Contemporary Philosophy Research Articles

Sophistry, Rhetoric and Politics

The article aims to shed light on the connection between rhetoric and politics, and its dissemination in the sophistic and philosophical tradition. The argumentation is based on the conceptions of two contemporary philosophers – Barbara Cassin and Hans Blumenberg, who appear as the protagonists of positions according to which rhetoric takes up a significant place in political life. Since Plato, the sophists were treated as other pre-Socratics, as demagogs, who do not hold the truth but spread a false opinion. The philosophers share a conviction that speech immediately expresses reality, and they also prohibited following the way of non-Being (Parmenides). The sophists (Gorgias, Protagoras) shared the position that speech expresses only itself, but not reality. Two opposite (but related) ways of thinking are best seen in M. Heidegger’s and H. Arendt’s philosophies. Keeping in mind the main theme, Blumenberg’s philosophical position includes logos as the mean of distancing, the art of politics is determined by the ability to delay decisions and soften conflicts by rhetorical means, while Cassins’ logology is understood as the ontology.

The Limits of Freedom

The research discusses a number of interrelated ideas, which are intended to lead us to the conclusion that absolute freedom is absolute corrupt, and that freedom is not limited by law and ethical and social and political controls is a chaos that leads to conflicts and dismantling the ties of society, and awareness of society's rights to maintain cohesion through The introduction of the liberal concept of freedom in contemporary political philosophy.

The metaphysical dimension in Shakir Hassan Al Said's painting

The first chapter (the methodological framework of the research) included the research problem, which was manifested in the following question: What is the metaphysical dimension in Shaker Hassan Al Said's drawings? As for the importance of the research and the need for it, the research will be a continuation of the process of other researches that preceded it in the field of contemporary Iraqi painting. It will contribute to clarifying the concept of the metaphysical dimension in Shaker Hassan Al Said's drawings. The grandmother of the subject being plowing in virgin areas of knowledge. The current research aims to (know the metaphysical dimension in Shaker Hassan Al Said's drawings). While the current research is limited to the study of: Spatial Boundaries: Iraq. Objective limits: a study of the metaphysical dimension in the drawings of Shakir Hassan Al Said, executed with different materials on different materials. Time limits: 1990 AD - 2000 AD. While the theoretical framework of the second chapter focused on studying contemporary Iraqi philosophy and painting. While the third chapter concerned the methodological framework: the research community, where the researcher looked at the published and available works of the artist Shaker Hassan Al Said’s paintings, which were specified in relation to the metaphysical representations in the drawings of Shaker Hassan Al Said, and limited the research community’s framework to the limits of the research in time and place. In a manner that covers the limits of the research and achieve its goal and ensures that the researcher monitors the largest amount of sample models that are working and the subject of the current research. Research sample: The researcher deliberately selected a sample form for his research, a painting from the framework of the research community. Research tool: The researcher relied on the indicators that the theoretical framework concluded for analyzing the research sample models. In his research, the researcher adopted the descriptive approach in analyzing the content of the artwork as a method followed in studies dealing with paintings by description and analysis. The fourth chapter came as follows, Results: Nostalgia and appeal to past worlds are images of metaphysical worlds present in the artist's achievement. The metaphysical power of the artist's senses aims to express the essence of things. Conclusions: metaphysical worlds have a translation of the essence of man (the artist). A formal product with expressive powers that translates hidden worlds. Myth, emotional notation, presence and absence, temporality, metaphysical worlds. The hidden essence is a metaphysical world. The researcher recommends studying the following: Metaphysical representations in Jawad Selim's drawings. Then came the list of margins and sources.

The Pessimistic Existentialism of Arthur Shopenhauer: An Expository and Evaluative Study

This work interrogates the seeming ambivalence between Arthur Schopenhauer's existentialist pessimism and his advocacy for artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness, as means of managing the absurdities and frustrations of life. The objective of this work is to discover whether or not his apparently orthogonal positions can be reconciled in any way at all, and what that might portend for the contemporary philosopher. Schopenhauer's metaphysics and philosophy of nature led him to the doctrine of pessimism: the view that sentient beings, with few exceptions, are bound to strive and suffer greatly, all without any ultimate purpose or justification and thus life is not really worth living. Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. He believed that the "will-to-life" (the force driving man to survive and to reproduce) was the driving forces of the world, and that the pursuit of happiness, love and intellectual satisfaction was essentially futile and anyway secondary to the innate imperative of procreation. This essay argues that phenomenologically, Schopenhauer had an “existentialist” orientation towards the spatio-temporal world that informed his pessimism, but also engenders further questions regarding the actual sincerity of his mental commitment to such a position.

