If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? The book addresses the intriguing problem of human 'self-realization' precisely because of the diverse uses of the term, which ranges from abstract philosophical-theological theories to practical psychological-spiritual applications. Jennifer Slater explores this fundamental free choice, which is at the same time a basic choice about oneself.
She writes from the understanding that the human person is radically free to become the choices she or he makes and freedom is the capacity for definitive self-realization. In the book, she shows that in the exercising of freedom, humans, precisely as historical beings, are also transcendent beings. Jennifer grapples with the perception that since human self-realization involves the power to make decisions, which in reality actualizes a person's own reality, how then does this self-realization come about and where does the Divine fit into the process?
If self-realization is related to the human self and to the Divine Self, she then questions what constitutes the self and self-realization? This struggle practically employs the woman in general and in particular the woman consecrated to a vowed life. The pervasive question throughout is: Read more Read less. Here's how restrictions apply. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 1 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews.
Upcoming Events
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. This text is well written and documented, but the topic seems to need further study as suggested by the writer. I found it an important read and I hope other writers will follow her lead and look further into her findings.
Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. A Theological Anthropology of Self-Realization: The latest iteration of our church-emergent precisely emulates such retrieval, revival and renewal dynamics. Our world remains enchanted and needs re-enchantment, on an ongoing basis it seems, but only in our stance toward reality and not in Nature, Herself, which is enchanted through and through!
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. When we look carefully at what is going on, what we call emergent, in one sense, might be the re- emergence of a reality that, inevitably, gets submerged, time and again. Emergence also has a more generic sense and, in that sense, is inextricably associated with novelty, a reality that will not go away for those of us who buy into telos, an inexorable movement built into the very fabric of creation.
Conversely, we ignore this dynamic and forsake this movement at our own peril. Instead, we are discovering a convergence that is more so of nonpropositional nature. This is to say that this convergence does not articulate, for example, a new narrative arch of a distinctly descriptive, normative or speculative nature, which would be a cosmological enterprise. Rather, this convergence has an axiological trajectory, which is to say that it fosters a harmonic resonance of an evaluative, interpretive or existential nature. Interpretively, we are coming away with a deepened sense of solidarity.
Evaluatively, we share a profound sense of compassion. We share, then, a great unity of mission even as we recognize our diversity of ministry and acknowledge our plurality of belief systems. What emerges, then, is not so much a convergence of metanarratives but, instead, of meta-perspectives. It is a convergence of perspectives that conditions HOW we will first see and experience reality, so to speak, desiring the Kingdom, and not of narratives setting forth WHAT we will eventually think about reality in order to somehow argue and prove the Kingdom.
Women and religion
A lot of people, who remain immersed in dualistic mindsets with their problem-solving orientation to all of reality, have a difficult time evaluating such conversations. For so many, apologetics is primarily evidential, rational and presuppositional, proceeding with empirical, logical, practical and moral reasoning. And, by all means, this approach to reality is indispensable and necessary. So, when we speak of a convergence in our conversation, we are not suggesting a novel set of concepts and categories.
Neither should one look for a specific political agenda. It is not a convergence of moral reasoning, such that emergent folk will all necessarily share the same positions on one moral reality or another. Even regarding cosmological 9 cf. Notice how these are not primarily propositional realities but are, first and foremost, relational realities. We are not first preoccupied with getting answers right as if we were mostly dealing with ideas. This convergence is not about getting the correct relationships between ideas, whether through a harmony of reasons or even intuitions.
This is about realizing the right relationships between humankind and God, ourselves and one another, ourselves and nature and even our relationship to our own self. This harmonic convergence, then, is like a symphony of many instruments, each with its own sound and timbre, all playing together in the same key, in harmony and to the rhythm of the same Drum. This is not to deny, however, that to the extent that we are conditioned, shaped and formed by a convergence of nonpropositional influences, that it will not eventually transvalue our more propositional approaches, effecting their convergence also.
But that requires a great deal of patience.
Altri titoli da considerare
Beyond socialization, we are opening ourselves up to ongoing transformation and a deep desiring of the Kingdom. We experience a deep desiring for environmental and social justice in solidarity with and compassion for humankind and our cosmos. Ever more identified with Jesus and His deep desiring of communion with the Father, we long for the coming of the Cosmic Christ.
Our ecclesiology is more ecumenical and egalitarian as we go beyond institutional structures and not necessarily without them seeking authentic community in manifold and multiform ways, wherever two or more can gather in His Name. Our worship becomes the practice of the Presence of God as we seek an abiding relationship with Him — not Whom we possess, but — Who possesses us.
In solidarity and sharing this same deep desiring, we may otherwise differ in HOW we see justice playing out morally, practically and politically, in HOW we see the Kingdom unfolding eschatologically and metaphysically. And we can abide with these differences because of our deep humility and deep love for one another, encouraging and forgiving one another, sharing a vision THAT in the Kingdom all may be well, all will be well, all shall be well and we will know that all manner of things shall be well. That these realities will play out in our lives we are confidently assured.
How they will play out is something we explore in humility and civility with all people of goodwill. Ours is foremost a shared axiology, interpretively and evaluatively, of what we deeply desire and deeply value. We believe that, one day, this will lead also to a shared cosmology, descriptively and normatively, consistent with the best science and best philosophy. You are made in the image of what you desire. And if one is talking about ALL of these spheres of human concern, in which sphere do they begin their conversation?
