Idea Of God Research Articles

Divine Ideas, Instants of Nature, and the Spectre of “verum esse secundum quid ” A Criticism of M. Renemann’s Interpretation of Scotus

Divine Ideas, Instants of Nature, and the Spectre of “verum esse secundum quid ” A Criticism of M. Renemann’s Interpretation of Scotus

Judaistyczne tło Modlitwy Pańskiej (Mt 6,9-13) w świetle idei ojcostwa Bożego w Kazaniu na Górze

The idea of God’s fatherhood seems very obvious in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus presents God as the Father who wants all what is good for all His children and invites all His children for a deep, spontaneous and intimate rela­tionship with Him. The idea of God’s fatherhood is present especially in the prayer which Jesus taught His disciples. The “Our Father” is a Christian prayer but it has Jewish roots. Jesus was a Hebrew and prayed according to Jewish faith. The structure of “Our Father” is as follows: invoca­tion followed by seven requests. The contents of the prayer reveal many references to Jewish prayers, known already at the time of Jesus (Abinu malkenu, Kaddish, Shemoneh Esreh). The similarities between “Our Father” and vari­ous prayers of the Jews do not exclude uniqueness of the prayer which Jesus taught His disciples. The idea of God’s fatherhood is present also in other parts of the Sermon on the mountain: the blessings of the peacemakers (Mt 5,9), the role of the disciples (Mt 5,13-16), love for enemies (Mt 5,43-45); the call to follow Christ (Mt 5,48); the Father who sees in secret (Mt 6,1-6.1618); Father’s forgiveness (Mt 6,14-15); Father’s care (Mt 6,25-34); Father’s good­ness (Mt 7,7-11) and God’s fatherly will (Mt 7,21). All these passages, just like the prayer “Our Father”, underline the importance of filial trust in God as the Father.

Religious Experience in a Cross-Cultural and Interfaith Context: Limitations and Possibilities

Religious experience is a multifaceted aspect of an individual’s experience involving conscious and unconscious components. Individuals, for example, maintain varied ideas of God at different levels of awareness and consciousness, all of which contribute to their broader experience of God. This paper focuses primarily on complex theistic experiences of God, their relationship to psychological and spiritual health, and how these experiences can be changed through psychological intervention. Consideration is also given to ethical issues and other implications of changing one’s religious experience.

Winch and Anscombe on Ethics and Religion

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to consider in detail a paper in which Peter Winch discusses the absolute nature of the moral ought. Anscombe had argued that the notion of an absolute ought presupposes the idea of divine law. Winch's aim is to show her mistaken. On his view, it is the idea of divine that depends on the notion of an absolute ought.It is argued that Winch is not successful in his criticism. Indeed, were we to accept his assumptions, we should be forced to conclude that the moral ought is not absolute at all, but relative.

DESCARTES' COMPOSITIONAL THEORY OF MENTAL REPRESENTATION

In his, ‘Descartes' Ontology of Thought’, Alan Nelson presents, on Descartes' behalf, a compositional theory of mental representation according to which the content of any mental representation is either simple or is entirely constituted by a combination of innate simples. Here the simples are our ideas of God, thought, extension, and union. My objection will be that it is simply ludicrous to think that any four simples are adequate to the task of combining to constitute all of human thought, and that the simples God, thought, extension, and union are particularly ill suited to it.

Ethics and God

AbstractPhilosophers like to speak of a “Euthyphro Dilemma” pitting divine fiat against a moral realism that soon fades to personal or social preferences. But Plato targets no such dilemma. The Euthyphro hints a complementarity of divine commands with human moral insights. Values are constitutive in ideas of divinity, and monotheism affirms only goodness in God. So, pace James Rachels, worship is not surrender of autonomy, as Saadiah and Maimonides' biblical and rabbinic ethics reveal. Chimneying more fairly models the dialectic of religion with ethics than does the contrived conflict between putatively arbitrary divine commands and presumptively self‐certifying human moral creativity.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF THE PRIVATE INNER SELF

