Философия
Различные книги в жанре ФилософияLove, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good
This book tells a compelling story about love, friendship, and the Divine that took over a thousand years to unfold. It argues that mind and feeling are intrinsically connected in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus; that Aristotle developed his theology and physics primarily from Plato's Symposium (from the «Greater» and «Lesser Mysteries» of Diotima-Socrates' speech); and that the Beautiful and the Good are not coincident classes, but irreducible Forms, and the loving ascent of the Symposium must be interpreted in the light of the Republic, as the later tradition up to Ficino saw. Against the view that Platonism is an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary experience or opposed to loving individuals for their own sakes, this book argues that Plato dramatizes the ambiguities of ordinary experience, confronts the possibility of failure, and bequeaths erotic models for the loving of individuals to later thought. Finally, it examines the Platonic-Aristotelian heritage on the Divine to discover whether God can love us back, and situates the dramatic development of this legacy in Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Dionysius the Areopagite.
Strength of Mind
Higher education in the twenty-first century should bring together freedom and knowledge with courage and hope. Why these four concepts? As Goodson argues in Strength of Mind, higher education in the twenty-first century offers preparation for ordinary life. Freedom and knowledge serve as the conditions for cultivating courage and hope within one's ordinary life. More specifically, courage and hope ought to be understood as the virtues required for enjoying ordinary life. If college-educated citizens wish to hold onto the concepts of courage and hope, however, then both courage and hope need to be understood as intellectual virtues. As a moral virtue, courage has become outdated. As a theological virtue, hope violates the logic of the golden mean. Focusing on intellectual virtues also requires shifting from moral perfectionism to rational perfectionism. Rational perfectionism involves keeping impossible demands in view for oneself while constantly and continually striving for one's «unattained but attainable self.» Goodson defends these arguments by learning from the bits of wisdom found within American Transcendentalism (Emerson, Cavell), German Idealism (Kant, Hegel), Jewish philosophy (Maimonides, Spinoza, Putnam), neo-pragmatism (Putnam, Rorty, West), post-modern theories about pedagogy (Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty), and secular accounts of perfectionism (Murdoch, Cavell).
The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being
This book gathers a set of reflections on the gift of beauty and the passion of being. There is something surprising about beauty that we receive and that moves the passion of being in us. The book takes issue with an ambiguous attitude to beauty among some who proclaim their advanced aesthetic authenticity. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us, not what gives delight or even consoles. By contrast, attention is given to how beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away, but we are more truly there with the beautiful when we are taken outside of ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. There is something given, something awakening, something delighting, something energizing, something of invitation to transcendence. The theme is amplified in diverse reflections: on life and its transient beauty; on soul music and its relation to self; on the shine on things given in creation; on beauty and Schopenhauer's dark origin; on creativity and the dynamis in Paul Weiss's creative ventures; on redemption in Romanticism in the thought of Stanley Cavell; on theater as a between or metaxu; on redeeming laughter and its connection with the passion of being.
The Expansion of Metaphysics
The culmination of a lifetime's preoccupation with crucial human concerns too often curiously marginalized by the history of philosophy, The Expansion of Metaphysics sheds new light on freedom and the will by making the phenomenon of novelty philosophically intelligible. The a priori synthesis of Kant is joined to Judeo-Christian themes (the kenosis of Christ in the incarnation and the tzimtzum of God in the creation) in order to develop a doctrine of «superabundance» (freedom and love) and «singularity» (with the Work of Art and the Child as paradigms). Space and time are reanalyzed as structural forms of human existence as Vető guides the reader into the depths and heights of reality, climaxing in a metaphysics of good and evil.
Embracing Our Finitude
Memento mori–remember death–this is how the medieval monks exhort us. Our life, given in birth and taken by death, is radically marked by finitude, which can be a source of great fear and anguish. Our finitude, however, does not in itself need to be something negative. It confronts us with the question of our life's meaning and spurs us on to treasure our days. Our contingency, as evidenced in our birth and death, reminds us that we have not made ourselves and that there is nothing necessary about the marvelous fact that we exist. Particularly from a Judeo-Christian perspective, embracing our finitude will mean gratefully accepting life as a completely gratuitous gift and living one's days informed by a sense of this gratitude.