All anyone thus establishes is a modicum of epistemological parity with alternate worldviews, i. For some, they have been indispensable parts of our journeys. And we trust what they report. They represent deeply and profoundly experienced existential orientations and ultimate concerns. They remind us that we are to be about the actualization of value. The interface between science and theology is not terribly interesting, philosophically, unless our project is to disambiguate their definitions. Unlike philosophy natural theology and science, wherein we bracket, best we can, our theology, in a theology of nature we start with God and see His presence in all things and hear Her siren song from all places!
From a different explanatory stance, we break out in analogy and metaphor, poetry and song, allegory and parable, joke and koan, story and dance, ritual and sacrament! And we speak of trail dust and stardust, quarks and supernovae, maidens and sailors, the Cosmic Adventure John Haught and the Divine Matrix Joseph Bracken , leaping whitetails and creeping lizards, bright indwelling presence and luminous dark nights, hope and love and faith … The Implications of a Semiotic Theological Anthropology for the Interaction Between Science and Religion Some Traditional Distinctions The human mind has been described in many different ways over the years by psychologists, philosophers, theologians and others.
In psychology, it has been described in both structural and functional terms, both by its parts and by their activities. Psychology coursework typically combines sensation with perception, emotion with motivation, learning with memory, personality with development. There are Jungian terms like sensing, intuiting, thinking, feeling, perceiving and judging and Freudian terms like ego, id and superego.
Philosophers have drawn a distinction between the brain and the mind. Most recognize distinctions like conscious, subconscious and unconscious. Neuroscientists describe a neuronal network that is distributed throughout the body. Theologians speak of memory, understanding and will. A host of other terms come to mind, like cognitive, affective, instinctual, inferential, noninferential, empirical, logical, practical and relational. One might also find the categories normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative helpful.
In theology, belief has been justified as evidential, when based on evidence, rational, when based on reason, presuppositional, when based on inescapable suppositions, and existential, when based on ultimate concerns. In psychology, different developmental theorists have studied human growth. The best known are probably Piaget cognitive , Erikson personality , Kohlberg moral and Fowler faith. Lonergan, as a systematic theologian, described growth in terms of intellectual, moral and religious conversions to which Gelpi has added affective and social conversions. Normatively, Lonergan gave us the famous transcendental imperatives: For every distinction listed above, there are further distinctions.
Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism, described three types of inference, all which presuppose the others, from the strongest form to the weakest, as deductive, inductive and abductive inference. Generally speaking, one might think of deductive inference in association with formal logical argumentation. Inductive inference is most often associated with the scientific method. Abductive inference might best be thought of as hypothesizing.
This does not mean that it should be readily dismissed for this is how we do most of our critical thinking, which is to say, fallibilistically. For example, so often, with only very limited information, we necessarily find ourselves reasoning backwards retro-ductively from known predicates or properties of a reality to unknown subjects of various classes, sets or subsets.
We find ourselves venturing guesses as to what reality or type of reality we may have encountered and employing analogies in our references to and descriptions of such realities, when we otherwise cannot determine epistemically or specify ontologically this reality versus another. Sometimes, we wonder if this or that reality is novel, even? It is through such alternating conjecture and criticism, then, or what Popper called falsification, that much of human knowledge has advanced.
This is not to say that knowledge has not also advanced, on occasion, through various leaps and bounds, or what Kuhn called paradigm shifts. Another pivotal distinction is that between a theory of truth and a test of truth. For our purposes, a conventional understanding of truth will suffice in place of any otherwise elaborately nuanced theory.
A test of truth is a process that helps us navigate toward the truth while not otherwise constituting the truth in and of itself. A truth-conducive process, like deductive inference and formal argumentation, navigates us more or less directly toward the truth. A truth-indicative process, like abductive inference, navigates us indirectly by, at least, raising the probability that we are approaching the truth.
As the weakest form of inference, abduction needs to be bolstered by repeated testing, which is to say, inductively. Beyond these rather simple, straightforward rubrics for human knowledge-advances, there are long histories and many competing schools in philosophy and theology and their interactions have not always been dialogical and irenic. In theology, there is a word for such thinking, heresy.
In philosophy, there is an adjectival suffix, - istic. Some Additional Distinctions Sociologically and linguistically, we would like to introduce some additional distinctions10 that are based on whether or not our concepts have been negotiated accepted into general use, more or less by the wider pluralistic community. Those that have been thus negotiated have theoretic status. Those still-in-negotiation are heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders. Dogmatic concepts are employed within communities of belief but have not been negotiated by the wider pluralistic community, more broadly conceived.
Semiotic concepts are those presuppositional notions without which meaning and communication would not even be possible. Toward a Philosophical Anthropology Our purpose, thus far, has been to introduce enough categories and distinctions to provide each different member of what might be a rather diverse audience some handles with which to grasp our meaning and intent as it relates to our philosophical anthropology. The history of philosophy has been characterized by one overemphasis after another, which is to say one — istic perspective after another, whether the empiricistic, rationalistic, positivistic, idealistic or pragmatistic.
Its history might best be summed up as the struggle between the more static essentialistic and substantialistic approaches and the more dynamical nominalistic and process-like approaches, which are but the obverse sides of the same coin of an otherwise epistemically and ontologically bankrupt dualistic realm, which transacts in a philosophical currency that has no practical cash value for most of us who get along quite well with good old common sense. The history of theology, which takes philosophy as its handmaiden, necessarily fares no better as its approaches can alternately be similarly described as evidentialistic, rationalistic, fideistic and pietistic.
One might justifiably wonder if, down through the centuries, an epistemic fetish is all one could be expected to come away with after a formal academic engagement of these disciplines. Because of their overly facile dyadic approaches, neither an essentialism nor a nominalism, neither a substance nor a process approach, can account for the novelty we encounter in reality.
