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This paper is a short discussion of the first book of prof. John C. Lennox published in Polish, in which he discusses the philosophical theses of Stephen Hawking, trying to show theirs inaccuracies and misunderstandings.
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The article presents and analyses the philosophical thought of Louis Lavelle, a representative of the French “Philosophy of Spirit” and a precursor of the philosophy of being. The ideas of Louis Lavelle are confronted and compared with the thought of M. Heidegger or J.-P. Sartre, as well as with the theses of postmodern thinkers, such as M. Foucault and R. Rorty. While all these philosophers reject the Enlightenment domination of Reason, the distinguishing feature of Lavelle’s philosophy is an optimistic vision of human participation in the dynamic being which constitutes the highest value. In the paper it is indicated that the axiology of Louis Lavelle might be a major contribution to the contemporary philosophical discourse. The affirmation of being, which is the basis of his axiology and metaphysics, opens new perspectives for the development of human beings and for the appreciation of values in individual life and within the society. This conception might be a good starting point for refuting the postmodern diagnosis and for developing a new axiology based on the participation in dynamic being, which is a foundation for all values.
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In the first part of the paper I present the brief overview of what negation is in philosophy and logic. In the second part I present examples of five kinds of negation that are used in the language of the catholic theology. This surprisingly results from the complex structure of the theology.
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This paper deals with the theological problem of creation understood as an act of God’s self-limiting. The idea of such limiting, which comes from a free decision of God, is an interesting argument for theodicy. This discipline tries to find out the reasons for which evil exists in the world created by God. In the article it is argued that one of this reasons can have its origin in God’s self-limiting which took place during the creation. God limits himself because this is the only way the world to materialize. But in such an act of creation God has to detract His omnipotence and this is why He cannot prevent evil. In the paper it is shown, that this idea comes from Jewish mysticism. To discuss its advantages and disadvantages special attention is paid to the interpretation of Hans Jonas who develops this idea to find out why God did not prevent the tragedy of Auschwitz.
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This paper argues that methods used in informal logic (sometimes called Critical Thinking) could be helpful in examining the arguments in discussions between theists and atheists. Application of the techniques of informal logic could reveal the substantive value of many commonly shared views about theism (and theists) and atheism (and atheists). The utility of applying informal logic methods has illustrated by several examples.
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Mystical experience and demonic possession as examples of religious experience are the areas which are submitted to extremely different interpretations. The gap between interpretations is due to the beforehand presumed metaphysics. Skillful separation between confessed metaphysics of the interpreter and religious experience which he interprets let us reach the true contents of the religious experience and at the same time become a true challenge to a philosopher.
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Among the new contemporary challenges brought by globalization is the need for more safety in public space. Under the pressure of internationalized terrorism, the crisis of immigrants and new worrying trends in the online environment that make the virtual space a battle front for hybrid or cyberwar. Among the attempts to protect and increase public safety, attention is drawn to the proposal discussed in more and more states to restrict individual freedoms to ensure security. Although, at first glance this approach may seem an alternative, the political, legal, social and ethical implications are many and require an elaborate debate. If we remember the many sacrifices and the long period of time when man has fought for the recognition of individual rights, it is very difficult to understand the reasons for proposing this exchange between individual freedoms and public security. After an analysis, even superficial, we can see that this negotiation between freedom and security would not be possible without a tendentious, debatable and sustained media coverage, but with priority in the online environment. It is also obvious that any initiative attempting to restrict individual freedoms in favour of public security would be doomed to failure if it were not authorized by a popular vote, or at least by persons who were elected to represent the people. But if we consider the very subtle methods of manipulation by which public opinion is influenced today and the impact of some interest groups that have access to information and controls certain areas of the media, may have we ask with concern, if not somehow the renunciation of freedoms for more security is not another form to maintain or increase the control over the masses. That is why, in the present paper, we first propose to present some arguments to show the indivisible link between individual freedoms and public safety, then to show that the vote of a majority can cancel out the balance between individual freedoms and public safety with the purpose to give priority to safety in relation with freedom, and finally, we’ll draw attention to the manipulation tendencies that want to present the exchange of liberties with security as acceptable or even necessary.
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Freedom was always the goal of humanity since its dawn. In theological and philosophical thought the concept of freedom was long debated. It is difficult to bring out a certain definition of freedom. What is freedom? Is there an absolute freedom? If so, how must one define it? It consists in a moment or a permanent state? How can be conciled the two aspects: freedom vs. determinism or freedom and determinism? When one attempts to defines freedom, what is the guiding standard: divinity, society or the individual? Who/what defines freedom? What are the criteria that defines freedom? Who/what has primacy: divinity, society or the individual? What is the authoritative source that provides a balanced view of human freedom?