Martha Nussbaum and Aristotle on Distributive Justice and Equality

Abstract This article gives a detailed analysis of Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ and her claim that it is a genuinely Aristotelian contemporary po-litical philosophy. The paper examines how Nussbaum bases her ‘capabilities approach’ on human nature and questions her assertion that both Aristotle’s account of human nature and her own approach are not metaphysical. In order to analyze the normative dimension of Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’, this article focuses on Aristotle’s doctrine of distributive justice and equality. It shows how Nussbaum adopts and modifies this doctrine in an egalitarian way and demonstrates that her reading and appropriation of it is problematic. With reference to contemporary literature on Aristotle’s Politics, the article criticizes how Nussbaum assimilates Aristotle’s political philosophy into modern values and notions, laying out six primary reasons supporting the thesis that Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ cannot be regarded as an Aristotelian one.

Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions by Christopher M. Brown

Reviewed by: Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions by Christopher M. Brown Elizabeth C. Shaw and Staff* BROWN, Christopher M. Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xiii + 487 pp. Cloth, $75.00 The contents of the book are straightforwardly announced by the title. Christopher Brown entertains four apparent problems about eternal life in heaven considered by contemporary philosophers and theologians and offers solutions to them from the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The book consists of seventeen chapters together with an introduction and conclusion and is divided into four parts. In the first part Brown lays out the problems and the solutions to them proposed by contemporary philosophers and theologians. In the second part he explains St. Thomas's distinction between essential and accidental reward in heaven and goes on to treat of the former—which consists in the beatific vision, that is, our beholding of God—and its proper accidents—which are delight, joy, and charity. In the third part he then deals with the accidental reward, which has to do with the perfected condition of our glorified bodies, society with other persons, and so on. Finally, in the fourth part Brown, drawing on his expositions of St. Thomas's doctrine in the two previous parts, details Thomistic solutions to the four problems discussed in the first part and argues that these solutions are superior to those proposed by the contemporary philosophers and theologians he has engaged. So, what are the four problems that Brown addresses? Let's present them as questions. (1) Is heaven just a private communion between a human person and God, or is it a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures? (2) Is heaven just a spiritual affair, or are our resurrected bodies a part of it? (3) Is heaven a static or dynamic reality? (4) Is heaven boring? The answers are as follows. Ad primum: Heaven is a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures. Ad secundum: Heaven is a spiritual and physical affair that includes our souls and our resurrected bodies. Ad tertium: Heaven is a dynamic reality. Ad quartum: Heaven is not boring! I cannot cover here all of the specifics of the way Brown shows how St. Thomas arrives at these answers. People who know St. Thomas well, even if they have not reflected much on these problems before, probably will [End Page 135] not have great difficulty thinking through how he might get to the first and second answers, at least in general terms. But the third and fourth, I think, call for further comment. My comments will necessarily be brief. If I understand Brown correctly, he wants to say (and contends that St. Thomas holds) that heaven is dynamic insofar as in heaven we are in act. But we can be in act in two senses: We can be in act in an unchanging way or in a changing way. In heaven my capacities to know God and to love him are both fully perfected, that is, they are fully actualized and undergo no change. But in heaven we will enjoy our resurrected bodies as well, and our bodies will also be active and interacting with other bodies. This activity will entail change. So, either way we will be active in heaven and, therefore, heaven will be something dynamic. What, then, about the problem of boredom? Because we will be perfectly happy in heaven, argues Brown (interpreting St. Thomas), heaven won't be boring. But the matter doesn't end there. Brown points out that Brian Ribeiro, developing an idea of Bernard Williams, objects that a person who is perfectly happy in the way that we are supposed to be in heaven, cannot be personally identical with any person in this life because the conditions of the beatified person and the nonbeatified person are just too radically different for there to be continuity between the two. Brown replies that St. Thomas convincingly shows that God can, by grace, prepare persons in this...