To be clear, the novelties we are dealing with include those involved in the Big Bang and its earliest moments, the origin of life and the dawn of human consciousness. The question that should be begging for our readers, now, is just what is the most successful way to refer to reality, phenomenologically, even if we cannot otherwise robustly describe it, metaphysically? What concepts and categories can we most profitably employ and what rubrics for relating them would be most fruitful in their application?
What can we reasonably aspire to say about reality without saying more than we know about such realities as the origins of life or human consciousness or even the cosmos, itself? It is beyond the scope of this consideration to set forth the details of our own philosophical journeys through these questions to our present provisional closures, but with a great deal of enthusiasm we can recommend the approach of the American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, as it has been employed and articulated by the biological anthropologist, Terrence Deacon11, and the systematic theologian, Donald Gelpi, S.
While we will not unfold the arguments of these scholars in any detail, neither would we want our enthusiasm to be mistaken for an academic pretension to either a full understanding of their work or a comprehensive grasp of its implications. Deacon, for his part, employs an emergentist heuristic, which has also been well articulated by, and on several occasions even co-authored with, Ursula Goodenough, a prominent cell biologist and popular author at the interface of science and religion.
Deacon and Goodenough are very circumspect in not telling what are otherwise untellable tales, as they comprehensively refer to many different natural phenomena without exhaustively describing them. These orders of emergence refer to progressively higher orders of regularities, which are causal configurations. For all science can tell, teleodynamics, or 3rd order emergence, as Deacon and Goodenough say, define the onset of telos on this planet and, for all we now know, the universe.
They go on to develop a correspondence between the human virtues of compassion, fair-mindedness, care and reverence with the inherited pro-social capacities of empathy, strategic reciprocity, nurturance and hierarchy, suggesting various symbolic accessions and syntheses whereby our otherwise innate groundings are complexified and transfigured into uniquely human capacities. In any case, the human capacities for virtue can be realized both intuitively and imaginatively as well as rationally and inferentially. Because humans are finite and learn fallibilistically, each human value-realization attempt leads to an uncertain outcome, which is to recognize that it requires a wager or risk.
As such, the augmentation of human value-realizations must be successfully managed through various risk amplification and risk attenuation strategies, which is to further recognize that we must be able to cash out the practical value of our concepts and risk amplification-attenuation strategies in what is our perennial pursuit of goodness, radically finite as we are. Thus it is that many fallacies of formal argumentation are employed in everyday common sense leading us fallibly but probabilistically toward value-realizations.
For example, if it is true, we believe that it is also beautiful and useful, leading us to various attraction or avoidance strategies in our value-realization pursuits. While the converse, if it is beautiful or useful, then it is also true, is not necessarily true, still, we do raise the probability of something being true in our recognition that it is either beautiful or useful because if something is neither beautiful nor useful then the possibility of it being true is nil.
Thus it is in theology that orthopraxis grounds orthodoxy. Our existential orientations toward truth, beauty and goodness, which are innately grounded in our inherited pro-social capacities, get transfigured into the theological imperatives of faith, hope and love as a human value- augmentation strategy requiring the amplification of the epistemic risks already entailed in the normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics.
In our religious communities, truth is thus articulated in creed, beauty celebrated in cult or ritual, and goodness preserved in code. Such is the nature of the Kierkegaardian leap and of the Pascalian wager. Some employ a root metaphor, like being or experience, to elaborate a speculative metaphysic.
Others dwell in analogical imaginations, inchoately relating to ultimate reality through robust metaphors and sweeping metanarratives. Rather, from a phenomenological perspective, we are invoking vaguely referential analogs as heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders, recognizing that metaphors and analogies are not, in and of themselves, system-bound. In other words, our robustly pneumatological imaginations are relating our triadic and social human experiences of phenomenal reality, with all of its many different patterns and regularities, to what we consider putative divine supremacies.
We are not otherwise attempting, in the least, to account for manifold and multiform continuities and discontinuities between different orders of reality. We do believe that any who ambition a metaphysic must both account for divine alterity as well as differentiate the moral status of the human from other selves and creatures.
All of this is to suggest that, because of the pervasive ubiquity in the use of the concept of Spirit down through the ages and still across the face of the Earth, arguably it meets the criterion of enjoying theoretic status contrasted with the dogmatic status of so many other theological concepts. In this regard, we might affirm with Radical Orthodoxy that, over against any notion that there exists a secular society writ large, as abstracted and reified by a militant but not truly regnant nihilism, our planet is inhabited, rather, by a pneumatologically-informed but broadly pluralistic community.
To the extent that we map science as a descriptive enterprise and religion as an interpretive enterprise and affirm them as autonomous methodologies but still integrally- related in every human value-realization, there can be no talk of conflict, as reigns in the scientism of the Enlightenment fundamentalists and the literalism of the various religious fundamentalists. In some sense, the very basis of a semiotic approach is grounded in the need for informational interpretation, a need that derives from the radical finitude of creatures, a need that plays out in our fallibilistic methodologies and heavy reliance on the weaker forms of inference, both abduction and induction, such as in the back-door philosophy of Popperian falsification and the informal argumentation that predominates, even mostly comprises, our common sense.