Abstract. The modern concept of the inner self containing a private inner world has ancient philosophical and religious roots. These begin with Plato's intelligible world of ideas. In Plotinus, the intelligible world becomes the inner world of the divine Mind and its ideas, which the soul sees by turning “into the inside.” Augustine made the inner world into something merely human, not a world of divine ideas, so that the soul seeking for God must turn in, then up: entering into itself and then looking above itself at the intelligible light of God. In modernity, “ideas” become the immediate object of every act of mental perception, the essential inner objects of the mind's eye. Locke makes the inner space inescapably private, excluding the divine inner light. Postmodern attempts to reconceive the relation of mind and world, rejecting the modern conception of a private inner self, will need to deal with lingering Platonist intuitions about the immediacy of the mind's vision.

Note sull’onnipotenza divina nell’Opera di Agostino

The notion of ‘omnipotence’ (potentia dei) runs through the history of medieval philosophy especially after the contribution of Augustine’s thought. Augustine thus traces ethical developments from the idea of God’s sovereignty to the construction of an order of things comparable with his power of creation. Augustine was the first Christian thinker to introduce and document the notion of potentia dei in an ethical context, proving at the same time that the ambivalence of God’s power results either from the activity of ordering, or from the impossibility of God’s duplication, or from the incapacity to destroy the world in respect to a rational configuration of laws and events.

Le geste de Dieu. Nature et origine du signe chez Spinoza

God’s gesture. Nature and the origin of the sign in Spinoza. The Author provides the textual and conceptual elements to outline a thought of event in Spinoza’s philosophy. On the one hand necessitas and contingentia are known to exclude one another while, on the other, necessitas and contingere are not opposite. They are the same when seen in relation to the conception of libera necessitas and to the doctrine of the unity of intellect and will. Also, the unity of a thought of concept and a thought of event appears in the definition of revelation, where the problem of the sign becomes crucial in separating philosophy from theology. A comparative study of the texts confirms the influence of Stoicism on the triadic model of the sign, showing that all interpreters give a pragmatic orientation to the sense of signs. The impossibility for any sign to be signum sui is not due to a defect in its nature. The idea of God, in fact, does not itself need any sign to be known, but it is also true that there is no lack of a sign for its linguistic communication.

Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes – By Gregory T. Doolan

Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes – By Gregory T. Doolan

Connaissance de Dieu et conscience de soi chez Descartes

RÉSUMÉ: La méthode analytique par laquelle Descartes établit le premier principe de sa philosophie (cogito, ergo sum) consiste en un procédé cognitif associant intuition directe et inférence non-logique qui diffère significativement du modèle déductif que l’on prête depuis toujours au rationalisme du dix-septième siècle. Cet article démontre que ce même processus analytique est à l’œuvre dans la preuve de l’innéité de l’idée de Dieu, où, pourtant, il y a des doutes majeurs concernant sa légitimité.

'Eξιλ <tex-math>$\acute{\alpha}$</tex-math> σασθαι: Appeasing God in the Septuagint Pentateuch

