Transcendental Character Research Articles

O senso comum e a filosofia

Ainda que pouco conhecido e estudado em nossa época, o filósofo neokantiano russo, de origem greco-alemã, Afrikan Spir, produziu uma obra original que teve repercussões importantes em seu tempo. Nascido um pouco antes de Nietzsche, em 1837, Spir será citado por ele, sobretudo, no que se refere às questões que envolvem o caráter transcendental do conhecimento. Afinal, como Kant, Spir defende que o mundo nos aparece mediado por nossa sensibilidade; mediado e organizado pelas estruturas “a priori” do conhecimento, ou seja, do mundo recebemos apenas impressões sensoriais, qualidades sensíveis, cabendo ao sujeito cognoscente ordená-las a partir de suas intuições. No entanto, na intitulada filosofia crítica de Spir, o único e o verdadeiro, à priori, é o “princípio de identidade”, que seria o responsável pela síntese do conhecimento, seja de nós mesmos, seja dos objetos do mundo. Em poucas palavras, segundo Spir, e contestando o senso comum e o próprio objetivismo científico, não existe nada que seja estável e absoluto fora de nós. Todo o absoluto diz respeito ao pensamento. Mesmo o “eu” nada mais é do que uma síntese operada pela consciência.

Expressing the Transcendence

Plotinus chooses to unveil the transcendent character of his principle and must find to this purpose an appropriate manner of speech. The Enneadscontain various descriptions of this search; they both practice and justify the constant use of negations. The aim is to prevent diminishing the superiority of the One by fixing it in certain determinations. Nevertheless, the language is granted a certain space of manifestation, within which the Nameless can receive names or superlative descriptions. Such “intervals” of verbalization show the discursive oscillation of the soul striving for the last unity, even though it is only beyond the margins of such intervals that the wordless encounter with the One may occur. Besides fundamental ontological options, a novel reply to classical difficulties underlie the formulations of what we might call Plotinus’ articulation of the via negativa. Formless and infinite, the principle must not contain the particularities it founds. A new logic of generation doubles the emphasis of the absolute otherness of the One. All along this inquiry, we shall see how the “negative” or “apophatic” approach of the Divine institutes its language and finds its legitimacy in the works of Plotinus. Thus the ineffable transcendence leaves echoes in the modulations of our language.

The Way into Transcendental Philosophy from the Argument in Suhrawardī’s Philosophy of Illumination

Abstract This paper presents a phenomenological analysis of the argument in The First Discourse of Part 2 of Suhrawardī’s Philosophy of Illumination. Specifically, this argument is considered with regard to temporal extension of its logos, i.e., the succession of logical steps. Contrary to traditional views of Suhrawardī as a Neoplatonizing proponent of the primacy of essence over existence, the steps of his argument convey a much more nuanced picture in which ligh t emerges as the main metaphysical principle. First, Suhra wardī explicates full evidentiality in visible light (which is the most patent, ’aẓhar, from the Arabic root ẓ-h-r = ‘to appear, be [made] manifest’): this light gives us the world as “this-there”; and second, as self-evidentiality (ẓuhūru-hu, ‘being obvious to itself by itself’) in the first-person consciousness of the knower. Suhrawardī accesses these modes by reduction(s) which liberate the transcendental character of light. The correlation in the evidential mode of light between the knower and the objects serves as a ground for the claims of transcendental unity of the self and the world, and as a condition of possibility for knowledge. A juxtaposition of this approach with phenomenological philosophy suggests that in Suhrawardī’s analysis, the evidentiality of visual light plays a role of a new universal a priori. I show that under the phenomenological reduction, this a priori participates in constitution of ontological validities; and within the transcendental empiricism of the physics of light, this a priori underlies the construction of causality. Thereby, the Philosophy of Illumination suggests a new horizon of entry into transcendental phenomenological philosophy. The paper also contains a justification of a phenomenological reading of Suhrawardī’s work, including explanation of the historical reduction.

