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Displaying: 1-14 of 14 documents


1. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Nathan A. Jacobs

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Amid the Arian dispute, opponents of Arius object to his Christology by arguing that if the Son came into being, then the Son is a creature; he is mutable; he is corruptible; his goodness is non-essential; and he cannot give life to humanity. These charges consistently appear in the writings of Arius’s contemporaries, the councils to follow, and the Eastern Church fathers in the centuries after the dispute. In this essay, I flesh out the metaphysical foundation of Eastern anti-Arian polemics and what this foundation tells us about how the Eastern pro-Nicenes understand the basic metaphysical differences between God and creatures.

2. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Kyle Hubbard

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In Book Four of his Confessions, Augustine recalls his grief at the death of his closest friend. Augustine believes he grieved excessively because he loved his friend as an idol, in the place of God. To illuminate the problems with Augustine’s friendship, I will draw on Jean-Luc Marion’s helpful analyses of the idol and the icon. In doing so I seek to clarify not only Augustine’s position on proper human love in the Confessions, but also suggest a way to understand his infamous uti/frui (use/enjoyment) distinction from On Christian Teaching, a nearly contemporaneous text to the Confessions.

3. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Juan Eduardo Carreño

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Traditionally divine life has been conceived as an attribute that belongs to God according to his way of acting. This thesis is based on a notion of life as a purely operational perfection and on the place in which Aquinas develops his thought about divine life in the Summa theologiae. Here we contend that these arguments are not entirely conclusive and introduce the idea that life, in its most radical meaning, is an attribute that belongs to God according to his way of being. In our view, this approach is more consistent with Thomas’s doctrine and avoids some common misunderstandings.

4. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Ronald R. Bernier

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This article centers on the modes of maintaining an equivalence of the moral and the good that lies behind and within Augustine’s and Aquinas’ understandings of beauty. Beauty, in the medieval experience of it, never derived exclusively from sense impression; it was neither purely pleasure in the sensuous nor a wholly intuitive contemplation of the transcendent occurring exclusively in the mind. Rather, beauty was the intelligible form of some higher reality, the quality of things that reflects their origin in the divine. Beauty, then, like meaning itself, could never be fully present in its material sign, as it appears to us only as a promise of presence through embodied absence, neither fully here and now nor entirely elsewhere and beyond. This, ultimately, may be the very purpose of beauty, a hopeful pull toward the perfect and yet never fully knowable God who is beauty.

5. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Liran Shia Gordon

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The aim of this paper is to apply the metaphysics of John Duns Scotus in constructing a new conception of matter which does not stand in opposition to the mental realm, but is rather composed of both physical and mental elements. The paper is divided into four parts. Section one addresses Scotus’ claim that matter is intelligible and actual in itself. Section two aims to show that matter can be seen as a deprived thinking being. Section three analyzes Scotus’ conception of place. The final section brings together the conclusions of the three preceding parts to confront the Cartesian psycho-physical problem anew and to suggest a viable solution.

6. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Toan Do

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In the wake of the humanism in the early sixteenth century, Erasmus of Rotterdam was often taxed with the “sin of journalism” as having little to contribute to the then--current obsolete Latinism. Despite much of the false accusation against his scholarship and erudition, one of Erasmus’s inaugural works, whose impact reverberates to this day, was the Novum Instrumentum (1516). Many of Erasmus’s contemporaries misunderstood this “new” Latin edition to be just “another” Greek edition of the New Testament. This article seeks to explore the background of Erasmus’s desire and struggle which led to the composition and publication of this Novum Instrumentum, on the one hand, and caused much confusion among his contemporaries, on the other.

7. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Terence Sweeney

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This essays considers hope as an essential aspect of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Comparing his pseudonymous works with Works of Love helps us to understand hope as the breath of the eternal, which is experienced in time as future possibility. True hope rests in the future eternal good and not in optimistic or calculative expectations. Hope is a necessary condition of the self on the journey to the eternal and as such is constitutive of the self. It is the belief in the in-breaking of the eternal into the temporal, which wholly surpasses earthly expectations in the form of the certain expectation of the future eternal good which is beyond all human possibility.

8. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Chris Calvert-Minor

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Jean-Paul Sartre is known for his analysis of human consciousness. Surprisingly, however, he never takes seriously what it might mean to theorize God’s existence through that same understanding of consciousness. In this paper, I endeavor that analysis and outline the Sartrean conscious God, where nothingness haunts God’s own being. My argument is not to prove God’s existence through a Sartrean theology. My argument is only that a Sartrean theology centered on the conscious God is fully consistent within Sartre’s existentialism and that such a conception of God should appeal to the Christian.

9. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Esther McIntosh, Don MacDonald, Christopher A. Sink

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This article seeks to draw out the links between systems thinking and the philosophy of John Macmurray. In fact, while systems theory is a growing trend in a number of disciplines, including counselling and psychotherapy, the narrative describes its ancient roots. Macmurray’s insistence that humans exist as interdependent rather than independent beings is supported by systems theory. Moreover, Macmurray’s critique of institutionalized religion and his favouring of inclusive religious community is akin to a model of spirituality that, in positive psychology, is conceived of as an open system.

10. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Jasper Doomen

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This article discusses whether animal rights may be defended from a natural rights or an ethical perspective. Both options fail. The same analysis applies in the case of humankind. ‘Humankind’ does not bring with it the acknowledgement of rights, nor does a focus on what is arguably characteristic of humankind, reason. Reason is decisive, though, in another respect: the fact that reasonable beings can claim and lay down rights. It does not follow from this that animals should have no rights, since human beings may be motivated to constitute such rights, while this provides the most solid basis for them.

11. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Michael Fagge

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This article relates the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas in order to overcome the technological attitude pervasive in society. Heidegger’s concept of technology as a way of presencing opens the door to both the danger and the saving grace of the technological attitude. Through a contemplation of art and nature recommended by Heidegger, St. Thomas’s metaphysics acts as a focus for that contemplation and de-centers the self by connecting all creation to God through esse which brings about a radiance in all things drawing the observers’ gaze away from the self to God.

12. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Benjamin W. McCraw

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Patrick Grim and Einar Duenger Bohn have recently argued that there can be no perfectly knowing Being. In particular, they urge that the object of omniscience is logically absurd (Grim) or requires an impossible maximal point of all knowledge (Bohn). I argue that, given a more classical notion of omniscience found in Aquinas and Augustine, we can shift the focus of perfect knowledge from what that being must know to the mode of that being’s understanding. Since Grim and Bohn focus on the object rather than mode of God’s knowledge, this classical approach to omniscience undermines their objections.

13. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Michael Rasche

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The defects and blank spaces of language are a challenge for any theology that sees itself as a linguistic reflection of faith. If theology pretends to speaking with any philosophical relevance, it must respect these gaps. Hermeneutics and deconstruction offer philosophical ways of analysing these linguistic gaps present in theology. In this way, they can integrate the linguistic turn of philosophy into theology. The hermeneutical theology of the twentieth century is at an impasse. Insofar as deconstruction carries critically different elements of the linguistic philosophy of hermeneutics forward, it provides theology with new opportunities to reflect on its own linguistic structure.

14. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
James B. South Orcid-ID

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