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) I. STATING THE PROBLEM The simplex verb ... and its compound ... indicate in Greek literature action appease, placate, propitiate, and are found in both religious and secular realms. The group (hereafter the word or the verb) expresses process by which a person could restore to kindness an aggrieved deity or fellow mortal, who would typically appear as direct object of verb. Septuagint this sense occurs to a limited extent.1 cultic portions of Pentateuch, however, in its meaning propitiate becomes a contextual difficulty. Such a meaning does not equate to ... (pivel), which there does not mean appease but rather something like of impurities.2 Moreover, Greek verb does not appear in syntax familiar to Greek readers. Instead of a human or deity appearing as direct object in accusative, a prepositional phrase or, far less frequently, an impersonal noun as direct object now follows verb. The nouns in prepositional phrases are often individuals, but could also be items such as tents and altars or abstracts such as life and sin. If verb could convey something like purge, purify, or expiate in these types of constructions, it would make better contextual sense, especially since this is what Hebrew means. The resolution of this contextual difficulty has been guided by considerations extraneous to LXX as a corpus of linguistic information. For instance, readers from earliest times have noticed that ... and cognates in meaning of appease were intrusive into Jewish and Christian thought. Consequently, in much of attention paid to this in secondary literature aim has been to resolve theological contradiction posed by LXX language, in which deity is propitiated by sacrifice, when Hebrew Bible and NT do not on face of it support such a notion. this regard, C. H. Dodd posited a development in meaning such that expiate or purge would be considered part of word's semantic range.3 That is, after all, what translators must have known term to connote if it came to stand in for a Hebrew of that meaning, or so his argument goes. Dodd's work was and remains highly influential.4 It is not surprising, therefore, to encounter meaning purge for in a LXX lexicon or a NT commentary that draws on Septuagintal usage. T. Muraoka and J. Lust et al. list in addition to standard meanings also sense of purge.5Harold W. Attridge in his commentary on Epistle to Hebrews states that in LXX words ... and ... had come to be used for expiation as well as propitiation. In Hebrews, he observes, Christ's sacrifice is always directed at removing sin and its effects, not at propitiating God.6 The central question for this study is whether such a semantic shift is borne out by philological data. II. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP Since appearance of Dodd's work, another kind of solution has been put forward that focuses on meaning of Hebrew context. Leon Morris's argument, articulated first in an article in Expository Times and later in a monograph, rests on assumption that meaning of ... is indeed propitiate or else translators would not have employed Greek equivalent, or that, at least, respective Hebrew contexts contained idea of God's wrath, so that translators employed a that responds well to such contexts.7 Morris's work is commendable, although my impression is that, had he argued for Greek word's meaning from perspective of its standard meaning, he would have arrived at similar conclusions. Instead he opened himself up to criticism by resorting to Hebrew context. I shall return to his arguments below. What one encounters in other studies is an emphasis on evidentiary value of Greek context with no regard for its relationship to Hebrew parent text. …

Wisdom as Conceptual Understanding

This article argues that Platonism provides a plausible account of wisdom, one that is especially attractive for Christians. Christian Platonism sees wisdom as conceptual understanding; it is a “knowledge of the Forms.” To be convincing this view requires us to see understanding as including an appreciation of the relations between concepts as well as the value of the possible ways of being that concepts disclose. If the Forms are Divine Ideas, then we can see why God is both supremely wise and the source of all human wisdom. The account of wisdom provided helps explain the relation between wisdom and knowledge, the connection between wisdom and emotion, and much about how wisdom is acquired. The view also helps explain why someone who lacks extensive propositional knowledge can still be wise, and it helps us see why an understanding of the Biblical narrative and participation in the life of the Church can be important aids in the development of wisdom.

Analytic Method, the Cogito, and Descartes’s Argument for the Innateness of the Idea of God

The analytic method by which Descartes discovered the first principle of his philosophy —cogito, ergo sum- is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and non-logical inference. It differs markedly from inductive as well as deductive procedures, but also from older models of the direct noetic apprehension of first principles, notably those of Plato and Aristotle. However, a critical examination of Descartes's argument for the innateness of the idea of God shows that there are serious obstacles in the way of his employment of the analytic method of discovery to reach this or any other conclusion about ideas that do not fall within the scope of ordinary human experience.

Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (review)