Text et langaje visuel: un proces de mise en abîme

The problem of the pictorial past in literature and of literary influences in painting has created a whole tradition. The literary experience of the image and the pictorial exercise in literature demonstrated the affinities between them, based on a specific view of the world. From contemporary philosophy, culture and literature, painting chooses its elements, symbols and ideational background, which is the substrate of the pictorial work. Translating them into the language of images, the painter reaches a more personal interpretation of literary works. The article presents a reflection on the prolific artistic career of the artist Cezar Secrieru, whose work creates a unique creative dynamic by transposing the mental and literary image into his canvases. The “Correspondences” of the arts enrich the deep ideational background of his creation, but also the diversification of the pictorial meanings potential.

Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives ed. by Shannon Sullivan

Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives ed. by Shannon Sullivan

The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb

Reviewed by: The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb Amy Gilbert Richards LIPSCOMB, Benjamin J. B. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xxx + 326 pp. Cloth, $27.95 In The Women Are Up to Something, Lipscomb demonstrates in form and content the inextricable link between philosophical theory and personal story and character. The book tells two stories: "first, a story [End Page 148] about four women, their overlapping friendships, and their struggle to establish themselves as philosophers in an often-hostile context; second, a story about two conflicting approaches to ethics." These two stories connect through the role these women played in the development of the second of the conflicting approaches—a challenge to the mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge orthodoxy in metaethics, what Lipscomb later calls a "minority report." Chapter 1 centers on the fact–value divide. The consequence of this divide for ethics lies in its banishment of all evaluative terms from the realm of possible facts, thereby demoting them to matters of "opinion." Lipscomb here offers a genealogy of the divide. He also introduces the insight that will become the seed of the minority report: The picture of the world offered by the fact-value divide is just that, a picture. Bringing to light the deep background pictures that undergird our understanding of the world is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks. But the picture rooted in the fact–value divide includes the claim that the divide itself is simply a "fact"—not a picture at all, and therefore not contestable. Lipscomb labels this view "the Dawkins' sublime." The next three chapters continue the work of stage-setting. Chapter 2 immerses us in the Oxford of the women's undergraduate years—an Oxford temporarily but dramatically altered by World War II, where female students made up a much larger percentage of the undergraduate population than was usual, and where professors were in a new way open to mentoring women. Chapter 3 briefly recounts all four childhoods, lived in the aftermath of the first World War. Chapter 4 returns to Oxford and narrates the graduate degrees of the four women. It also offers a perceptive primer on the history of analytic ethics, culminating in the state of the field at the point when the women were on the cusp of entering it—the precise shape of the approach to ethics the women would eventually abjure. Each of the next four chapters traces the development of the mature philosophy of one of the four women—in order: Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley. Despite deep differences among their philosophical and theological outlooks, they all four came to defend a version of the thesis, commonplace in ancient and medieval philosophy, that there are things that are good for human beings qua human being, that our moral lives are largely a matter of seeing and responding—well or poorly—to these elements of the human good that are given as part of our nature. In other words, there are facts about values. We in crucial ways discover rather than invent morality. The last chapter serves as an epilogue to both stories: It traces the ways in which the writing and lives of these four women produced a decisive change in the landscape of Anglo-American philosophy. Lipscomb notes which strains in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy owe their existence to the minority report. Figures like Korsgaard feature as contemporary representatives of an ethics grounded in the fact–value [End Page 149] divide. Figures like MacIntyre and Hursthouse feature as inheritors of the philosophical legacy of the book's heroines. In this final chapter Lipscomb also offers brief portraits of the later life and death of each of the women in turn. At the end of the final portrait, the book rounds to a poetic close—not offering a final philosophical statement but reflecting on the fruits of friendship and the power of its legacy for those who come after. It is difficult to pin down Lipscomb's precise philosophical...

Which naturalism?