The implication is, then, that absent this finitude and given a virtual omniscience, descriptively, and omnipotence, evaluatively, the normative sciences would consist of only aesthetics and ethics, logic would be obviated and the descriptive and interpretive would be a distinction without a difference, which might describe, in fact, an idealized eschatological epistemology whereby humankind as a community of inquiry has attained to the truth. At any rate, to be sure, that is manifestly not the case, presently. One practical upshot of this situation is that there need be no Two-Language Theory as discussed by Peters or Two-Language System as described by Peacocke, at least from our idealized theoretical perspective; however, from a practical perspective, science and religion will seemingly traffic in two languages because, if for no other reason, the latter is dominated by dogmatic and heuristic conceptions, the former by semiotic and theoretic conceptions.
These need not be conceived as two languages, from a strictly linguistic perspective, but might better be conceived as two vocabularies that are slowly merging. It is in that vein that one might invoke what Barbour and Polkinghorne have called Independence and Haught has described as Contrast. At this point, one might recognize that the various categories that have been employed for the interaction between science and religion are not all mutually exclusive. Thus it is that, whenever any methodologically autonomous realms do not fully overlap, but only partially overlap, and are placed in what Haught calls Contact, we would urge what Barbour and Polkinghorne suggest as Dialogue.
Anticipations From the standpoint of interreligious dialogue, this hermeneutical circle of the normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative might be interpreted in terms of orthopathy, orthodoxy, orthopraxis, orthocommunio, each as an aspect of a religious interpretation which presupposes the other aspects. Thus we would expect continued fruitful interreligious engagements such as have already been realized between Christianity and Zen, for example, and would encourage further orthopathic dialogue and exchange. Most theologians already recognize this dynamic, prudentially speaking, in their willingness to abstract orthopraxes — or moral and practical aspects — out of their doctrinal contexts in other traditions.
Also, metaphorical and analogical language ananoetic knowledge is not system-bound, so our depth encounters of reality can be enriched by our interreligious ananoetic interchanges, which can provide common ground to explore together our theologies of nature, especially from a pneumatological perspective. We believe this approach can help prepare an ever more fertile ground for interreligious dialogue as our orthopathic, orthopraxic and ananoetic exchanges prepare the way to a much sought after unity even as we continue our search to discursively identify the commonalities in our otherwise diverse and pluralistic belief systems.
We can discuss the philosophic focus of human concern in terms of the normative sciences. These sciences, in their mediation of our interpretive and descriptive foci will, in the final analysis, always come up short in rationally demonstrating and empirically proving our competing worldviews and metaphysics. We do want to ensure, normatively, that any of our competing systems at least minimalistically gift us with sufficient modeling power of reality such that we can establish an epistemic parity with other systems. And such a principle can should adhere to normative guidelines for informal reasoning based on our abductive and retroductive inferential modes, which are presupposed in our triadic inferential dynamism along with induction and deduction.
Here we reason from predicates and properties back to subjects and essences nonstrict identities in order to gain a probabilistic edge over otherwise arbitrary decision-making and prudential judgment. Thus we invoke parsimony, simplicity, elegance, beauty, symmetry, utility, goodness and other aesthetical and ethical and logical existential orientations, advancing notions like Pascal's Wager, for example, and taking courage to leap with Kierkegaard.
And it is here that we would propose that these philosophic norms transist into theological virtue, which we propose might be understood in terms of the amplification of risks toward the augmentation of value. As we gather from Haught's Cosmic Adventure and aesthetic teleology, the more fragile the more beautiful. And, as we know from nonequilibrium thermodynamics, the greater the number of bifurcations and permutations in a structure's composition, the more fragile because it runs a greater risk of disintegration hence, the more beautiful.
So, the leap, the wager, from a philosophic epistemic virtue to a theological virtue, from logic and aesthetics and ethics to faith and hope and love, is an amplification of risk kenosis as risk of disintegration toward the augmentation of value, an increase in truth, beauty and goodness, mediated by creed, cult and code in community, both a philosophical community of inquiry and a theological community of lovers.
We are not, in any manner, suggesting that we believe that this is what many, or even most, people are doing consciously. This is how we conceive the underlying dynamism for common sense as practiced by humanity, whether consciously or not, competently or not. Our affinity for Peirce comes from our appreciation of his pragmatic logic and theory of meaning and affirmation of metaphysics as a valid but fallible enterprise. Beyond that, we otherwise sympathize with the analytical approaches and the advocates of common sense and any other approaches that incorporate some type of fallibilism or critical realism.
And beyond that, we really are not looking for additional epistemological or methodological rigor other than that practiced by conventional science and that enjoyed in colloquial usage including the "leap" of faith and subject to linguistic analysis. It is our simple thesis that most people are competent in their interactions with reality because we have evolved that way. That is a tautology, to be sure. But it is a taut one, empirically. Peirce is exactly right in his use of the analogy of a cable with many strands or filaments to explain human knowledge. The reason most people are competent is that they have enough strands.
We are also fallible, because no one has them all. Epistemology searches for an eschatological ideal that would account for every strand and epistemologists argue about the attributes of differently-stranded cables. Ontologists, for their part, argue about how high they have rope-climbed these cables and what vista they have taken in, cosmologically, or how low they have descended into the deepest structures of matter to discern reality's microstructures.
Their arguments, too, reach a point of diminishing returns vis a vis my value-realizations. Although there is no theoretical constraint on how high or low humankind can travel, hoisting itself on its epistemic cables, for all practical purposes, our radical finitude limits our horizons vis a vis humanity's ultimate concerns. And this, then, places us in deep sympathy with Wittgenstein, Pascal, James, Kierkegaard et al with my qualifying proviso being that faith takes us beyond but not without reason, which is to recognize that we do need different strands to construct our cables and that some cables are indeed better than others.
