Mortal Imitations of Divine Life

Mortal Imitations of Divine Life PDF Author: Eli Diamond
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081013070X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
In Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, Diamond offers an interpretation of De Anima, which explains how and why Aristotle places souls in a hierarchy of value. Aristotle’s central intention in De Anima is to discover the nature and essence of soul—the principle of living beings. He does so by identifying the common structures underlying every living activity, whether it be eating, perceiving, thinking, or moving through space. As Diamond demonstrates through close readings of De Anima, the nature of the soul is most clearly seen in its divine life, while the embodied soul’s other activities are progressively clear approximations of this principle. This interpretation shows how Aristotle’s psychology and biology cannot be properly understood apart from his theological conception of God as life, and offers a new explanation of De Anima’s unity of purpose and structure.

Mortal Imitations of Divine Life

Mortal Imitations of Divine Life PDF Author: Eli Diamond
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081013070X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, Diamond offers an interpretation of De Anima, which explains how and why Aristotle places souls in a hierarchy of value. Aristotle’s central intention in De Anima is to discover the nature and essence of soul—the principle of living beings. He does so by identifying the common structures underlying every living activity, whether it be eating, perceiving, thinking, or moving through space. As Diamond demonstrates through close readings of De Anima, the nature of the soul is most clearly seen in its divine life, while the embodied soul’s other activities are progressively clear approximations of this principle. This interpretation shows how Aristotle’s psychology and biology cannot be properly understood apart from his theological conception of God as life, and offers a new explanation of De Anima’s unity of purpose and structure.

Aristotle on God's Life-Generating Power and on Pneuma as Its Vehicle

Aristotle on God's Life-Generating Power and on Pneuma as Its Vehicle PDF Author: Abraham P. Bos
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438468296
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Proposes an innovative rethinking of Aristotle’s work as a system that integrates his theology with his doctrine of reproduction and life. In this deep rethinking of Aristotle’s work, Abraham P. Bos argues that scholarship on Aristotle’s philosophy has erred since antiquity in denying the connection between his theology and his doctrine of reproduction and life in the earthly sphere. Beginning with an analysis of God’s role in the Aristotelian system, Bos explores how this relates to other elements of his philosophy, especially to his theory of reproduction. The argument he develops is that in talking about the cosmos, Aristotle rejected Plato’s metaphor of artisanal production by a divine Demiurge in favor of a biotic metaphor based on the transmission of life in reproduction, in which pneuma—not breath as it is often interpreted but the life-bearing spirit in animals and plants—plays a key and sustaining role as the vital principle in all that lives. In making this case, he defends the authenticity of the treatises De Mundo and De Spiritu as Aristotle’s, and demonstrates Aristotle’s works as a unified system that sharply and comprehensively refutes Plato’s, and in particular replaces Plato’s doctrine of the soul with a theory in which the soul is clearly distinguished from the intellect. “Bos offers a fresh, interesting, and important perspective. His interpretation will be very controversial, but if he is right, the standard Anglo-American interpretation of Aristotle will have to change radically.” — Malcolm Wilson, author of Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature

Christian Inversion of Jewish Nationalist Monotheism, and its Modern Romantic-Narcissist Betrayal

Christian Inversion of Jewish Nationalist Monotheism, and its Modern Romantic-Narcissist Betrayal PDF Author: Patrick Madigan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527552659
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
This is a history of Western culture, divided into two parts. The first concerns the aggressive championing of monotheism by Jewish people as their distinctive national culture (although they only fell into or embraced it late in their development). Jesus offended by proposing an inversion of the divine protocols and an agenda more in harmony with international political realities: the one God proposed to use the Jews to reach (and transform) the entire human race, which was the actual object of His redemptive and creative energies. With the Renaissance widening opportunities for study, travel, learning and discovery, authorities had greater difficulty justifying limitations on individuals’ freedom of expression of heterodox artistic, political, philosophical or religious positions. This book explores the difficult modern psychological adjustment of dealing with a world with diminishing centers of authority – where it often seems as if no one is in charge – while also doing justice to one’s feelings of frustration and lack of fulfillment without becoming a radical narcissist.

Aristotle on Human Nature

Aristotle on Human Nature PDF Author: Gregory Kirk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350348333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Exploring Aristotle's concept of logos, this volume advances our understanding of it as a singular feature of human nature by arguing that it is the organizing principle of human life itself. Tracing its multiple meanings in different contexts, including reason, logic, speech, ratio, account, and form, contributors highlight the ways in which we can see logos in human thinking, in the organizing principles of our bodies, in our perception of the world, in our social and political life, and through our productive and fine arts. Through this focus, logos reveals itself not as one feature amongst others, but instead as the feature that organizes all others, from the most “animal” to the most “spiritual.” By presenting logos in this way, readers gain a complex account of the philosophy of human nature.