AbstractThe ‘naturalizing’ agenda in contemporary secularist philosophy is often presented in opposition to traditional theism. But looking at the history of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ reveals a discontinuity between how these terms are currently understood and how they were understood in the past. The modern ‘naturalist’, in insisting that all phenomena should be brought within the domain of the natural, is advancing a thesis that many classical, medieval and early-modern philosophers and theologians would have regarded as fairly self-evident. What has changed is not that there is a new determination to include within the natural domain what was previously excluded from it, but rather that there is a radical shift in how the natural domain is to be understood. This paper argues that the philosophically interesting question is not whether or not we should be naturalists, but which of two naturalisms we should adopt: secular naturalism, with its neutralist conception of nature in general and of human nature in particular, or theistic naturalism, according to which the natural world and our own nature bear the stamp of the divine. It turns out the former (secularist) view is vulnerable to serious difficulties, on both the epistemic and the moral fronts.

From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith by Louis Markos

Reviewed by: From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith by Louis Markos Mark Mattes From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith. By Louis Markos. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2021. xvi + 234 pp. This book seeks to show the impact that Plato has had on the Christian faith. It is written by an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The first six chapters interpret Plato's essential writings and the next six show his influence on Christian thinkers: Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Palamas, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Erasmus, Descartes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and C. S. Lewis. This book offers no direct ties between Plato and Luther. That said, the book is valuable because it makes a strong case for how Christianity has been deeply influenced by Plato and that this has led both to Christian humanism and a Christian approach to the liberal arts. Markos knows how to hook his readers: he sees modern and contemporary philosophy prefigured in the Sophists, antagonists of Plato's mentor, Socrates. For example, the sophist Thrasymachus, an interlocuter with Socrates in the Republic, is akin to Nietzsche (29). Interestingly, against the ancient view that "humans are the measure of all things," Plato proposes instead that God is (91). Also, in the Timaeus, similar to the Bible, but unlike all other ancient views, God predates matter (102). In the same writing, Plato portrays a cosmology not like the Gnostics, often thought to be Plato's heirs. Instead, for Plato, God created the world good and the material world is no product of a Fall of spiritual reality into material things (107). Strangely, Christians may even see the suffering Christ as prefigured in Plato's exaltation of the righteous person who would rather suffer wrong, even being impaled, than prosper at others' expense as the evil would do (127). While Markos looks to Erasmus as Plato's voice in the Reformation, it would be interesting to examine just how Platonic Luther's and Calvin's views of participation in Christ are or are not. Given the case Markos has built for similarities between Plato and Christianity, the biggest difference between the two for the Reformers would be that human sinfulness is a result not of a lack of knowledge, which Plato teaches, but instead a misuse of the will, that is, [End Page 337] its revolt against God's will. In spite of Markos' failure to bring the Reformers and Plato into conversation, this book is valuable for understanding Christianity's role in the liberal arts. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des Moines, Iowa Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Challenging the New Atheism: Pragmatic Confrontations in the Philosophy of Religion

Challenging the New Atheism: Pragmatic Confrontations in the Philosophy of Religion