Which strands are necessary and how many of them are sufficient is Problematical. What would make for the ideal cable is highly problematical. We think it is fair, then, to talk in terms of adequacy, abundance and superabundance or degrees of participation, if you will when it comes to epistemic cables vis a vis value-realizations. We might think, for example, of Lonergan's transcendental imperatives: Be intelligent, semantically, such as in our naming exercises, critically examining our referents, concepts and terms as they variously describe or refer to realities.
Be reasonable, logically, whether in formal or informal argumentation, especially employing common sense. Be responsible, prudentially, in our practical and moral deliberations and judgments and in our analyses of actionable norms, guided by equiplausibility principles. Be in love, affectively, relationally interacting with reality guided, orthopathically, by authentic aesthetic sensibilities and a grammar of trust, proper assent, dutiful fidelity, a felt sense of solidarity expressed in compassion and by being-in- love storge, philia, eros and agape.
Now, one of our central contentions is that a philosophical anthropology that does not recognize and affirm a human exceptionalism is not empirically demonstrable and therefore not philosophically defensible. Further we contend that such a philosophical anthropology does not necessarily derive from a Peircean-informed perspective, neither from a religious nor a secular outlook. For example, we largely resonate with Ursula Goodenough and Terry Deacon, who have set forth what we interpret as a naturalistic account of human exceptionalism. However one defines the epistemic filaments that comprise the human cable of knowledge per the Peircean metaphor, epistemology is the study of which of the filaments are necessary and how many of them are sufficient.
Beyond the necessary and sufficient, epistemologists also want to know what mix might be epistemically optimal. Presumably, because of our finitude, we are all operating suboptimally, some merely satisficing, minimalistically, others variously enjoying epistemic abundance and superabundance. People with the requisite common sense are enjoying epistemic efficacies from these probabilistic heuristics. The normative and evaluative mediation of human knowledge-advances and value-realizations are grounded in these probabilistic heuristics and can be rendered, in fact, in terms of informal argumentation based on retroductive abductions that reason backwards from predicates to subjects, or, we might say, from various properties to various modal realities.
If it is elegant, it is true. If it is useful, it is true. That is why Occam's Razor works, sometimes. That's how and why parsimony, symmetry, elegance, simplicity and utility work, sometimes. The epistemic efficacies, or gnosiological significance, of the logical and aesthetical and ethical sciences, or of truth and beauty and goodness, derive from the fast and frugal heuristics of an ecological rationality gifted by natural selection.
When these heuristics are modeled like informal arguments, their fallibile and probabilistic nature is plain to see. Because we are fallible, our value-realizations involve risk-ventures. Risk ventures involve risk-management. The amplification of risks, within reasonable norms, augments human value-realizations. Like all other epistemic risk-taking, risk- amplification toward the end of value-augmentation is normed probabilistically and can be guided by equiplausibility or even equiprobability principles, which might suggest, for example, that one is acting within one's epistemic rights, only when one's risk- ventures are life-giving and relationship-enhancing.
The concepts and terms employed in our various belief systems can be categorized as semiotic if nonnegotiable, cross-culturally , theoretic if negotiated , heuristic if still- in-negotiation and dogmatic if non-negotiated. One's belief system, even when articulated with dogmatic and heuristic concepts and terms in addition to the requisite semiotic and theoretic ones , enjoys epistemic parity with competing perspectives as long as one is acting within one's epistemic rights as guided by the actionable norms derived from acceptable equiplausibility principles, which have been established in a, more or less, pluralistic community.
One's beliefs enjoy epistemic warrant in a community of value-realizers when one establishes epistemic parity with competing systems, acts within one's epistemic rights and articulates those beliefs using only semiotic and theoretic concepts and terms. A community's acceptance of actionable norms and establishment of semiotic and theoretic terms and concepts is, itself, a truth- indicative, probabilitistic hence, still fallible guide to optimal value-realization. The creeds, cults and codes of religious communities thus represent existential risk- ventures, Pascalian wagers and Kierkegaardian leaps, that go beyond but certainly must not go without the philosophic risk-taking of the normative sciences of the wider pluralistic community in a risk-amplification ordered toward optimal augmentation of human value-realizations of truth, beauty, goodness and unity.
Which communities enjoy epistemic parity with competing interpretive systems and meet the criteria of acting within their epistemic rights? We consider ourselves minimalist realists, fallibilists. We draw our inspiration from Peirce's pragmatism or pragmaticism. Theologically, then, the only thing we need in our epistemic suite to do the God-encounter is our common sense and a receptive heart.
The existentialists and reformed epistemologists think all we need is that receptive heart. The classical rationalists think all we need is deductive inference. The presuppositionalists think the God-idea is axiomatic, as indispensable as other unprovable notions like belief in other minds, first principles and the intelligibility of reality. The evidentialists think all we need is inductive inference.
The cumulative case folks think all we need is abductive inference. Peirce teaches us that inferential thought is irreducibly triadic and each inferential process presupposes the others and that, when our inferential processes end in a stalemate or Scottish verdict, we then necessarily fallback on our noninferential approaches to reality, like our receptive hearts, in order to adjudicate between competing actionable norms.
So, as in theology, it is our view that in epistemology, heresy consists of our making a partial truth into an absolute. So, just like in theological apologetics, some folks adopt a perspectivalism that gives each of our epistemic witnesses to revelation a voice, our appropriation of the Peircean triadic logic is a nonfoundational perspectivalism that is holistic.
Unlike those theological perspectivalists, however, who turn to Scripture as the normative perspective, we have somewhat of a positivist bent, which is to say that, for epistemology, broadly conceived, we do not consciously get into fallback mode noninferentially until the stronger types of inference have failed us, which they necessarily will vis a vis our ultimate concerns.