Words into Silence

This essay explores Karl Rahner’s use of silence throughout his writings in relation to central themes of his theology. First, in his reflections about encountering the silent mystery of God in prayer, Rahner discovers that this painful silence may indeed be sacramental of God’s abiding nearness, inviting us to greater faith, hope, and love. Second, Rahner engages the transcendental character of this relationship between grace and freedom through the silence that permeates the existential divine-human dialogue. Third, Rahner’s meditations on Jesus, the silent Word, reveal how Jesus’s surrender in freedom to God’s silence enables our own response to God and participation in Jesus’s salvific “death-into-resurrection.” Fourth, Rahner elucidates the role of silence in ordinary mysticism; patient forbearance, bold proclamation, and love of neighbor are all opportunities for experiencing the grace of the Holy Spirit in everyday life. Finally, these themes converge in Rahner’s thoughts about the importance of silence in the spirituality of the theologian.

Los planteamientos radicales de la filosofía de Leonardo Polo

The purpose of this paper is to make clear the basic set up of Leonardo Polo’s philosophy. It can be summarized in the transcendental character of the act of human understanding and the detection of mental limit with the inmediate consequences which both have for the new posing of philosophizing.

Naturalismo y trascendentalismo en la teoría kantiana del conocimiento

This paper argues against the naturalistic interpretation of Kant's epistemology and shows the transcendental character of the critical theory, focusing on the transcendental deduction of categories. The author emphasizes the difficult balance between the transcendental and the naturalistic approach to Kantian epistemology.

Spanishness Through Dark Humor

Spanishness Through Dark Humor Katarzyna Beilin Egea, Juan F. Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy and the Nation. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 188 pp. ISBN-978-0-299-29544-8. The book focuses on Spanish film produced between 1960–92 and it reframes important part of Spanish cinematic canon of the 1960s, as well as the early Almodóvar’s and Alex de la Iglesia’s films. It conceptualizes Spanishness through dark humor as a specific way of self-knowledge. In Egea’s view, dark comedy is not only defining of the nation and of Spanish cinema, but also mediating of the socioeconomic context in which the darkly funny films are produced. To this extent, Egea understands dark comedies as interventions revealing the darker side of the dictatorship propaganda, and later, the incompleteness of the Transition and false glamour of Spain in the early 90s. Another important angle of Egea’s analysis is what he calls “cultural specificity” of Spanish dark humor that could serve to reframe modern cinema and modernity itself. Not unrelated to this ambitious attempt to rethink modernity through Spanish dark laughter are the ethical questions that Egea reflects upon: What are the mechanisms and limits of complicity, dissidence and rebellion against an unethical social and political order from within? The first chapter contains a discussion of dark comedy as a genre defining of Spanish national cinema. Egea argues that dark comedies re-shape once established imagined national community, indeed he claims that they “wrestle” with the nation. He follows with a brief history of what seeming Spanish has meant since majismo and connects this to the theories of Spain’s peripheral modernity. Referring to the 1960-s when various films that he reflects upon where made, Egea notes that by then modernity has lost its ethos and become “a ceaseless creation of needs and consumption.” The historical concept of “apertura” (opening) when Spanish culture performed towards the expectations of the tourists arriving mainly from northern Europe, is one side of the “visual modernity” of those years. On the other side stand dark comedies of those years with their aesthetics of deformation. They are retraceable to Valle Inclán’s “esperpento,” that continue also in Almodóvar’s and de la Iglesia’s films of the 80s and 90s. Towards the end of the first chapter, Egea introduces his own concept of “laughing darkly.” Relying on Breton, he describes dark laughter as “self-protective” expression of modern sensibility whence we are laughing at ourselves bitterly yet not without perverse pleasure. [End Page 145] Chapter two focuses on El cochecito (1960) directed by Marco Ferreri. Ferreri’s film’s dark laughter examines the character’s capacity to rebel against the consumerist society through an acquisition of a vehicle, an apparently liberating commodity. This acquires specific political meaning in the context of the 1960s Spain’s transformation of socioeconomic system that made various film directors and writers question citizen’s complicity with the order through consumption. Through an analysis of the film photography, Egea retraces the transformation of the vehicle and its relations with the protagonist, and arrives at the conclusion that even if the the commodity has been used against the system that the protagonist rejects, that alone has neither guaranteed a transcendental character of his rebellion nor let him escape. In the third chapter, Egea interprets Berlanga’s El Verdugo (1963) along the same lines as a dissection-like analysis of complicity with the regime of an average good citizen. In Egea’s text, it is the camera that examines the relation between the individual and the fascist state that is becoming consumerist at the same time. The moral statement of the movie can be tracked, as Egea suggests, through the shots, cranes, depth of the field and the montage. The same angle is used to film the execution of the death penalty and the wedding ceremony. The depth of the field of vision underscores how much the protagonists lack freedom while “nearness and closeness are at the same time spatial and moral terms.” Dissecting the camera searches for the spaces where agency becomes complicit with the regime by failing to make a right ethical...