Narrative Ontology by Axel Hutter

Reviewed by: Narrative Ontology by Axel Hutter Frank Schalow HUTTER, Axel. Narrative Ontology. Translated by Aaron Shoichet. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. xiii + 296 pp. Cloth $69.95; paper, $26.95 Where postmodernism has dominated the language of contemporary philosophy, there is a need to develop an alternative discourse to address perennial philosophical issues. In Narrative Ontology, Axel Hutter proceeds along this path by introducing narration or a form of storytelling to reinscribe "the three ideas that have belonged since time immemorial to the heart of philosophical reflection: freedom, God and immortality." Hutter's defense of his thesis is twofold. First, he distinguishes narration as a temporal enactment embodied in telling a story, the scope of which is sufficiently universal as to found a new understanding of history, its alpha and omega. Second, he appeals to the biblical account of the tribulations of Jacob and Joseph as retold in the narrative style of Thomas Mann's novel Joseph and His Brothers. "The first reason a philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with Thomas Mann is that he himself accommodates a reciprocal illumination of philosophy and literature by situating his own way of thinking and working in explicit proximity to philosophy." "The second reason this philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with Thomas Mann is that he accommodates a narrative ontology of meaning, by contemplating, in his way, the same fundamental question." Along with an introduction, Hutter divides his book into three parts. In Part One ("The Stories of Jacob"), Hutter undertakes a precise explication of Mann's novel, in order to illustrate how ontology can be reconstituted as a narrative event that redefines "being" as a foundational act of history. "Jacob's sentences give expression to the hope that God can preserved the possibility of the future even if it seems to be destroyed in the fire of death." Form (that is, the narrative style) and content (that is, the interwoven meanings of the biblical text of Jacob as told and retold) are united. "This characterizes how Thomas Mann reads the original text. . . . The manner of his reading is articulated, in fact, in the Joseph novel itself. . . . Thus, a complex intertwining of narrative levels of meanings emerges: the inner meaning of the original story consists in a narrative ontology in which being is understood—in a sense that is still in need of elucidation—narratively and historically: as (hi)story. For an adequate understanding, this original story is re-narrated by Thomas Mann himself with the explicit intention of raising the original meaning of the story, its narrative ontology, clearly into consciousness." In Part Two ("Time and Meaning"), Hutter explores the thematic and methodological implications of narration as an attempt to infuse meaning into history and, conversely, through its own self-illustration, to chart the course of what is historical, that is, the transmission of future [End Page 143] understanding through the recovery of the past. Thus, storytelling renders history concrete, and, reciprocally, history challenges the narrator to plumb the depths of its greatest mysteries. According to Hutter, the Joseph novel embodies Mann's effort to meet this challenge. Storytelling is a way of preserving the past, but only under the condition of welcoming the promise of the future. "Yet the story that the Joseph novel narrates concretely is the story of Abraham and his blessing that is handed down to his descendants. In the peculiarly timeless omnipresence of this story, the tradition of the figure of Abraham is joined with the prophecy of the blessing that is not only promised to Abraham but to all his heirs." In Part Three ("The Stories of Joseph"), Hutter examines the dynamic of conversion or the transformative movement from self-love to compassion. He appeals to these spiritual elements to check the nihilistic tendency to exalt the individual both as the center of freedom and as the ground of social relations. Another kind of bond is necessary to overcome the abyss of meaninglessness, which is prefigured in ancient times and becomes most evident today in postmetaphysical forms of nihilism. "The 'whole theology' of the Joseph novel revolves around the Abrahamic covenant between God and human being—a covenant that, as already stated, implies a theory of...

Arne Næss’s experiments in truth

Well over half a century before the development of contemporary experimental philosophy, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss conducted a number of empirical investigations intended to document non-philosophers’ convictions regarding a number of topics of philosophical interest. In the 1930s and 1950s, Næss collected data relevant to non-philosophers’ conceptions of truth. This research attracted the attention of Alfred Tarski at the time, and has recently been re-evaluated by Robert Barnard and Joseph Ulatowski. In this paper I return to Næss’s research on truth in order to better develop an account of how such empirical data does or doesn’t bear on the philosophical study of truth. I examine Næss’s findings from his various studies on truth, and challenge the interpretation of those studies offered by Barnard and Ulatowski.

Ежен Дюпреель і Хаїм Перельман: нормативно-критичні засади «риторичного повороту» в сучасній філософії. Частина І

The purpose of this article is to give a critical assessment of the methodological, epistemological and philosophical principles of the “rhetorical turn” as a historico-philosophical phenomenon in contemporary philosophy. The first part offers a reconstruction and a critical assessment of the methodological and epistemological foundations of Eugène Dupréel's critique of the key features of “classical philosophy”, namely, the concept of necessary knowledge and the concept of progress. These are supplemented by a brief analysis of Chaїm Perelman’s reception of Dupréel's theses in his works of the so-called “turning point” period (1947–1949). It is shown that Dupréel's critique is “axiological” in nature and consists in his reassessment of the principles of classical methodology and epistemology. In his critique of the doctrine of necessary knowledge from the standpoint of humanism, Dupréel wittingly vindicates the methodological and epistemological principles of sophistry (critical realism, subjectivism, pragmatism, pluralism, relativism, conventionalism, etc.), but endows these, as well as other concepts of classical epistemology, with a new, humanistic, meaning. Perelman generally supports the main points of Dupréel's criticism, strengthening their social and humanistic orientation. This article demonstrates that the criticism of classical philosophy offered by both thinkers is limited in terms of both its subject and its principles. After all, it (1) provides a simplified image of “classical philosophy”, (2) is based on a misunderstanding of the fundamentally conceptual and constructive nature of philosophical knowledge, (3) is carried out from the standpoint of “socially oriented realism”, and, therefore, (4) has no bearing on the epistemological principles of idealistic and religious movements,(5) leading to the separation of philosophy from scientific and religious knowledge.

