corresponding cultures. “We did not leave Christianity because we wanted to “sin”, we left because we found the entire institution to be morally repugnant and we refused to be complicit in bringing about a heaven built of someone else’s hell. It is not death we fear, but living under tyranny.” This is not another argument for or against the existence of god but rather an examination of the phenomena often attributed to god and a discussion about each culture and ages claims about those gods identities. From biological anthropology and evolutionary psychology to sociology and the humanities. This book can best be described as A mixture of science and poetry surrounding one of the deepest cosmological question known to man. pondering the meaning of life.
Download or read book Ineffability and Its Metaphysics written by Silvia Jonas and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can art, religion, or philosophy afford ineffable insights? If so, what are they? The idea of ineffability has puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein. In Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion and Philosophy, Silvia Jonas examines different ways of thinking about what ineffable insights might involve metaphysically, and shows which of these are in fact incoherent. Jonas discusses the concepts of ineffable properties and objects, ineffable propositions, ineffable content, and ineffable knowledge, examining the metaphysical pitfalls involved in these concepts. Ultimately, she defends the idea that ineffable insights as found in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical contexts are best understood in terms of self-acquaintance, a particular kind of non-propositional knowledge. Ineffability as a philosophical topic is as old as the history of philosophy itself, but contributions to the exploration of ineffability have been sparse. The theory developed by Jonas makes the concept tangible and usable in many different philosophical contexts.
Download or read book What It Means to Be Human and What That Has to Do with the Ineffable written by M.R. Holt and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2022-05-23 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book for those deconstructing their religious, nationalistic, socioeconomic, and occupational identities, and the subsequent stories we’ve come to believe about what kind of world we live in. For those searching for meaning in the here and now, to those ready to rediscover and redefine what it means to be human. From ancient mythology to neuroscience, this book attempts to grapple with the human experience across culture, politics, and religious demographics. “If the choice is to be correct or compassionate, to be consecrated or complete, to be content or conscious, the choice is simple, but not easy.”
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 The Free Person and the Free Economy written by Anthony J. Santelli and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thisvolume applies the praxeological and theoretical foundations of the personalist tradition to free-market economic theory. This work defends economic liberty in theologically sensitive terms that reference the personalist tradition, without compromising the disciplinary integrity of either economics or social ethics.
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 Music and the Ineffable written by Vladimir Jankélévitch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the philosophy of music—now available in English to a new generation of readers Vladimir Jankélévitch left behind a remarkable body of work steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and, as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetics and on modernist composers such as Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jankélévitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sustained examination and dismantling of the idea of musical hermeneutics in its conventional sense. Music, Jankélévitch argues, is not a hieroglyph, not a language or sign system; nor does it express emotions, depict landscapes or cultures, or narrate. On the other hand, music cannot be imprisoned within the icy, morbid notion of pure structure or autonomous discourse. Yet if musical works are not a cipher awaiting the decoder, music is nonetheless entwined with human experience, and with the physical, material reality of music in performance. Music is "ineffable," as Jankélévitch puts it, because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains. Jankélévitch's singular work on music was central to such figures as Roland Barthes and Catherine Clément, and the complex textures and rhythms of his lyrical prose sound a unique note, until recently seldom heard outside the francophone world.
Download or read book Capturing the Ineffable written by Philip Y. Kao and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in ethnographic case studies that examine experiences from which wisdom emerges, Capturing the Ineffable provides a rigorous analysis of the sociocultural context of wisdom in the contemporary world. Each chapter in the volume deals with different aspects and showcases how communities in different contexts - nursing homes, religious organizations, corporations, and monastic institutions, for example - engage with the ineffability of wisdom. Contributors draw from a range of disciplines and cross-cultural and historical data in order to interpret the meaning and value of wisdom as a human endeavour. This book also represents an anthropological method for evaluating various philosophical and scientific approaches to understanding wisdom, including how wisdom is learned and taught. Readers will be able to appreciate how action, emotion, uncertainty, and cultural systems come to bear on wisdom as a value in human life and expression. In the end, Capturing the Ineffable reveals how the conception and paradoxical nature of wisdom dispels the dichotomies of self/other, structure/agency, known/unknown, nature/culture, and the like. What is at stake is a recasting of wisdom as a particular kind of anthropological endeavour and, thus, a return to and modification of philosophical anthropology.
Download or read book The Preacher s Complete Homiletical Commentary on the Old Testament written by Anonymous and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book When Souls Had Wings written by Terryl L. Givens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the pre-existence of the soul has been extremely important, widespread, and persistent throughout Western history--from even before the philosophy of Plato to the poetry of Robert Frost. This book offers the first systematic history of this little explored feature of Western culture. Terryl Givens underscores how durable (and controversial) this idea has been throughout history, highlighting the theological dangers it has represented, and revealing how prominently it has featured in poetry, literature, and art.
Download or read book The Supraconscience of Humanity written by Edward H. Strauch and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humankind evolved through three psychological stages - subconscience, conscience, and supraconscience. Ritual and myth, cosmology and theism marked phases of psychic integration, initiating our supraconscience evolution. Four archetypes: temperance, 'the great chain of being,' Biblical interpretation, and Divinity became the Cosmic consciousness of secular man. Study of Scripture developed a communal supraconscience. Mystics' dedication showed us the deeper meaning of a life purpose. Yet, heretics taught man faith in the superior power of the free mind. Heresy helped evolve humanity's secular supraconscience. Indeed, the exponential growth of psyche's powers and the continuous revelation of new, secular knowledge seems the fulfillment of Revelation. Finally, the enlightened understood that when God created the earth, he included evolution so that our kind would evolve a superior nature. Hence, religious and scientific, secular and humanistic developments reveal themselves to be the primary powers accelerating human evolution. Together, they have nurtured humankind's ever-evolving supraconscience.