Even then, where the heart comes in -- whether via beauty or goodness, we interpret as a type of informal reasoning, a probabilistic, truth-indicative sign. This is synthetic thinking, not systematic which is for philosophers and theologians. This book sets forth an exploratory heuristic as a meta-critique of religious epistemologies and theologies of nature, hence, a nonfoundational perspectivalism normed by common sense and a receptive heart inspired by Peirce's pragmatic logic and a pneumatological theology of nature, a pansemioentheism, suggested by vague analogical references but not otherwise aspiring to robustly systematic descriptions.
In terms of Lonergan's imperatives, the descriptive is a focus of concern that requires the epistemic virtue of being attentive. The normative requires being reasonable and being responsible. The interpretive requires being intelligent in our naming exercises. The evaluative requires being-in-love, broadly conceived.
Peirce's pragmatic logic guides us in properly relating these epistemic foci and virtues such that our existential orientations correspond to transcendental imperatives. Our nonfoundational perspectivalism is very much like John Frame's perspectivalism his religious epistemology which integrally relates the evidential, rational, presuppositional and existential methods of apologetics, except for the fact that his normative perspective is Biblical, while ours is Peircean vis a vis the normative sciences.
While we deeply sympathize with the existentialist, fideist, presuppositionalist and reformed epistemologies, it is our rather mundane contention that beauty and usefulness guide us to truth and goodness because they are retroductive abductions with probabilistic significance that gift us, truth-indicatively, with a higher probability of realizing the truth than other more arbitrary criteria based on chance, alone. The same is true for the truth- indicative criterion of community consensus. Beauty, pragmatic utility and community consensus are informal arguments but fallacies of formal logic; when intertwined together as individual filaments in our epistemic cables they gain epistemic strength, even if fallibilistically.
We are not wholly disagreeing with other epistemologies in the belief THAT orthopathic and orthopraxic dynamisms are efficacious but offering my philosophic defense of HOW and WHY they work, as well as suggesting that while they may even enjoy a certain methodological primacy and even autonomy in matters of ultimate concern, this is true only after they have established epistemic parity with competing worldviews and only when operating within their epistemic rights vis a vis equiplausibility principles life-giving and relationship-enhancing. They are not otherwise autonomous systematically vis a vis the other perspectives required for all human value-realizations.
Normatively, the implications are that, in our search for a root metaphor to articulate a speculative metaphysics, we must employ an emergentist heuristic in order to robustly account for the novelty that we will encounter in reality, a novelty that corresponds, hypothetically, to various degrees of participation in the divine matrix, ergo, also accounting for meaningful differences in the moral status of emergent modal realities, meta-ethically, and affirming a divine alterity, theologically.
Beyond these minimalist formulations of theological virtue -- It may be that Spirit, broadly conceived, is a theoretic concept, crossculturally? It may be that this is an empirically defensible sociologic datum? This would be consistent with the suggestion that the term secular society is a reification, that our world community is, rather, a pneumatologically-informed pluralistic community and overwhelmingly so, demographically. Radical Orthodoxy may thus have some valid points regarding same? Even if the Spirit is not nonnegotiable for human values, broadly conceived, it might certainly approach nonnegotiability for any who'd choose the path of normative risk- amplification in pursuit of such value-augmentations as would be fueled by humanity's ultimate concerns?
So, to the extent that humanity's existential orientations to ultimate concerns are in play and in whom are they not? These are stronger positions to defend philosophically than what we have argued within these pages, but it is our belief that our exploratory heuristic provides the categories and the empirical thrust by which these epistemic hypotheses can be evaluated as sociologic data.
It may be that narrowly conceived dogmatic formulations of religion, as strawgods, are deservedly in retreat, but belief in Pneuma writ large remains compelling and vital in our new age and, arguably, as indispensable as ever to any truly robust augmentations of human value-realizations. Let the half-gods depart that God may appear borrowing phraseology from Emerson! If we, as created co-creators, indeed participate in and are indwelled by our Creator in a dynamic Creator-creature relationship, then all dualistic conceptions of this relationship must give way to nondual approaches.
There is a great deal of value that has been revealed by and that can be realized through our cosmology via its triadic constellation of descriptive science, evaluative culture and normative philosophy. Many report that there is even more value to be had if one allows this constellation to then spin around the interpretive axis of religion. If there is one thing that the great traditions and even many indigenous religions seem to have in common, then it would seem to be the notion that this Creator-creature relationship involves a Lover, a beloved and the love dynamic, itself, most often called the Spirit.
Whatever else may be going on with onto-theologies and theo-ontologies and such root metaphors as being, substance, process or experience, we must recognize our creaturely autonomy as quasi not inconsistent with the formal modal distinction of Scotus. So, too, it must be with this dynamic love triangle, wherein we recognize our otherness as also quasi.
If we are not wholly autonomous in the intraobjective dimension of our experience, wherein we interact in reality's dynamic unfolding, however that activity might be conceived, neither are we wholly other in the intersubjective dimension of our experience, wherein we interact, hopefully, as lovers do. This is all to recognize that, like all participatory dynamics, there's an implied range of motion whereby one can participate or not and in varying degrees.
The Spirit, we might suggest, is never timid always present but always coy ever unobtrusive , a gentlemanly suitor, Who'd not force His way in, but a seductive siren, Who'll not stop singing from around the bend. As in any relationship, the Creator-creature dynamic is characterized by elements of vulnerability and risk, sacrifices, even, of that which is good for that which might be better. There's a divine kenosis, in fact, in the act of creation, itself.
