This book provides a series of challenges to Jorge J. E. Gracia's views on metaphysics and categories made by realist philosophers in the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. Inclusion of Gracia's responses to his critics makes this book a useful companion to Gracia's Metaphysics and its Task: The Search for the Categorial Foundation of Knowledge.
Fleeing Cuba in 1961, Jorge J. E. Gracia arrived in the USA at the age of nineteen without family and unable to speak English. Ten years later he was assistant professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Over the next 50 years Gracia published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, making major contributions to numerous areas of philosophy: Latin American philosophy, race and ethnicity, Medieval philosophy, philosophical historiography, metaphysics and ontology, and theory of interpretation. This book is a critical response to Gracia’s work and a tribute to his legacy. It includes a comprehensive bibliography of Gracia’s philosophical works.
This volume re-examines some of the major themes at the intersection of traditional and contemporary metaphysics. The book uses as a point of departure Francisco Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations published in 1597. Minimalist metaphysics in empiricist/pragmatist clothing have today become mainstream in analytic philosophy. Independently of this development, the progress of scholarship in ancient and medieval philosophy makes clear that traditional forms of metaphysics have affinities with some of the streams in contemporary analytic metaphysics. The book brings together leading contemporary metaphysicians to investigate the viability of a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.
Scientists, historians, philosophers and theologians often engage in debates on the limitations and mutual interactions of their respective fields of study. Serious discussions are often overshadowed by the mass-produced popular and semi-popular literature on science and religion, as well as by the political agendas of many of the actors in these debates. For some, reducing religion and science to forms of social discourse is a possible way out from epistemological overlapping between them; yet is there room for religious faith only when science dissolves into one form of social discourse? The religion thus rescued would have neither rational legitimisation nor metaphysical validity, but if both scientific and religious theories try to make absolute claims on all possible aspects of reality then conflict between them seems almost inevitable. In this book leading authors in the field of science and religion, including William Carroll, Steve Fuller, Karl Giberson and Roger Trigg, highlight the oft-neglected and profound philosophical foundations that underlie some of the most frequent questions at the boundary between science and religion: the reality of knowledge, and the notions of creation, life and design. In tune with Mariano Artigas’s work, the authors emphasise that these are neither religious nor scientific but serious philosophical questions.
In rural Florida in 1940, the members of the Brown family find themselves battling circumstances far beyond those faced by small-town farmers. With war looming overseas, their hometown of Lorimar struggles with the racially-charged discord of the time with its residents drawn into opposing factions that threaten to tear the town apart. Stirred by the strict and uncompromising sermons of the church pastor and the secretive work being undertaken in the Army facility on the shore of the lake that supplies the town's water, the people are quickly overwhelmed by events for which they are unprepared to face. The lake's level begins to drop dramatically and drought threatens their livelihoods, but nothing poses a threat greater than the series of deadly sinkholes that mysteriously open up and devastate the town. Soon Lorimer finds itself gripped by terror unlike anything it has previously known or imagined to be possible. Using the stark language and the customs of the day, Sinkhole Summer takes the reader to the beating heart of the story where tones of hate and mistrust paint the landscape with fear, and the horrors lurking within the earth present a menace the town might not survive.
In spite of the growth of secularization, technology, and science, statistics tell us that religious conversions are on the rise, and the number of people who take religion and divine revelation seriously is at an all-time high. This phenomenon, curiously enough, has increased rather than decreased both inter and intra-religious conflicts: Protestants fight Catholics in Northern Ireland; Serbian Greek Orthodox fight with Kosovo Moslems in Yugoslavia; Jews fight with Moslems in Palestine; Hindus fight with Moslems in India - and the list is seemingly endless. There is bitter disagreement also in dealing with revelation, even within the same religious traditions and with regard to the same scriptures: Liberal Christians reject the literal interpretation of the Christian scriptures favored by Evangelicals; many Protestant groups do not accept the role of tradition in interpretation which Roman Catholics consider essential; Orthodox Jews strictly follow eating regulations presented in the Torah, but Reformed Jews take these in a different sense. The sources of these disagreements vary considerably. Some are rooted in historical events and traditions, but quite often they signal deep confusions concerning the interpretation of what believers take to be divinely revealed. In recent years, the author claims, the confusion has been compounded by the rise in the number and variety of interpretational approaches that are used to understand revelation. One can now take a culturalist, sociological, literary, psychoanalytical, historical, political, philosophical or feminist interpretations - to name just a few - approach. But do these all necessarily make sense when applied to religious texts? These and other questions cry out for answers which seldom are even attempted in the pertinent literature. This book offers a novel and sustained philosophical treatment of religious hermeneutics in which the author considers the main alternatives available in today's marketplace. The book is neither ideologically partisan nor thematically narrow and should be of interest to anyone concerned with interpreting the divine word. It offers a sensible roadmap to a topic that continues to draw heated debate in philosophy, theology, sociology, history and literary studies.
This book examines philosophers' autobiographies as a genre of philosophical writing. Author J. Lenore Wright focuses her attention on five philosophical autobiographies: Augustine's Confessions, Descartes' Meditations, Rousseau's The Confessions, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, and Hazel Barnes's The Story I Tell Myself. In the context of first-person narration, she shows how the philosophers in question turn their attention inward and unleash their analytical rigor on themselves. Wright argues that philosophical autobiography makes philosophical analysis necessary and that one cannot unfold without the other. Her distinction between the ontological and rhetorical dimensions of the self creates a rich middle ground in which questions of essence and identity bear upon existence.
For scholars working on almost any aspect of American thought, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America presents an indispensable reference work. Selecting over 700 figures from the Dictionary of Early American Philosophers and the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, this condensed edition includes key contributors to philosophical thought. From 1600 to the present day, entries cover psychology, pedagogy, sociology, anthropology, education, theology and political science, before these disciplines came to be considered distinct from philosophy. Clear and accessible, each entry contains a short biography of the writer, an exposition and analysis of his or her doctrines and ideas, a bibliography of writings and suggestions for further reading. Featuring a new preface by the editor and a comprehensive introduction, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America includes 30 new entries on twenty-first century thinkers including Martha Nussbaum and Patricia Churchland. With in-depth overviews of Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Noah Porter, Frederick Rauch, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, this is an invaluable one-stop research volume to understanding leading figures in American thought and the development of American intellectual history.
