The Image in Mind
The Image in Mind

Author: Charles Taliaferro

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1441148825

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A philosophical inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of theism and naturalism in accounting for the emergence of consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. The authors begin by offering an account of modern scientific practice which gives a central place to the visual imagination and aesthetic values. They then move to test the explanatory power of naturalism and theism in accounting for consciousness and the very visual imagination and aesthetic values that lie behind and define modern science. Taliaferro and Evans argue that evolutionary biology alone is insufficient to account for consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. Insofar as naturalism is compelled to go beyond evolutionary biology, it does not fare as well as theism in terms of explanatory power.

Image
Image

Author: Mark C. Taylor

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 022678231X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion, explore the modern power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images. Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.

Philosophies of Liturgy
Philosophies of Liturgy

Author: J. Aaron Simmons

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1350349240

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mainstream philosophy of religion has primarily focused on the truth and justification of religious beliefs even though belief is only one small facet of religious life. This collection remedies this by taking practice and embodied action seriously as fundamental elements of any philosophy of religion. Emerging and established voices across different philosophical traditions come together to consider religious actions, including public worship, from perspectives such as trauma and social ontology, sound and silence, and knowledge and hope. Embodied religious practice is viewed through the lens of liturgy, intrinsically connecting religious rituals to human existence to show clearly that, no matter where one finds oneself in terms of the so-called 'analytic-continental' divide, philosophy of religion must be concerned with more than just beliefs if it is to adequately deal with the subject matter of 'religion.' The purpose of these studies is not to reject what has gone before but to expand the focus of philosophy of religion. This approach lays the groundwork for investigations into how beliefs are situated in our theological, moral, and social frameworks. For any philosophy of religion student or scholar interested in how thinking and living well are intimately related, this is a go-to resource. It takes seriously the importance of historical religious traditions and communities, opening the space for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary debates.

The Essence of Manifestation
The Essence of Manifestation

Author: M. Henry

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 857

ISBN-13: 9401023913

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book was born of a refusal, the refusal of the very philosophy from which it has sprung. After the war, when it had become apparent that the classical tradition, and particularly neo-Kantianism, was breathing its last, French thought looked to Germany for its inspiration and renewal. Jean Hyppolite and Kojeve reintroduced Hegel and the "existentialists" and phenomenologists drew the attention of a curious public to the fundamental investigations of Husserl and Heidegger. If only by being understood as a phenomenological ontology, this books speaks eloquently enough of the debt it owes to these thinkers of genius. The conceptual material which it uses, particn1arly in chapters 1 to 44, outlines the Husserlian and Heideggerian horizon of the investigations. However, it is precisely this horizon which is questioned. In spite of its profundity and achievements, I wanted to show that contemporary ontology pushes to the absolute the presuppositions and the limits of the philosophy of consciousness since Descartes and even of all Western philosophy since the Greeks. An 'External' critique, viz. the opposing of one thesis to another, wonld have no sense whatever. Rather, it is interior to these presuppositions whose insufficiency had to be shown that we placed ourselves; the very concepts which were rejected were also the ones which guided the problem initially.

The Christ Is Dead, Long Live the Christ
The Christ Is Dead, Long Live the Christ

Author: Andrew Oberg

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-07-07

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1725277840

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Christ Is Dead, Long Live the Christ: A Philotheologic Prayer, a Hermeneutics of Healing is a call for renewal and reinvention. Following a brief examination of the historical Jesus (Yeshua, using his actual Aramaic/Hebrew name), the book moves into a phenomenological study of the image, idea, and the place of both in our felt experiences. Looking closer at what we think were the actual words of this wandering sage, the picture we arrive at is one that will surprise, possibly unsettle. Moved out of our traditional comfort zones, we find the need to question what we have been told were Yeshua’s teachings, compelling us to further rethink messages on the afterlife, human finitude, so-called atonement theologies, and above all the “kingdom of God.” Whatever this vision was—and might yet be—it seems central to Yeshua’s efforts, and so we finally weigh these “kingdom” facets against a broader ideascape, offering suggestions for how a Yeshuan “kingdom” project situated within the panoply of a widely comprehended Judaic way-of-being might yield fresh life to we who find worth in the utterances and what they point towards, to we who wonder about a more human(e) world.

Figuring the Sacred
Figuring the Sacred

Author: Paul Ricœur

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published:

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9781451415704

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The thought of Paul Ricoeur continues its profound effect on theology, religious studies and biblical interpretation. The 28 papers contained in this volume constitute the most comprehensive overview of Ricoeur's writings in religion since 1970. Ricoeur's hermeneutical orientation and his sensitivity to the mystery of religious language offer fresh insight to the transformative potential of sacred literature, including the Bible.

Through a Speculum That Shines
Through a Speculum That Shines

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 069121509X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter. In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

Religious Experience Revisited
Religious Experience Revisited

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-09-07

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9004328602

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Religious Experience Revisited explores a dilemma which has haunted the study of religion since William James. Is religion rooted in experiences? Is religion rooted in expressions? How are experiences and expressions related? The contributors to this international and interdisciplinary compilation explore the possibilities and the impossibilities of a hermeneutics of religion. Combining theology and philosophy with biblical, cultural, historical and literary studies, they examine how religious experiences and religious expressions have been entangled in the past and in the present. These entanglements call for interdisciplinary conversations in which those who study experiences and those who study expressions can learn from each other in order to carve out important and instructive spaces for the study of religion.