O IMPACTO DO PROTAGONISMO DAS EMPRESAS TRANSNACIONAIS COMO ATORES NÃO ESTATAIS E A EMERGÊNCIA DA TRANSNORMATIVIDADE

O mundo das Relações Internacionais vem adquirindo espaço no cenário global. Com o surgimento e protagonismo de novos atores, seus fluxos de poder se intensificaram, remodelando a atuação estatal, por vezes, limitando-a. As empresas transnacionais, como atores não estatais, possuem o peculiar caráter transcendental, não ficando restritas às fronteiras dos Estados Soberanos. Consequentemente, ocorre uma redistribuição do poder, antes somente conferido aos Estados, agora também de domínio das empresas transnacionais. Por tal razão é que se torna necessário estudar a questão normativa atinente a essas empresas sob uma perspectiva do Direito Transnacional. O presente trabalho, portanto, visa analisar os impactos causados nas relações internacionais por empresas transnacionais, abordando a questão da transnormatividade, através do método dedutivo. Partindo-se dessa premissa, conclui-se que a transcendência das corporações transnacionais faz surgir a necessidade de um Direito Transnormativo, que não se limite às fronteiras Estatais, uma vez que tais empresas possuem seu próprio regime e suas próprias regras.

The Ethical Subject and Willing Subject in the Tractatus: an Alternative to the Transcendental Reading

The Transcendental Reading of the Tractatus argues that Wittgenstein endorses, under the notion of ‘metaphysical subject’, the existence of a willing subject as a transcendental condition of ethics and representation. Tejedor aims to reject this reading resorting to three criticisms. (i) The notion of ‘willing subject’ does not appear explicitly in, nor can it be deduced from, the Tractatus, (ii) the metaphysical subject and the willing subject are not synonymous or analogous notions and, finally, (iii) Wittgenstein abandons the notion of ‘willing subject’ at the end of the Notebooks. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, it analyzes the critique introduced by Tejedor and presents three problems that demonstrate that Tejedor’s critique cannot adequately reject the Transcendental Reading. Secondly, it sets forth an alternative reading of the Tractatus that overcomes the issues that stem from the Transcendental Reading. This alternative reading conceives the metaphysical subject as an ethical subject and a willing subject. Additionally, it advances an alternative account of the transcendental character of ethics that does not defend the existence of a transcendental subject understood as a condition of ethics and representation in the Tractatus.

Two-dimensional mathematical model for simulation of the drying process of thick layers of natural materials in a conveyor-belt dryer

This paper presents the mathematical model and numerical analysis of the convective drying process of thick slices of colloidal capillary-porous materials slowly moving through conveyor-belt dryer. A flow of hot moist air was used as drying agent. The drying process has been analyzed in the form of a 2-D mathematical model, in two directions: along the conveyor and perpendicular on it. The mathematical model consists of two non-linear differential equations and one equation with a transcendent character and it is based on the mathematical model developed for drying process in a form of a 1-D thin layer. The appropriate boundary conditions were introduced. The presented model is suitable for the automated control of conveyor-belt dryers. The obtained results with analysis could be useful in predicting the drying kinetics of potato slices and similar natural products.

Islands as Symbolic Centres of the Early Medieval Settlement Patterns in Middle Pomerania (Northern Poland)<br>Wyspy jako symboliczne centra wczesnośredniowiecznych mikroregionów osadniczych Pomorza środkowego</br>

Islands have played a significant role in the region of Pomerania. Isolated from the rest of the landscape, islands appealed to the human psyche in a highly distinct way. Because of their geographic isolation, they allowed their inhabitants to develop relations of a transcendental character. According to scholars of religion, when people searched for a place of settlement, they looked, above all, for a specific, unique area. In a symbolic sense, such an area was regarded as a pivot around which social life would revolve. Those parts of land that were surrounded by water were associated with the mythic Primeval Land: the first land emerging from the Primeval Ocean and perceived as the centre of the world, axis mundi. Empirical material obtained in the course of archaeological research allows one to impute and follow such dynamics in traditional communities. By analysing selected sites, this paper explores the complex worldviews of pagan Pomeranians from the early Middle Ages. Material evidence of sacred space organization and relics of ritual activities visible in archaeological sites suggests that isolated parts of land, in the form of islands, were a key component in the creation of the religious and mythical worldview of the pre-Christian inhabitants of early medieval Pomerania.

