Reordering Nature

Reordering Nature PDF Author: Celia Deane-Drummond
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567088963
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book experts in the environment, theology and science argue that the challenge posed to society by biotechnology lies not only in terms of risk/benefit analysis of individual genetic technologies and interventions, but also has implications for the way we think about human identity and our relationship to the natural world. Such a profound--they would suggest religious--challenge requires a response that is genuinely interdisciplinary in nature, a conversation that draws as much on expertise in theology and philosophy as on the natural sciences and risk assessment techniques. They argue that an adequate response must also be sociologically informed in at least two ways. First it must draw on contemporary sociological insights about contemporary cultural change, the complex role of expert knowledge in modern complex society and the specific social dynamics of contemporary technological risks. Secondly, it must endeavour to pay sensitive attention to the voice of the lay public in the current controversy over the new genetics. This book attempts to realise such an aim, as a contribution not just to academic scholarship, but also to the public debate about biotechnology and its regulation. Thus the collection includes contributions from scholars in a range of intellectual domains (indeed, many of the chapters themselves draw on more than one discipline in new and challenging ways). The book invites the reader to enter into this conversation in a creative way and come to appreciate more fully the many-sided nature of the debate.

Reordering Nature

Reordering Nature PDF Author: Celia Deane-Drummond
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567088963
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book experts in the environment, theology and science argue that the challenge posed to society by biotechnology lies not only in terms of risk/benefit analysis of individual genetic technologies and interventions, but also has implications for the way we think about human identity and our relationship to the natural world. Such a profound--they would suggest religious--challenge requires a response that is genuinely interdisciplinary in nature, a conversation that draws as much on expertise in theology and philosophy as on the natural sciences and risk assessment techniques. They argue that an adequate response must also be sociologically informed in at least two ways. First it must draw on contemporary sociological insights about contemporary cultural change, the complex role of expert knowledge in modern complex society and the specific social dynamics of contemporary technological risks. Secondly, it must endeavour to pay sensitive attention to the voice of the lay public in the current controversy over the new genetics. This book attempts to realise such an aim, as a contribution not just to academic scholarship, but also to the public debate about biotechnology and its regulation. Thus the collection includes contributions from scholars in a range of intellectual domains (indeed, many of the chapters themselves draw on more than one discipline in new and challenging ways). The book invites the reader to enter into this conversation in a creative way and come to appreciate more fully the many-sided nature of the debate.

Reordering the Natural World

Reordering the Natural World PDF Author: Annabelle Sabloff
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802083616
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
"With this text, Sabloff not only provides insight into the study of relations between humans and the natural world, she lays a cornerstone for building a new structure for the study of anthropology itself."--BOOK JACKET.

Fragmented Nature: Medieval Latinate Reasoning on the Natural World and Its Order

Fragmented Nature: Medieval Latinate Reasoning on the Natural World and Its Order PDF Author: Mattia Cipriani
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000599973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Latin Middle Ages were characterised by a vast array of different representations of nature. These conceptualisations of the natural world were developed according to the specific requirements of many different disciplines, with the consequent result of producing a fragmentation of images of nature. Despite this plurality, two main tendencies emerged. On the one hand, the natural world was seen as a reflection of God’s perfection, teleologically ordered and structurally harmonious. On the other, it was also considered as a degraded version of the spiritual realm – a world of impeccable ideas, separate substances, and celestial movers. This book focuses on this tension between order and randomness, and idealisation and reality of nature in the Middle Ages. It provides a cutting-edge profile of the doctrinal and semantic richness of the medieval idea of nature, and also illustrates the structural interconnection among learned and scientific disciplines in the medieval period, stressing the fundamental bond linking together science and philosophy, on the one hand, and philosophy and theology, on the other. This book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in Medieval European History, Theology, Philosophy, and Science.

Reordering Nature

Reordering Nature PDF Author: Celia Deane-Drummond
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567088789
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book experts in the environment, theology and science argue that the challenge posed to society by biotechnology lies not only in terms of risk/benefit analysis of individual genetic technologies and interventions, but also has implications for the way we think about human identity and our relationship to the natural world. Such a profound--they would suggest religious--challenge requires a response that is genuinely interdisciplinary in nature, a conversation that draws as much on expertise in theology and philosophy as on the natural sciences and risk assessment techniques. They argue that an adequate response must also be sociologically informed in at least two ways. First it must draw on contemporary sociological insights about contemporary cultural change, the complex role of expert knowledge in modern complex society and the specific social dynamics of contemporary technological risks. Secondly, it must endeavour to pay sensitive attention to the voice of the lay public in the current controversy over the new genetics. This book attempts to realise such an aim, as a contribution not just to academic scholarship, but also to the public debate about biotechnology and its regulation. Thus the collection includes contributions from scholars in a range of intellectual domains (indeed, many of the chapters themselves draw on more than one discipline in new and challenging ways). The book invites the reader to enter into this conversation in a creative way and come to appreciate more fully the many-sided nature of the debate.