This self-emptying or delimitation is like a fugue playing in every dimension of our co-creative reality as we shed monotony and appropriate novelty, augmenting value-realizations through all manner of risk-amplifications, running even the risk of disintegration in the pursuit of more truth, beauty, goodness and unity. The quasi-autonomy of creation is a "managed" risk, reminiscent of my old banking trope that profits do not come from risk-taking but from superior skills at managing risks.
However one might conceive of such boundaries and limits, or laws and axioms, in a divine kenotic act of self-delimitation, the Ens Necessarium "relaxed" its boundary and limit conditions in devising the initital conditions of creatures and creation thus processed forth with regularities, habits, tendencies, capacities, or an agapic Spirit, if you will, coaxing it along in a dance of discovery toward a divine romance. The cosmos, for its part, gave itself over to emergence dynamics as it surrendered to a state far from equilibrium, where novelty could be teased forth from the bifurcations and permutations that were compounded in the formation of each dissipative structure, structures that, in running the risk of disintegration, experienced increases in fragility that were only to be exceeded by their increases in beauty.
Animals emerged whose behavior became increasingly plastic only because their brain processes became decreasingly algorithmic, which is to say more capable of error. But the animals exploited these errors, where different parts of otherwise discrete memories became dissociated from each other only to be recombined in novel mistaken ways. Their brains became open-ended rather than close-ended processors as mere icons and indexes gave way to symbols mistakes that presented models more and less perfect of reality that could compete with reality, itself, for the animals' attention and responses.
This is to say that predicates could now be stripped from their subjects, properties from their objects, accidents from their essences, and combined in novel ways even bigger mistakes to tell stories and make myths, some which, lo and behold, evoked novel but appropriate adaptive responses to reality. Mistakes were being exploited by creatures as their algorithmic, rule-governed behavior became progressively de-limited, more open- ended, an imago Dei dynamic, to be sure. Homo sapiens thus emerged as the symbolic species, modeling reality through story- telling and myth-making. This modeling abilty was very rudimentary and was, ironically, a tad too rule-governed and dualistic in its conceptions.
This is to recognize that humankind's epistemology was not modeling reality's ontology very well. The practical take-away is that a participatory ontology can gift us with an enhanced modeling power for reality. And this does not really challenge the notion that methods precede systems because a participatory ontology is not really a system but is a practice, which is to say, a method, an approach to reality, an interpretive axis, a confessional theological stance that is moreso practical and not so much speculative.
It inspires a turn to community because it invites one to love and be-loved via the Spirit. It allows us to leverage up our cosmological approaches of descriptive science, evaluative culture and normative philosophy through the orthodoxic, orthopathic and orthopraxic risk amplifications known as faith, hope and love, which augment our value-realizations of truth, beauty and goodness. Next time you encounter a mistake, an imperfection, a blemish, an uncomfortable arousal from a serene equilibrium welcome that Cross with open arms. It's the paschal mystery come to call and great things are about to happen if you hold on loosely but don't let go.
That's the divine fugue and your co-creative calling to bring an even greater harmony into a love relationship. What does this mean in terms of esse? Heaven if I know. And it's increasingly hard to care less these days. Ontology — the metaphysical Is Metaphysics Moonshine? And think about some of the ideas associated with theoretical physics: It is enough to make anyone feel a little tipsy.
Jj Slate - książki - theranchhands.com
Whether we are studying speculative cosmology or speculative cognitive science, from that end of the Great Chain of Being, where consciousness emerges, to that end near the earliest moments after the Big Bang, where we encounter the deepest structures of matter, ineluctable paradox confronts us. Despite the incredible complexity these realities present, our attempts to eliminate the paradoxes they generate are rather simple.
They essentially boil down to four basic categories: Proposed revisions to our logic and our understanding of causality, respectively, deal with epistemology and ontology, while propositions regarding hidden variables involve cosmology. Whether we attempt to resolve paradox with epistemological, ontological or cosmological revisions, we soon learn that the descriptive problems we are faced with are intractable and that every time we open a new interpretive window, reality shuts another hermeneutical door.
Often, our last resort is a reductio argument, demonstrating the manifest absurdity of a given revision, but science, in its inexorable advance over the centuries, has justified the issuance of a caveat emptor on any casual rejection of the counterintuitive. How, then, are we to revise our logic? What epistemological tool do we abandon first? And what about causality? What ontological determinations are we to give up? Perhaps we should not only break with our bivalent logic constructions, epistemologically, but also our realist conception of inquiry, ontologically?
Problems Epistemologically confronted by godelian incompleteness, ontologically faced with friesian undecidability and cosmologically challenged by peircean unlimited semeiosis, are we the servants of our own formal symbol systems, unable to transcend them to see the reality that our language and thought are supposed to represent? Is there any way, rather, that language could be our servant, a calculus always subject to reinterpretation as we employ it in our progressive attempts to model reality?
Whatever the case may be, one thing is certain: Does philosophy have to be confronted with the challenges of modern speculative cosmology and speculative cognitive science in order to recognize human cognitive limitations? And what precisely is at stake? The status of various truth propositions or merely the establishment of these limitations?
- Self-realization in contemporary theology : towards a vision of Christian wholeness.
- Copyright Statement?
- La donna perfetta (Italian Edition)?
- Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses (33 1/3)!
- Unisciti a Kobo e inizia a leggere oggi stesso.
Can we escape the epistemological, ontological, cosmological, and even axiological and teleological, cartesian dilemmas? Solutions It is our thesis that, prior to any confrontation by modern cosmology or cognitive science, we can prescind from our metaphysical perspectives to positions of both ontological and cosmological agnosticism, gaining virtual meta-ontological and meta-cosmological vantage points. Such a retreat might be energized by an essential pragmatism that avails itself of both well-known human cognitive limitations as well as well-founded human cognitive aspirations.