A Cause Among Causes? God Acting in the Natural World

Contemporary debates on divine action tend to focus on finding a space in nature where there would be no natural causes, where nature offers indeterminacy, openness, and potentiality, to place God’s action. These places are found through the natural sciences, in particular quantum mechanics. God’s action is then located in those ontological ‘causal-gaps’ offered by certain interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this view, God would determine what is left underdetermined in nature without disrupting the laws of nature. These contemporary proposals evidence at least two unexamined assumptions, which frame the discussion in such a way that they portray God as acting as a secondary cause or a ‘cause among causes’. God is somewhat required to act within these ‘gaps’, binding God to the laws of nature, and placing God’s action at the level of secondary causes. I suggest that understanding God’s action, following Thomas Aquinas, in terms of primary and secondary causation could help dissolve this difficulty. Aquinas moves away from this objection by suggesting to speak of an analogical notion of cause, allowing for an analogical understanding of God’s causality in nature. With a radically different understanding of the interplay between secondary causes and God, Aquinas manages to avoid conceiving God as a cause among causes, keeping the distinctive transcendent character of God’s causality safe from objections.

Consciência moral transcendente e experiência religiosa na obra de Viktor Frankl

The present article is an analysis of how Viktor Emil Frankl’s thesis about the transcendent character of the moral conscience [Gewissen] constitutes a key argument to bring to light his visions on religious experience. It is a debate that encompasses, in a particular way, the theological thought of the Viennese philosopher and psychiatrist because it goes from an analysis of the human responsibility phenomena to a peculiar notion of the relationship between men and God. In this sense, we can get a glimpse of how this thinker refutes the psychological readings on morality at the same time that he objects the central psychoanalytical thesis on this matter.

Transcendent Mind, Emergent Universe in the Thought of Michael Polanyi

AbstractThis essay vindicates two major aspects of the science-based philosophy of Michael Polanyi: 1. His concept of tacit knowing, and 2. His concept of the multi-levelled character of reality. These two notions relate closely with one another, and together support the thesis to be argued here, that when it comes to understanding human beings, and most especially the human mind, science and religion have to meet on the common ground of the transcendent capacities of human beings, which are pointers to the transcendent character of the universe. The mind is an emergent of the universe, as are all of its other amazing characteristics, but mind is also, therefore, a clue to the character of the universe and its encompassing reality. Mind reflects reality; reality invites mind.

Transcendental philosophy within perspectives of the romantic fragmentariness

The relation of Jena romantics to Kant?s transcendental philosophy could be considered from the point of view of the romantic theory of the fragment. The author claims that fragmentariness had a transcendental character in the philosophical ref lections of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. That is the reason that they have acquired the opportunity of approaching to the immanent tension of Kant?s philosophical project. The problem of ref lection of relation between systematicity and incompleteness of knowledge and of man?s theoretical and practical side is among the most important. The author tries to evaluate the importance of Fichte?s version of critical idealism for romantics, considering the crucial romanticists? intention of historization of transcendental idealism with the help of the fragment. Final chapter refers to recent interpretations of the romantic fragment which tend to ignore this intention.

RECONCEPTUALISING ZAKAT IN INDONESIA

In the past few decades, in Indonesia as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world, the practice of zakat has been repositioned from an annual, obligatory ritual of worship to a fundamental instrument for achieving socio-economic justice. This article explores key discourses relating to this reconceptualisation and the alternatives to both capitalist accumulation and socialist utopia they point towards. It also seeks to problematise the very grounds this repositioning has been conducted on, arguing that the recent conception of zakat as philanthropic giving sidelines and downplays other, alternative understandings of it as a right. It argues that this reconceptualisation ultimately rests on a political perspective which privileges the transcendental character of obligations and supports zakat payers at the expense of the immanent presence of others to whom zakat is owed as a due.