Reviewed by: Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes Antoine Côté Gregory T. Doolan. Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Pp. xviii + 277. Cloth, $74.95. The author’s purpose is to understand the role divine ideas play as causal principles in Aquinas’s philosophy. His contention is that, although Thomas’s doctrine of ideas is perhaps not the key to an understanding of his metaphysics, it is certainly “a key to such an understanding” (xiv). The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter seeks to provide a general definition of divine ideas according to Aquinas. Divine ideas are exemplar causes in the likeness of which God produces creatures. Ideas in the strict sense belong to God’s practical or actually practical knowledge. The causality exercised by exemplars is that of formal causality, but because they are productive of things, they entail efficient and final causality, as well. In chapter 2, Doolan examines Thomas’s arguments in favor of the existence of divine ideas. Chapter 3 deals with the question of the multiplicity of divine ideas. Doolan first establishes, against Gilson and others, that Aquinas did indeed hold that there was a multiplicity of divine ideas. He then shows how Aquinas was able to reconcile the diversity of ideas with God’s simplicity. The gist of the solution involves viewing ideas as nonbeings relative to God, who is, of course, ipsum esse. Now the only way non-beings can enter into God is in the form of entia rationis. “It is for this reason,” Doolan concludes, “that the ideas exist simply as known beings rather than as real ones and, moreover, that there can be many of them” (110). Chapter 4 is devoted to identifying the divine ideas. Although Aquinas does hold that God has the ideas of matter, possibles, and evil, Doolan argues that “according to the strictest meaning of the term ‘exemplar’ as Thomas comes to employ it, only those divine ideas that are of individual things made by God at some point in time can truly be called exemplars” (155). Doolan then turns, in chapter 5, to an examination of the manner in which divine ideas exercise their causality. He considers two questions in this regard: first, whether the causality of divine ideas is limited to the production of form, and second, whether exemplar causality, to the extent that it is productive of the forms of creatures, leaves any room for the causality of creatures. Doolan examines the well known passages in Thomas’s works relating to the articulation of divine and secondary causes in the production of effects, and concludes that “it is through the combined agencies of God and the natural agent that a natural effect comes to be” (189). Finally, because the resemblance things have with their exemplars has often been accounted for by Platonically-minded philosophers by saying that the former participate in the latter, Doolan devotes the last chapter to clarifying the relation between exemplarity and participation in Aquinas. After examining several central texts as well as the most influential interpretations of the doctrine, he concludes that individuals do not participate in their exemplars, according to Aquinas. The author’s ultimate conclusion is that the doctrine of divine ideas is essential to Thomas’s philosophy for two reasons. First, it plays an important epistemological role by providing a theoretical expression for a central tenet of theism, namely that God must possess a proper knowledge of the beings he creates. Second, it provides an ontological foundation for the directedness of nature and the determinacy of form, showing that creation results from the divine intellect and will. While Doolan does a convincing job of arguing for the importance of divine ideas in Aquinas’s philosophy, his interpretation of specific texts is sometimes a little strained. For [End Page 624] instance, he argues in chapter 4 that divine ideas for Thomas are properly only of individuals, but the only evidence he can muster for this view in the text that he sees as most clearly supporting it—De ver., q. 3, a. 8—is a sed contra! At a more...

Osservazioni sulle fonti luterane della controversia De notitia Dei naturali insita in infantibus

Starting from a passage of Adam Steuart's refutation of Descartes' Notae in programma quoddam, this essay reconstructs the debate on the innate idea of God in infants (incorrectly attributed to Descartes by Steuart, who was a Calvinist) that took place in Lutheran-oriented philosophy and theology between the end of the 16th and the middle of the 18th century. It is shown that one of the most common questions in modern philosophy is closely connected with theological thinking - in this case Lutheran - from the formulation of the dogmatic systems up until their criticism by the Enlightenment. Also explained is the way in which the reception of Cartesianism was singularly influenced by the various backgrounds and the different and continuously changing polemical goals that inspired each author. In fact, Descartes was even accused of being a Lutheran.Key words: History of modern philosophy, History of Protestant theology, History of Cartesianism, History of Lutheranism, Reception of Cartesianism.

Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes. By Gregory T. Doolan

Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes. By Gregory T. Doolan

Freiheit durch Gott retten? Die Freiheitsproblematik in Schellings Schrift Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und in den Werken von Wolfhart Pannenberg

The article is an attempt to analyze the essence and limits of human freedom within the horizon of the question about God. Such diverse authors as Schelling and Pannenberg, selections of whose writings are the subject of the present considerations, do not take human freedom and God to be contradictory, as often has been the case since the times of the critique of religion in the 19th and 20th centuries; rather, they consider God to be the foundation of freedom, being its source and guarantee. Important reasons for engaging in reflection upon the problematic of human freedom in the context of the question about God are such issues as the idea of God, reality conceived as a system or process, acquaintance with the feeling of freedom, the essence of freedom understood as freedom of choice between good and evil and subjectivity, and the personal nature of man.