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At the beginning of the 16th century, the Transylvanian Principality had been an Catholic land within the Hungarian Kingdom, led by an elite consisting of three Estates, that of the nobles, later called the Hungarian nation, of the Saxons and of the Szeklers. However, the common population numbered a majority of Orthodox Romanians, without any administrative or political representatives and with restricted rights. The Reformation’s advent in Transylvania showed a broad causality, harbouring theological, moral, ethical reasons but was also pushed by political and stragic considerents.The reformatory process christalized in several confessions from which 3 became main stream and gained legal recognition: Lutheranism, Calvinism and Unitarianism. In the space of 3 decades (1540-1570) the denominations gained legal status and joined Catholicism as official religions. The new denominations and their variables found it relatively easy to emerge out of the Reformation theological pool and, with the exception of Sabbatarians, gained legal status and coexisted. This system became later known as “the Transylvanian system of tolerance” and represented the foundation of the Principality’s constitutionalism (in a broader sense). Even if remarkable, the Transylvanian tolerance didn’t cover all the religious and social layers and even if fueled by the Reformation and humanism, didn’t reach the discrimination and the social iniquitousness experienced by the Romanians.
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In the postmodern contemporaneity, when, as W. T. Anderson shows, the world religions can discover, in full awareness, what divides them and approaches them, and when, as Jean Delumeau emphasizes,"... different religions exalt each in its language, wisdom and compassion, sincerity and humility, which are precious common values , nobody may not wish them disappear" (Nicolae Achimescu, 2013), the Orthodox Church opens its doors to all the believers of the world awaiting the love of the Lord, as Rev Professor Dumitru Belu writes in his iconic book About love(Dumitru Belu, 2016), understanding through tolerance and co existence the inter religious dialogue. The renewal of the religious world societies will start, in this context, from the hope that the inter religious dialogue has the faith in its "mission for promoting a globalization capable [...] of sustaining authentic dialogue between religions and cultures"(Dumitru Popescu, 2003). In other words, Orthodoxy is sincerely (Nicolae Achimescu, 2006) on the path of the dialogue, being aware of the need and the utility of the dialogue, but also of the chance, perhaps unique, of making publicits sacred and liturgical tradition, given the fact that it is God „who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth."(I Timothy 2:4).
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The study aim to explain one of the most interesting concepts in European Philosophy of Identities. The sources of the term are the Greek New Testament and the Christian Philosophy. The archeology of identity in the European Space has also sources in the Greek antique context of the split identity, by divine power infusion, or by the exiting from the Self in the antique and medieval context of the parepidemical identity. Thus were needed adaptations to the historical and eschatological contexts.
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Gregory of Nyssa's theology of the spiritual life has come in for special study in recent years. While many Greek theologians have described the soul’s movement toward God, even using the word ἐπέκτασις drawing on Paul’s participle in Phil. 3, 13, Gregory is original in claiming that man’s ultimate end is itself and endless progression. The τέλος of life is beatitude, because we are blessed by participation in God, and thus both the definition of human beatitude and the τέλος of life according to virtue consists in assimilation to Him. On the one hand, God is satisfying the soul. But Gregory’s eschatology is summed up in a paradox, that our satisfaction is never to be satisfied. Such is the dynamic, on-going process of ἐπέκτασις, a movement beyond all experience, for the good, as Gregory so often points out, is not circumscribed by death. The summit of religious experience, even after death, is not marked by satisfaction, but by desire. Saint Gregory stands out among Christians theologian for developing an eschatology that denies the soul final knowledge, rest and satisfaction in God.
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In Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant shows explicitly that we could not do a worse service of morality than if we wanted to be examples. For every example that is presented to us must be judged by the principles of morality first, to know whether it is worthy to serve for example, the original, that is the model. Thus the theory of the categorical imperative is subordinated to a logical problem. It postulates that there may be sentences in our consciousness that come neither from the observation nor from any reasoning with the starting point in another preface. In order to understand the nature of the categorical imperative, we must relate to the famous theory of synthetic judgments a priori. Our observations on the objects of the common experience, as well as the propositions of science, are only possible thanks to the forms that the spirit receives from nowhere else but from its own constitution.
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Erasmus in Rotterdam analyze the forms of self-exploration and the need of a subjective pantheon, capable of replacing the classical mythology and the Christian one. The trickster goddess of Madness from the Erasmi enkomion is an ephemeral god of private happiness. The individual assumes the liberty of reconstructing his interior space.