The significance of religious imagery in The Philosophy of Money

This article seeks to understand a puzzling aspect of Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, namely, the many religious analogies Simmel uses to characterize money. We argue that with these analogies Simmel indicates how what he would later term ‘the transcendent character of life’ permeates mundane monetary interactions. Specifically, we articulate how key religious forms of experience – faith, unity, and individuality – exist in monetary exchange and point toward a distinctively Simmelian way to understand the interplay between religion and economics.

Book Review: The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere

The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere. By Samuel Joeckel. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-88146-4375. Pp. 403. $30.00. It can be like discovering a jewel to find a book that is both scholarly and argumentatively sound. It is a rare thing indeed for that same book to offer keen insights into the life of a profound writer, as well as provide organizational categories for that writers work that are both complex and accessible. Samuel Joeckel has shaped such a jewel in his recent book, The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere. The book is a delight to read, as Joeckel progresses through a carefully constructed series of definitions and assertions toward understanding Lewis as a intellectual. Joeckel's primary claim is that Lewis' persona as a created the ways in which Lewis responded to truth claims and the methods that he used to construct the arguments in his works. With the rise of the sphere that began with Enlightenment presumptions, so Joeckel argues, the place of one type of public became a response to the challenge that atheism offered to Christianity. The introduction to this lengthy book sets up key terms that Joeckel will spend the remainder of part 1 (of three parts) defining, with careful examples from Lewis' culture and works: public intellectual, de-conversion, transcendent character, the genre of and vantage point. Chapter 1 overviews the qualities and role of the who used Enlightenment standards of reasoned argument to assume a neutral, or objective, arguer (de-converted stance in Joeckel's term) who used logical discourse to carefully move through an argument and that by doing so, the argument could be acceded on solely rational grounds. Drawing on Russell Jacoby's (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Joeckel defines a as a figure who defends religious, political, or ideological beliefs in a manner that requires the expertise of a scholar, possessing the learning and critical acumen to engage with proficiency complex issues, and the communicative skills of a journalist, capable of making those complex beliefs understandable to the layperson (7). As is evident from this quote, Joeckel himself writes--at times--in a style that captures key ideas in loaded, but succinct language. Since this laconic language is not always present in the book, the argument is well worth some unnecessary repetition by Joeckel. Defining the allows Joeckel to argue that the or nonconformist role assumed by those taking on the persona is one Lewis assumed in his apologetics, as well as his apologue, which Joeckel argues are works organized as a fictional example of the truth of a formulable statement or a series of such statements (qtd. Sacks Fiction and the Shape of Belief 26, Joeckel 3). Lewis' personality as is upheld by his arguments against modernity and moral relativism, as well as the rise of scientism during the twentieth century. As a defender of Christianity, Lewis assumed the outsider stance to the new atheism that gained support during the twentieth century. As a translator of difficult messages, Lewis assumed a de-converted stance that attempts to reduce (or remove) bias before analyzing ideas, often employing transcendent characters (another Joeckel term as he so fondly and repeatedly reminds the reader through the 400-page book) who adopt Olympian perspectives on truth and reason that transcend the intellectual limitations endemic to the human condition (22). In his second chapter Joeckel argues that the challenge of atheism along with changes in Christian apologetics work together to create a moment perfect for Lewis' rise to popularity--a unique and unrepeatable moment. …

The fundamentality of the transcendent character of the concept of "human dignity"

The fundamentality of the transcendent character of the concept of "human dignity"

Un Dieu sadique : le rôle de l’image blasphématoire de Dieu dans Dolce agonia de Nancy Huston

The present article seeks to analyze the way in which the blasphemous figure of God in Dolce agonia by Nancy Huston allows the author to describe the sacred element in human life, seen as deprived of transcendental character. This is possible thanks to the three aspects of the text dependent on the type of God’s figure, which are: the contrast between passages marked by the cynical God’s voice and passages focused on man’s life filled with suffering; the tone and the appropriation of time var-iations and, finally, the double character of God who, at the same time, is indifferent to man’s lot while touched by his capacity of love.