scholarly journals Defining ontological categories in an expansion of belief dynamics

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (0) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Jan Westerhoff
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-69
Author(s):  
Fritz Detwiler

Graham Harvey’s reconceptualisation of religion emphasises the relational world of indigenous peoples. His suggestion that religion revolves around negotiating with ‘our neighbours’ is particularly relevant to Native American ritual processes insofar as he extends ‘neighbours’ to other-species persons. Further, by emphasising ‘lived religion’, Harvey turns our attention to the significance of embodied religion as it expresses itself in ceremonial performances. Harvey’s approach is enriched by Ronald L. Grimes’ notion of the way in which indigenous rituals take us into the deep world of other-species communities through a gift exchange economy that promotes the wellbeing of everyone in the neighbourhood. The present discussion demonstrates the applicability of both Harvey’s and Grimes’ approaches to indigenous religious ritual processes by focusing on James R. Walker’s account of Oglala Sun Dancing. Walker constructs a fourstage ritual process from information he gathered while working as a physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1896 to 1914. The entire process, from the declaration of the first candidates who announce their intention to make bodily sacrifices to the culmination of the ritual process in the last four days where the flesh sacrifices are made many months later, centres on re-establishing and promoting harmonious relations among the Oglala and between the Oglala and their other-species neighbours within the Sacred Hoop. The indigenous methodological approach interprets the process through Oglala cosmological and ontological categories and establishes the significance of Harvey’s approach to religion and Grimes’ approach to ritual in understanding embodied and lived religion.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laakasuo ◽  
Anton Berg ◽  
Jukka Sundvall ◽  
Marianna Drosinou ◽  
Volo Herzon ◽  
...  

In this chapter, we will provide theoretical background of discussion on issues related to AIs. Some of the main topics, theories and frameworks are mind perception and moral cognition, moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, trans-humanism and ontological categories shaped by evolution.


Author(s):  
Balázs Trencsényi ◽  
Michal Kopeček ◽  
Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič ◽  
Maria Falina ◽  
Mónika Baár ◽  
...  

The interwar radicalization of politics in East Central Europe was linked to the proliferation of a discourse of crisis. Symptoms of crisis could be localized in certain social groups, institutions, and social relations, such as the generational cleavage. Since the topos of crisis was not bound to any particular ideology, the very same discourse was used by liberal and leftist intellectuals as well. Nevertheless, the most plausible ideological framework offering a way out of the crisis seemed to be the “conservative revolution,” promising to restore the continuity of traditions that had been interrupted by the breakthrough of modernity. This led to the proliferation of “national metaphysics,” defining the specificity of the respective nation with ontological categories. Another face of this “conservative revolution” was the politicization of religion, linked to the renewed interest in myth and popular religiosity. At the same time, there was also a conservative anti-totalitarian stance and, in a few cases, a left-wing reorientation of certain religious subcultures.


Text Matters ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Lacefield

This essay begins by examining the rhetorical significance of the guillotine, an important symbol during the Romantic Period. Lacefield argues that the guillotine symbolized a range of modern ontological juxtapositions and antinomies during the period. Moreover, she argues that the guillotine influenced Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through Giovanni Aldini, a scientist who experimented on guillotined corpses during the French Revolution and inspired Shelley’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Given the importance of the guillotine as a powerful metaphor for anxieties emergent during this period, Lacefield employs it as a clue signaling a labyrinth of modern meanings embedded in Shelley’s novel, as well as the films they anticipated. In particular, Lacefield analyzes the significance of the guillotine slice itself—the uneasy, indeterminate line that simultaneously separates and joins categories such as life/death, mind/body, spirit/matter, and nature/technology. Lacefield’s interdisciplinary analysis analyzes motifs of decapitation/dismemberment in Frankenstein and then moves into a discussion of the novel’s exploration of the ontological categories specified above. For example, Frankenstein’s Creature, as a kind of cyborg, exists on the contested theoretical “slice” within a number of antinomies: nature/tech, human/inhuman (alive/dead), matter/spirit, etc. These are interesting juxtapositions that point to tensions within each set of categories, and Lacefield discusses the relevance of such dichotomies for questions of modernity posed by materialist theory and technological innovation. Additionally, she incorporates a discussion of films that fuse Shelley’s themes with appeals to twentieth-century and post-millennium audiences.


Author(s):  
Friederike Moltmann

Natural language, it appears, reflects in part our conception of the world. Natural language displays a great range of types of referential noun phrases that seem to stand for objects of various ontological categories and types, and it also involves constructions, categories, and expressions that appear to convey ontological or notions. Natural language reflects its own ontology, an ontology that may differ from the ontology a philosopher may be willing to accept or even a nonphilosopher when thinking about what there is, and of course it may differ from the ontology of what there really is. This chapter gives a characterization of the ontology implicit in natural language and the entities it involves, situates natural language ontology within metaphysics, discusses what sorts of data may be considered reflective of the ontology of natural language, and addresses Chomsky’s dismissal of externalist semantics.


1974 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter A. Armbruster
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-186
Author(s):  
Martin Lin

For what are things independent of reason? To answer that would be like to judge without judging, or to wash the fur without getting it wet. —Gottlieb Frege Over the course of the preceding pages, I have attempted to develop an interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics according to which he should be counted among the metaphysical realists. His basic ontological categories—substance, attribute, and mode—are not, although they are correlated with them, reducible to nor grounded in anything epistemic, psychological, or conceptual. Neither are the basic metaphysical relations that structure his world—inherence and causation—reducible to nor grounded in anything epistemic, psychological, or conceptual. Rather, Spinoza is a realist and a rationalist. He believes that the metaphysical and the epistemic/conceptual mirror one another in such a way that the structure of the world is accessible to philosophical reason, but he does not try to justify this assumption by reducing the metaphysical to the epistemic/conceptual. He merely presumes it to be true and proceeds to philosophize on this basis. If it is to find justification at all, it will only be because if it weren’t true, then philosophy as he conceives it would be impossible. Thus, to the extent that Spinoza’s philosophy helps us solve philosophical problems and otherwise understand the world, the hypothesis that being and reason mirror one another is vindicated....


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