Hegel’s Anthropology

Hegel’s Anthropology PDF Author: Allegra de Laurentiis
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014378X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This book provides a critical analysis of Hegel’s Anthropology, a long-neglected treatise dedicated to the psyche, or “soul,” that bridges Hegel’s philosophy of organic nature with his philosophy of subjective spirit. Allegra de Laurentiis recuperates this overlooked text, guiding readers through its essential arguments and ideas. She shows how Hegel conceives of the “sublation” of natural motion, first into animal sentience and then into the felt presentiment of selfhood, all the way to the threshold of self-reflexive thinking. She discusses the Anthropology in the context of Hegel’s mature system of philosophy (the Encyclopaedia) while also exposing some of the scientific and philosophical sources of his conceptions of unconscious states, psychosomatism, mental pathologies, skill formation, memorization, bodily habituation, and the self-conditioning capacities of our species. This treatise on the becoming of anthropos, she argues, displays the power and limitations of Hegel’s idealistic “philosophy of the real” in connecting such phenomena as erect posture, a discriminating hand, and the forward gaze to the emergence of the human ego, or the structural disintegration of the social world to the derangement of the individual mind. A groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on Hegel and nineteenth-century philosophy, this book shows that the Anthropology is essential to understanding Hegel’s concept of spirit, not only in its connection with nature but also in its more sophisticated realizations as objective and absolute spirit. Future scholarship on this subject will recount—and build upon—de Laurentiis’s innovative study.

Religion and the Philosophy of Life

Religion and the Philosophy of Life PDF Author: Gavin Flood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573144
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
Religion and the Philosophy of Life considers how religion as the source of civilization transforms the fundamental bio-sociology of humans through language and the somatic exploration of religious ritual and prayer. Gavin Flood offers an integrative account of the nature of the human, based on what contemporary scientists tell us, especially evolutionary science and social neuroscience, as well as through the history of civilizations. Part one contemplates fundamental questions and assumptions: what the current state of knowledge is concerning life itself; what the philosophical issues are in that understanding; and how we can explain religion as the driving force of civilizations in the context of human development within an evolutionary perspective. It also addresses the question of the emergence of religion and presents a related study of sacrifice as fundamental to religions' views about life and its transformation. Part two offers a reading of religions in three civilizational blocks--India, China, and Europe/the Middle East--particularly as they came to formation in the medieval period. It traces the history of how these civilizations have thematised the idea of life itself. Part three then takes up the idea of a life force in part three and traces the theme of the philosophy of life through to modern times. On the one hand, the book presents a narrative account of life itself through the history of civilizations, and on the other presents an explanation of that narrative in terms of life.

Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation

Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation PDF Author: Matthew D. Walker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108421105
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Provides an original, up-to-date, and systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good.

Philosophy, Art, and the Imagination: Essays on the Work of John Sallis

Philosophy, Art, and the Imagination: Essays on the Work of John Sallis PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004507094
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This volume of essays on the philosopher John Sallis assesses his wide ranging and genuinely original contribution to philosophy. Along with the response to the essays by Sallis, these essays indicate directions for the future of philosophy.

The Invention of Imagination

The Invention of Imagination PDF Author: Justin Humphreys
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822989123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Aristotle was the first philosopher to divide the imagination—what he called phantasia—from other parts of the psyche, placing it between perception and intellect. A mathematician and philosopher of mathematical sciences, Aristotle was puzzled by the problem of geometrical cognition—which depends on the ability to “produce” and “see” a multitude of immaterial objects—and so he introduced the category of internal appearances produced by a new part of the psyche, the imagination. As Justin Humphreys argues, Aristotle developed his theory of imagination in part to explain certain functions of reason with a psychological rather than metaphysical framework. Investigating the background of this conceptual development, The Invention of Imagination reveals how imagery was introduced into systematic psychology in fifth-century Athens and ultimately made mathematical science possible. It offers new insights about major philosophers in the Greek tradition and significant events in the emergence of ancient mathematics while offering space for a critical reflection on how we understand ourselves as thinking beings.

Mathematics and the Craft of Thought in the Anglo-Dutch Renaissance

Mathematics and the Craft of Thought in the Anglo-Dutch Renaissance PDF Author: Eleanor Chan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000461807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The development of a coherent, cohesive visual system of mathematics brought about a seminal shift in approaches towards abstract thinking in western Europe. Vernacular translations of Euclid’s Elements made these new and developing approaches available to a far broader readership than had previously been possible. Scholarship has explored the way that the language of mathematics leaked into the literary cultures of England and the Low Countries, but until now the role of visual metaphors of making and shaping in the establishment of mathematics as a practical tool has gone unexplored. Mathematics and the Craft of Thought sheds light on the remarkable culture shift surrounding the vernacular language translations of Euclid, and the geometrical imaginary that they sought to create. It shows how the visual language of early modern European geometry was constructed by borrowing and quoting from contemporary visual culture. The verbal and visual language of this form of mathematics, far from being simply immaterial, was designed to tantalize with material connotations. This book argues that, in a very real sense, practical geometry in this period was built out of craft metaphors.