Turning the Tables on Apologetics
Does apologetic method matter? Helmut Thielicke argues that the method should conform to its own message. He thus rejects traditional apologetic methodologies beholden to supposedly neutral scientific and philosophical paradigms. Seeking to reform Christian conversation, Thielicke discovers a lost way of persuasion, that is, the table-turning approach found in Christ's conversations. Whenever Jesus is questioned, he seldom answers directly. For he refuses to allow the conversation to be framed by an autonomous mindset, and instead responds with a counterquestion. Christ's style of persuasion–as the controller of the question–subverts his hearers' presuppositions and challenges their unbelief. This approach is the reverse of the defensive, answer-giving mode of traditional apologetics. In view of renewing Christ's method, Thielicke insists that the task of apologetics is «something which is always on the offensive and, far from giving ready-made answers to the doubtful questions of men, turns the tables by putting questions on its own account–aggressive, violent, radical questions–and striking straight to the hearts of men.» Christian conversation must integrate Christ's method with his message in order to advocate the message itself. For it is not the world that questions Christ, but rather Christ questions the world.
Love and the Postmodern Predicament
The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of «reality» is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are losing a sense of the concrete and imposing presence of the real, and the fundamental claim it makes on us, a claim that Iris Murdoch once described as the essence of love. In response to this postmodern predicament, the present book aims to draw on the classical philosophical tradition in order to articulate a robust philosophical anthropology, and a new appreciation of the importance of the «transcendental properties» of being: beauty, goodness, and truth. The book begins with a reflection on the importance of metaphysics in our contemporary setting, and then presents the human person's relation to the world under the signs of the transcendentals: beauty is the gracious invitation into reality, goodness is the self-gift of freedom in response to this invitation, and truth is the consummation of our relation to the real in knowledge. The book culminates in an argument for why love is ultimately a matter of being, and why metaphysical reason in indispensable in faith.
James Baldwin and the Short Story
This book examines the range of issues that echo in James Baldwin's short stories. It articulates and defends the claim that the stories in the collection Going to Meet the Man are driven by the autobiographical memory of the author. To support this line of thought and the related proposition that the stories feed into themes relevant to self-knowledge, vicarious suffering, love, and forgiveness, their effectiveness as transformative and «revelatory texts» is highlighted. By drawing on contemporary studies and challenging the view that short stories are no more than miniature pieces merely echoing «major» works of their authors, this book demonstrates that the short story genre can be profoundly forceful and effective in the articulation of complex human issues. This study shows also that the humanistic import of the Baldwin stories is amplified by their ability to accumulate moral tension as they elicit the participation of the reader in an imaginative quest for a better world.
The Ethics of Superintelligent Design
Artificial intelligence (AI) permeates Google searches, the personal assistants in our smartphones, and is all over our newsfeeds. Watson's machine learning has already started to revolutionize many important industries including oncology, law, finance, and entertainment. The idea that man is about to increase his immediate surroundings with exponential gains in the level of intelligence over the coming generations is based upon a technological revolution and the potential for artificial superintelligence (ASI). It is within this context that there is a prevailing need for a discussion of its ethical implications. As a Christian ethicist, Paul Golata believes that the need for this conversation to be informed by Christian principles is imperative. ASI is a move toward the proper handling of information. However, how a society interprets and applies this information is actually more pertinent than the raw amount of information it possesses. This important ethical conversation is being led by humanistic thinkers who assume that all of reality is just matter in motion and that mind is nothing more than electrochemical activity in the «wetware» of human brains. The Ethics of Superintelligent Design critically examines and challenges some of the most important trajectories of ASI while upholding the authority and inerrancy of the Bible, the supernatural creation account, a realistic view of the state of humanity, and biblical ethics.
Being and Intelligibility
What do we mean when we say that something is? What is the meaning of human experience? These two most elementary philosophical questions have perplexed thinkers for thousands of years. Being and Intelligibility explores them from the simple premise that all entities are essentially logical in their being. The book develops its three central theses: that the beingness of beings, called «Being,» and the intelligibility of Being are one and the same; that nothingness (i.e., absolute not-Being) is self-contradictory and unintelligible and, therefore, Being is logically necessary; and that the fullness of human rational experience cannot be explained in materially reducible terms and requires recognition of the existence of transcendent reality, which includes God (as self-grounding good will), moral obligation and freedom, and the souls of men. Being and Intelligibility thoroughly investigates the implications of the essential logicality of Being, including that human Being shows itself to itself from within itself as a substantive, persistent, morally obligated unity among the ordered manifold of its life experiences, whose essential Being is orientation toward God.