Why Ultimate Happiness Transcends Human Limitations

Why Ultimate Happiness Transcends Human Limitations PDF Author: Francis Bestman Isugu
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1493142291
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book Why Ultimate Happiness Transcends Human Limitations is a Christological Philosophical Classic that is apt for its time. It presents the issue of human limitations on earth in a new light that offers proper clarification for the important issue of the purpose of human life on earth viewed in the light of a prison. This book is written to you and for you, in an epistle apostolic didactic and reflective style of discussion; to enable you participate easily in the discussions initiated by the author to respond to some of the swaying issues bordering on the humanist outlook and its influence on society in this postmodern era of secularism and irreligion. This book crops up many religious and ethical issues that make it in many ways relevant for addressing your diverse needs, as an individual in society or as a member of any political, economic, commercial, ethical, religious, intellectual, professional and seminal group. So, in diverse ways this book is addressed by the author Isugu Francis Bestman to you. It answers many of the questions that you may have been thinking are unanswerable. Moreover, this book will appeal to scholars, intellectuals, professionals, business personnel, entrepreneurs, educators, public and evangelical ministers, clerics, and the laity especially because the issues raised and discussed by the author have objective, rational, religious, moral, psychological or emotional and practical imports and values. This makes this book meet the standard for proffering solutions to problems and doubts anyone or you may experience pertaining to your personal life situations in particular and the situation of public life in general. Hence this book is a must-read for all and sundry.

Natural Final Causality and Scholastic Thought

Natural Final Causality and Scholastic Thought PDF Author: Corey Barnes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040113176
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines scholastic conceptions of final causality through the methods and concerns of historical theology. It argues the history of final causality is most profitably understood according to the interplay of regularity, order, and intentionality as interpretive categories. Within this analytic framework, the author explores the history and theological implications of final causality from Aristotle to Nicole Oresme, utilizing shifts in the dominant interpretive category to clarify how final causality could change from one of four co-equal explanatory strategies in Aristotle to the cause of causes in Avicenna to a merely metaphorical cause in Walter Chatton. Theological debates – ranging from questions of creation, the relationship of primary and secondary causality and of the ultimate good to secondary goods, the autonomy or instrumentality of nature, and the compatibility of chance with providence – motivated many of these changes. The chapters examine final causality in Aristotle and the commentorial tradition from late antiquity to medieval Arabic sources and then consider in detail various scholastic understandings and uses of final causality. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of historical theology, systematic theology, scholastic thought, and medieval philosophy.

The Greeks and the Environment

The Greeks and the Environment PDF Author: Laura Westra
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847684465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism.

Possible Knowledge

Possible Knowledge PDF Author: Debapriya Sarkar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512823368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature--what early moderns termed poesie--in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor. Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes "possible knowledge" as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the "possible," defined by Philip Sidney as what "may be and should be," to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing--including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia--in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from "nature" or reality. Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the "possible" lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

Modernism and the Ideology of History

Modernism and the Ideology of History PDF Author: Louise Blakeney Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Louise Williams explores the nature of historical memory in the work of five major Modernists: Yeats, Pound, Hulme, Ford and Lawrence. These Modernists, Williams argues, started their careers with historical assumptions derived from the nineteenth century. But their views on the universal structure of history, on the abandonment of progress and the adoption of a cyclical sense of the past, were the result of important conflicts and changes within the Modernist period. Williams focuses on the period immediately before World War I, and shows in detail how Modernism developed and why it is considered a unique intellectual movement. She also revisits the theory that the Edwardian age was a difficult period of transition to the modern world. Finally, she illuminates the contribution of non-Western culture to the literature and thought of the period. This wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary study is essential reading for literary and cultural historians of the modernist period.

Malebranche: The Search After Truth

Malebranche: The Search After Truth PDF Author: Nicolas Malebranche
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521589956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 828

Get Book Here

Book Description
Distinguished translation of the major work by a figure of crucial importance to the Enlightenment.