The Politics of God in the Christian Tradition

This article traces the development of the idea of God from the ancient Near East thought into Patristic Christianity with its fusion with Greek philosophy. The article details five patterns that shape the way in which God language in Christianity influences social and political systems: androcentrism or male domination over women; anthropocentrism or human domination over nature; ethnocentrism or the domination of a `chosen' people over other people; militarism, and asceticism or the dualism and hierarchy of mind over body. It also suggests how these patterns of domination can be dismantled and more mutual relations between God, humans and nature developed.

The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry Stephanie L. Hathaway Kay, Sarah, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007; cloth; pp. xii, 236; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$59.95, £39.00; ISBN 9780812240078. Attempting to stretch the boundaries of conservative views on multiplicity and oneness in medieval literature, Sarah Kay makes a study of a number of French texts spanning the ‘long fourteenth century’ exploring how the concepts of ‘one’ and ‘place’ in didactic texts converge. This innovative approach to the genre is balanced by Kay’s ability to address the texts with supporting contemporaneous philosophical texts as well as by considering the influence of classical ethical works, treating each as a step in the investigation of its problematic relation to the medieval world through vernacular texts. Kay’s premise is the common loci, or metaphors of place, that are called up to convey a unity of meaning and interpretation that thereby impose an idea of homogeneity. The premise for the interplay between place and thought is set out early on, when the didactic ‘place’ is compared to that of the individual. Though the framework for this study is thoroughly expounded in the introductory chapter, supporting evidence is at times ponderous. Classical philosophic ideas are shown as useful for comparison as well as inspiration for the medieval texts, though Kay points out the medieval trend of coming away from Platonist realism in medieval investigations of the concept of unity and universals in relation to plurality. Kay describes the didactic texts that she explores as written for the purpose of giving pleasure as well as for provoking reflection. Thus, she does not disregard verse over prose, but suggests that it is monologism and the expression of melancholy that imparts the philosophical as well as the aesthetic goal to the audience. [End Page 177] Kay begins with Matfré Ermengaud’s Breviari and the metaphorical tree of love that maps relations between unities and particulars. Turning to the Ovide Moralisé, Kay proposes that the unity of the commentary alongside the poem in this work can be fully understood when studied as a whole rather than piecemeal, and that the ‘unity of place’ can then be perceived as the individual’s place in the divine community from which man has been banished. It is the antithesis of perspective here that allows the ‘place’ to be perceived by the audience. Building upon these constructs, Kay delineates the journey through thought taken in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pélerinage de vie humaine, outlining paradoxes in the conception of place: the domains of human nature and of divine wisdom. Kay suggests that the idea of transformation is introduced in the form of the inner space contained by Penitence, which then becomes the container of the inner space, marking an exploration of the dualism of the individual. Kay sees these first three texts as showing how it is possible for the individual to be in unity with God, the ‘one’, but that this unity involves unstable and paradoxical ‘places’. In the next three texts, Kay seeks to show how poets acknowledge the priority of universal knowledge, but emphasize that the individual is excluded from it. Kay’s approach to Machaut’s comedic poems about love and the conduct of leaders written in monologue, Jugement de roy du Navarre, takes into account the ‘elaborate rewriting and combining of past texts’ and suggests it to be in dialogue with its didactic models such as Boethius and Aristotle. Kay draws attention to the use of internal and external spaces and the transformation of settings, and how this allows the text to disengage from Boethius’ idea of God as the one supreme good. Machaut’s idea of good is shown to be a completion of a progression rather than an entity in itself, differing according the circumstance, where the singular becomes excluded from the universal. The metaphorical locus of the tree reappears in the merry bush of Froissart’s Joli Buisson, providing a dream vision setting that Kay compares to the tradition of the...