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Perhaps every artistic, philosophical, scientific or religious action of any human being is based on the quest for understanding the meaning of his/her own existence. In order to achieve immortality or as a consequence of the need to exist eternally in one way or another, we are headed in different directions. The religious man seeks a theological explanation (and there is a big amount of such explanations) and the least religious man (or just more skeptical) is headed towards the scientific discoveries. The Art, the Science, and the Religion are our reference points when trying to load a deeper sense to our existence. Creationism has always had a number of supporters, many of them intelligent and passionate. Their main occupation was, over time, to integrate the scientific discoveries into religion and to assign everything that happens in the hands of a conscious Creator who made us and wants us to exist. The present paper consists of a review of several discoveries and theories elaborated by modern evolutionists. All these new discoveries cover several scientific domains such as biology, physics, genetics and paleontology, and they have transformed our knowledge about the Universe and the nature of human being and life in general.
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The main purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss Al-Fârâbî’s understanding of the relationship between theology and metaphysics based on his interpretation of Aristotle’s contribution to this problem through the perspective of Late Greek Commentaries on Metaphysics. The research starts from the underlying assumption that Al-Fârâbî’s understanding of this relationship was contrary to the generally accepted view that Aristotle’s Metaphysics was exclusively devoted to theological problems, which was the basis of the standpoint that in Metaphysics the subject of metaphysics as a science is identical to what it should be the task of Islamic theology. In this way, I wish to emphasize the importance of Al-Fârâbî, for he was the first Islamic philosopher who, in his approach, included both aspects of Metaphysics: theological and ontological, and thus, above all, opposed the interpretation of the Metaphysics, which identifies metaphysics with Islamic theology.
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Our analysis starts from the premise that the symbiotic act of two existences cannot be possible as long as the entities involved do not give up the free will. The two personal histories are marked by the rejection of obedience, doubled by a strong sexual attraction. A coincidentia oppositorum in which divine intervention produces a constant discordant field. The result: the man becomes the lover of the demon "divorced" of the angel.
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The heterocosmical fiction of a world that the individual is heading to, a world possible at present as well as in the future had involved the idea of compensatory universe composed by worlds that are equally possible and accessible during the lifetime of after death (the vertical Christian universe, divided in stories by customs of the heavens, and the gnostic supra-storied universe with the 365 circles, or the Judaic Hekhalot universe). In the gnostic debate, the man has a double allogeneic identity: he is first “cast” into the world and isolated in a hostile, strictly delimited space, and then he becomes a stranger also in relation with his origins. Unlike the Christian’s position into the world, the position of the gnostic “is tensed in an insoluble anguish” which makes impossible his simultaneous relation to the physical world and to the divine space and which leads to confusion and eschatological pessimism. The frontier between man and world is doubled by the customs firmly outlined between man and God; in this point, the gnostic intellectualism of “extraction from the world” is fundamentally different from the Christian one which has elaborated a more nuanced vocabulary of the metaphysics frontiers with the purpose of marking the itinerary of the individual return to the celestial homeland. Reading the existential individualism in gnostic terms is useful in understanding the modern polychronic identity the origin of which could be represented by the gnostic motive of the man cast into the world.
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The main topic of the Correspondence of the two humanists consists of Olahus's repeated undertakings to persuade Erasmus to return to the Netherlands, followed by so many elusive promises, thus explaining the fear that Magister Europae has towards Franciscans and Dominicans, who were very powerful within Charles V, as well as his permanent concern not to be seized by Catholics or Lutherans. Besides this central issue, the correspondence contains the most diverse information that the two literary men were carrying out (theological, political disputes, all the novelties they used to exchange). So, in its wholeness, this correspondence brings to sight ”a communion of ideas and concerns, love for the promotion of truth and a constant trust in the possibilities of man to create a better world”.
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In this paper I express certain views on the fundamental questions about religion placed in sociological and anthropological scientific optic reception, as they are presented almost in the school sense within contemporary tendencies of the development of a modern world whose character changes on a daily basis, and where religious communities within the same, at all levels of social and anthropological analysis become increasingly important factors in shaping everyday life. In this work, among other things, I would like to point out some fundamental differences and convergences between sociology and anthropology of religion, where some of the most important and frequent definitions of religion created in these scientific disciplines are poorly shown. The principle thesis could be sublimed in the fact that one should start with the research of religion multidisciplinary and multidimensionally. Considering the type of work, and having in mind more extensive and lateral starting points, standpoints and definitions could not be consciously involved. This paper consists of the introductory part, four chapters and conclusion.
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