Truth be known, epistemologically, our logic does apparently need some tweaking but certainly not a major overhaul? Ontologically, navigating from the possible to the actual, even employing the rigors of scientific method, is very problematical using the necessary at either helm or stern, wheel or rudder. Cosmologically, our descriptions of reality in terms of givens or primitives , such as space, time, mass and energy, and of axioms, such as of the various forces weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravity and physical laws, are still incomplete, inviting propositions that consider manifold and multiform hidden variables.
Are there efficacies to be realized as we thus prescind to the functional and phenomenal from the ontological and cosmological? Can this be done in the modern day scientific cultural milieu where ontologies wage a battle royale in the philosophy of mind interdisciplines, where cosmologies collide in their implications for both our origin and our destiny?
Emergence There is one unifying metanarrative and that appears to be that of emergence. In the great chain of being there are levels stretching from the quantum to the sociological. There are levels of being within levels of being. There are theories that govern interactions within levels and sometimes between levels, sharing concepts.
The concepts concern 1 parts and wholes; 2 properties and 3 natural laws. There are three ways to look at the possible relationships between these levels. If a lower level completely explains a higher level, then we have reductionism and the strongest relation possible. Emergence is sometimes considered to correlate with supervenience, such that strong supervenience correlates with weak emergence and weak supervenience with strong emergence.
Systems have also been characterized as closed emergent and open emergent systems. Open emergent systems are epistemologically open, characterized by epistemic uncertainty. They may be either ontologically open or closed, which is to say they may or may not require new physical laws in their naturalistic explanations. Basically, if our current understanding of an emergent system is lacking, it is epistemologically open and if new physical principles are invoked, it is ontologically open.
In fact, they are extremely overdetermined. Presently, then, any understanding of the emergent system of human consciousness is epistemologically open, marked by substantial epistemic uncertainty. Until there is a more robust understanding of the properties and laws governing consciousness, we risk reification of both the structural and the functional concepts that describe our mental states and their interactivity with the physical. Such systems are advanced by those who insist that the distinction between syntax and semantics in semiotic science are critical, that the distinction between computational and nonalgorithmic cognition is pivotal.
Those who propose ontologically closed systems include the psychoneural identity theorists and others with various views regarding the Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism and such as Dennett over against Chalmers on qualia. The categories that distinguish between the open and closed systems, epistemologically and ontologically, are philosophical categories. Discussions of supervenience and emergence in the study of human consciousness, such as we set forth above, for the reasons we set forth above, presently are moreso subsumed under the philosophy of mind, not so much the science of mind.
This notwithstanding, there is nothing discussed above that is not naturalistic, though a few approaches were nonphysicalistic. Regarding the mind-body problem, William James wrote: We are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the one hand, with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon a priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. I'm more optimistic than James. Is the current explanatory gap epistemic?
Perhaps we'l eventually close it, but only asymptotically approaching godelian boundaries. Even then, I think our abductions will guide us toward an accumulation of indirect evidence, such evidence subjected to ever more rigorous statistical analyses and resulting in increasingly compelling inferences about the nature of consciousness, again constrained by godelian dynamics.
As such, it will never be exhaustive of the competing ontological and cosmological approaches but will remain congruent with many of them through the highly refined nuancing suggested by James. Still, if we continue our search for the most comprehensive, and at the same time discriminating, synthesis of whatever is best in rival systems, then we think we'll get closest to the truth.
Semiotic Emergence A very fruitful way of engaging a most comprehensive, yet very discriminating, perspective on emergence dynamics is through the hermeneutic of semiotic emergence. From the purely phenomenal perspective, prior to describing reality, ontologically, in terms of absolute necessity, cosmologically, in terms of primitives and their attendant axioms, or epistemologically, in terms of absolute logic, we can more tentatively and fallibilistically approach reality using an interpretive scheme of semiotic emergence, with meaning essentially defined as the establishment of information loops.
In semiotic emergence, from a: In approaching a semiotic reality epistemologically, we have prescinded from such as the excluded middle, not to take permanent refuge from the bivalent in the multivalent, rather, only retreating to a contextual-relational vantage with the clear intent of returning to perform our conventional logical operations. In approaching a semiotic reality ontologically, we have prescinded from such a modal logic as governed by necessity having observed in the crucible of experience that reality is apparently more so governed by probability.
In approaching a semiotic reality cosmologically, we have prescinded from such an account of the nature of the universe as a priori relies on an invariable set of primitives and governing axioms, while nevertheless holding to a meta-cosmological bias toward symmetry.
They will all, nevertheless, still be encumbered by this or that paradox of infinite regress, circular reasoning, ipse dixit, etc Oh, bother! The semiotic emergence paradigm [SEP] can serve as an indispensable hermeneutical hygiene insofar as it clarifies our thinking about reality, enabling us to rise above the insidious cartesian dualisms, which breed the mutually unintelligible distinctions such as between essentialism and nominalism, realism and idealism, empiricism and rationalism, reductionism and holism, phenomenal and noumenal, foundational and nonfoundational, correspondence and coherence, deontological and teleological ethics, contingency and teleology, etc This hermeneutic is no more immune to paradox than any other, suffering as it does from an infinite regress of semiotic realities, but that is a small price to pay for the enhanced modeling power it provides us for reality, especially once considering the manifold and multiform efficacies than ensue from its transcendence of cartesian spectres.