Download or read book Human Sexuality and the Nuptial Mystery written by Roy R. Jeal and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays was originally presented at the St. Margaret's Consultation on Doctrine, Liturgy, and Preaching held at St. Margaret's Anglican Church in Winnipeg, Canada in 2008. They consider human sexuality and marriage from a distinctly theological rather than polemical standpoint, aiming to avoid frequently polarized debates. The interesting commonality indicated in the articles is that sex and marriage are not about self-fulfillment, but are outwardly directed, aimed toward the other person, toward growth, maturity, and deepened spirituality, for the benefit of the church, for productive good, and for children. The first section explores theological and ethical issues surrounding human sexuality and aims toward understanding the nature of relationships in these contexts. The second section explores the spiritual nature of marriage and the history of thinking on marriage and family within Christian theology. For those interested in pursuing truly theological engagement with marriage and sexuality, this collection is required reading.
Download or read book Divine Providence and Human Agency written by Alexander S. Jensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divine Providence and Human Agency develops an understanding of God and God's relation to creation that perceives God as sovereign over creation while, at the same time, allowing for a meaningful notion of human freedom. This book provides a bridge between contemporary approaches that emphasise human freedom, such as process theology and those influenced by it, and traditional theologies that stress divine omnipotence.This book argues that it is essential for Christian theology to maintain that God is ultimately in charge of history: otherwise there would be no solid grounds for Christian hope. Yet, the modern human self-understanding as free agent within certain limitations must be taken seriously. Jensen approaches this apparent contradiction from within a consistently trinitarian framework. Jensen argues that a Christian understanding of God must be based on the experience of the saving presence of Christ in the Church, leading to an apophatic and consistently trinitarian theology. This serves as the framework for the discussion of divine omnipotence and human freedom. On the basis of the theological foundation established in this book, it is possible to frame the problem in a way that makes it possible to live within this tension. Building on this foundation, Jensen develops an understanding of history as the unfolding of the divine purpose and as an expression of God's very being, which is self-giving love and desire for communion. This book offers an important contribution to the debate of the doctrine of God in the context of an evolutionary universe.
Download or read book Alone in the World written by Van Huyssteen and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2006-04-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Alone in the World? -- first given as the 2004 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh -- J. Wentzel van Huyssteen develops the interdisciplinary dialogue that he set out in The Shaping of Rationality (1999), applying this methodology to the uncharted waters between theological anthropology and paleoanthropology. Among other things, van Huyssteen argues that scientific notions of human uniqueness help us to ground theological notions of human distinctiveness in flesh-and-blood, embodied experiences and protect us from overly complex theological abstractions regarding the "image of God." Focusing on the interdisciplinary problem of human origins and distinctiveness, van Huyssteen accesses the origins of the embodied human mind through the spectacular prehistoric cave paintings of western Europe, fifteen of which are reproduced in color in this volume. Boldly connecting the widely separated fields of Christian theology and paleoanthropology through careful interdisciplinary reflection, Alone in the World? will encourage sustained investigation into the question of human uniqueness.
Download or read book Deep Refrains written by Michael Gallope and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep Refrains is a wide-ranging investigation of the philosophy of music. Michael Gallope asks what it means for music to "speak” when it is not saying anything in particular. To answer this question, he turns to the writings of some of the most revered thinkers of the twentieth century--Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jank�l�vitch, Gilles Deleuze, and F�lix Guattari. For these theorists, Gallope argues, the paradox that music is both ineffable and yet harbors deep philosophical wisdoms is fertile ground for thinking outside of conceptual boundaries. It provides the lens for a utopian potentiality that inspires hope (Bloch), an ethical critique of modernity (Adorno), an exemplification of the ephemeral movement of lived time (Jank�l�vitch), and a sonic extension of the syncopated, contrapuntal rhythms of sense and social life (Deleuze and Guattari). Gallope argues that a philosophical engagement with music’s ineffability rarely calls for silence or declarations of the unspeakable. Rather, it asks us to think through the ways in which the impact of music is made to address complex philosophical problems specific to the modern world.
Download or read book Virtual Humans written by David Burden and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual Humans provides a much-needed definition of what constitutes a ‘virtual human’ and places virtual humans within the wider context of Artificial Intelligence development. It explores the technical approaches to creating a virtual human, as well as emergent issues such as embodiment, identity, agency and digital immortality, and the resulting ethical challenges. The book presents an overview of current research and practice in this area, and outlines the major challenges faced by today’s developers and researchers. The book examines the possibility for using virtual humans in a variety of roles, from personal assistants to teaching, coaching and knowledge management, and the book situates these discussions around familiar applications (e.g. Siri, Cortana, Alexa) and the portrayal of virtual humans within Science Fiction. Features Presents a comprehensive overview of this rapidly developing field Provides an array of relevant, real-life examples from expert practitioners and researchers from around the globe in how to create the avatar body, mind, senses and ability to communicate Intends to be broad in scope yet practical in approach, so that it can serve the needs of several different audiences, including researchers, teachers, developers and anyone with an interest in where these technologies might take us Covers a wide variety of issues which have been neglected in other research texts; for example, definitions and taxonomies, the ethical challenges of virtual humans and issues around digital immortality Includes numerous examples and extensive references
Download or read book Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the Civilization of Europe written by Jaime Luciano Balmes and published by . This book was released on 1851 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