Noteworthy Problems with God’s Immutability, Impassibility, and Simplicity. Should We Treat These Divine Attributes and the Hellenic Conditions of Christian Theism as a Dogma?

The article presents problems that the concepts of God’s immutability, impassibility, and simplicity pose for Christian theism. Through the critical analysis, the author indicates the roots of these ideas (mostly, but not only, in ancient Greek philosophy) and the consequences of absolutizing them for the image of God and His relationship to the world. The more general purpose of the paper is to highlight the danger of the strong dependence of religious depictions on philosophical grounds. As concluded in the article, it is a mistake to absolutize the particular solutions that appeared at the junction of fides et ratio at one of the historical stages. The awareness of this becomes extremely important when reflecting on the divine immutability, impassibility, and simplicity. The author shows some proposals to reformulate their understanding in light of contemporary analytic philosophy. Partial reinterpretation in this regard may help to rethink the concept of the Creator’s interaction with creation and to reconcile the biblical image of God with the philosophical one.

What Philosophy Contributes to Emotion Science

Contemporary philosophers have paid increasing attention to the empirical research on emotions that has blossomed in many areas of the social sciences. In this paper, I first sketch the common roots of science and philosophy in Ancient Greek thought. I illustrate the way that specific empirical sciences can be regarded as branching out from a central trunk of philosophical speculation. On the basis of seven informal characterizations of what is distinctive about philosophical thinking, I then draw attention to the fact that scientific progress frequently requires one to make adjustments to the way its basic terms are conceptualized, and thus cannot avoid philosophical thought. The character of emotions requires attention from many disciplines, and the links among those disciplines inevitably require a broader philosophical perspective to be understood. Thus, emotion science, and indeed all of science, is inextricably committed to philosophical assumptions that demand scrutiny.

Is Interreligious Dialogue Even Possible? Meeting the Other in a Philosophical Approach

To become reality, religious freedom requires the possibility of interreligious dialogue. Does dialogue lead to the abolition of differences between religions? Should dialogue lead to religious syncretism? This paper attempts to grasp the essence of interfaith dialogue on the basis of contemporary philosophy by presenting the notion of dialogical attitude, the adoption of which makes dialogue possible. Five necessary assumptions that constitute a dialogical attitude are characterized and must be accepted before meeting the Other. The idea of tikkun olam – the Jewish concept of repairing the world – is also presented briefly. Its recent reception, in the author’s belief, has established the perfect atmosphere for treating religious dialogue as an important step in achieving peace and justice.

Substance, name and thing in aristotle’s «computer» ontology

In this article, we will discuss the elements of classical and nonclassical ontological systems in Aristotle’s doctrine of the substance, categories and language. It is amazing that the classic heritage of ancient philosophical thought include ontological models similar to the contemporary analytic philosophy. Aristotle was the first to speculate on the substance in terms of language categories. It is the transition from the subject individual to a logical entity and then to a part of speech. The nature of knowledge is based on a single representation of the universal. According to Aristotle, only a plurality of randomly designated unique individual things exists. However, the species and genera build some logical relations between them. Therefore, the language updating of the knowledge of the world is possible only with respect to species and genera, i.e., a logical structure as thing in itself (not described) does not have any features but exists independently in the reality. On the one hand, Aristotle supports the classical nominalistic ontology (the material world is a complexity of things existing in the reality of single non-attributive objects). On the other hand, Aristotle’s ontology is a complex of objects believed existing by a statement. That is, the objects can be from imaginary or impossible worlds, but the language descriptions credit them with the function of propositional value. In both cases, language is just a method of consistent description.

Slaying the “Venomous Beast:” Envy in the Work of Christian Ministry and Teaching

Envy is a vice that is both widespread and uniquely corrosive, undermining relationships among ministry and teaching colleagues. This article draws upon a wide array of historical and contemporary ministers, theologians, philosophers, and social scientists to look at the meaning of envy, the contexts in which envy is most likely to emerge, the destructive power of envy, and the perspectives and practices that are necessary for envy to be tamed in church and school environments.