Mysticism as a Basis of Inter-Religious Dialogue

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-107
Author(s):  
Michael H. Mitias ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Beliefs And Values ◽  
Religious Dialogue ◽  
Transcendent Reality ◽  
The Common

Some philosophers and theologians have argued that God-centeredness cannot be a condition of inter-religious dialogue for at least four reasons. First, it is an existential fact that all religions tend to view the truth of their beliefs and values as absolute. Second, all religions are embedded in radically different cultural contexts; this kind of difference undercuts the possibility of inter-religious dialogue. Third, grounding all the religions in a transcendent reality relativizes their beliefs and values. Moreover, people worship “their” God, not a neutral reality. Fourth, it is difficult to ground all the religions in a transcendent, neutral realty. This paper critically evaluates these arguments and defends the proposition that the mystical experience provides a justifiable basis for the claim that the transcendent is not only a wealth of being but also an infinite wealth of being and that the same transcendent is “revealed” in the mystical experience which underlies all the major religions. The transcendent is the common ground on which all the religions stand in inter-religious dialogue qua religions.

Contextualism, Decontextualism, and Perennialism

1998 ◽  
pp. 142-146
Author(s):  
Timothy A. Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Perennial Philosophy ◽  
The Common ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
Central Claim

This paper addresses religious epistemology in that it concerns the assessment of the credibility of certain claims arising out of religious experience. Developments this century have made the world’s rich religious heritage accessible to more people than ever. But the conflicting religious claims tend to undermine each religion’s central claim to be a vehicle for opening persons to ultimate reality. One attempt to overcome this problem is provided by "perennial philosophy," which claims that there is a kind of mystical experience common to all religious traditions, an experience which is an immediate contact with an absolute principle. Perennialism has been attacked by "contextualists" such as Steven Katz who argue that particular mystical experiences are so tied to a particular tradition that there are no common mystical experiences across traditions. In turn, Robert Forman and the "decontextualists" have argued that a certain kind of mystical experience and process are found in diverse traditions, thereby supporting one of the key elements of perennialism. I review the contextualist-decontextualist debate and suggest a research project that would pursue the question of whether the common ground of the world’s mystical traditions could be expanded beyond what has been established by the decontextualists. The extension of this common ground would add credibility to the claims arising out of mystical experience.

TEOLOGIA FILOSÓFICA E DIÁLOGO RELIGIOSO

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (134) ◽  
pp. 423
Author(s):  
Josef Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
The Self ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Rational Potential ◽  
Religious Dialogue ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Universal Reason

Resumo: O diálogo entre as diversas concepções do mundo, hoje tão urgente, especialmente o diálogo com as religiões e entre as religiões, só poderá ter sucesso se os parceiros estiverem dispostos a e forem capazes de levar a sério uns aos outros no cerne de suas convicções. Já que se trata de convicções últimas que de per si contêm uma pretensão universal, a razão é o espaço comum de tal diálogo. O seu cultivo é tarefa da filosofia, que se torna neste caso um parceiro qualificado, porque a transcendência como tema das religiões é também seu objeto. É o que mostram os diferentes argumentos da transcendência elaborados na filosofia, que como demonstrações de Deus constituem a ponte para a religião. São argumentos nucleares da filosofia, já que neles a razão tematiza sua capacidade para superar em princípio seus limites. Os tipos particulares desses argumentos são maneiras intimamente relacionadas da autoexplicitação da razão universal. A dimensão da normatividade e da bondade que assim emerge leva ao problema da teodicéia com o qual a filosofia e a teologia são conjuntamente confrontadas. A respeito desse problema a fé cristã possui um potencial racional especial que tem intensificado nos últimos tempos o diálogo com o budismo.Abstract: The dialogue between the different conceptions of the world, so urgent nowadays, especially the religious dialogue and that between religions, can only succeed if partners are willing and able to take each other seriously, at the heart of their own convictions. As these ultimate convictions contain per se a universal claim, reason must be the common ground for such a dialogue. The task of philosophy, acting here as a qualified partner, is therefore to cultivate dialogue since transcendence is an object of study for both religions and philosophy. This is what the different arguments of transcendence, developed in philosophy, show. Their demonstrations of God serve as a bridge to religion. They are core philosophical arguments since it is through them that reason expresses its ability to overcome, in principle, its own limits. The particularities of these arguments are closely related to the self-explanation of the universal reason. The dimension of normativity and kindness that emerge, brings the problem of theodicy to which both philosophy and theology are confronted. Regarding this issue, the Christian faith has a rational potential that has recently favoured the dialogue with Buddhism.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

scholarly journals Across the Divide: Looking for the common ground of Hindustani

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2056-2079 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID LUNN
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
The Common

AbstractThis article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.

Linguistic influences on gesture’s form

Gesture ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gerwing ◽  
Janet Bavelas
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Communicative Function ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Original Action ◽  
New Information ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Given ◽  
Linguistic Influences

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This paper presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the symbolic form of the gesture. First, we manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had done the same actions and therefore shared common ground or to one who had done different actions and therefore did not share common ground. The common ground gestures were judged to be significantly less complex, precise, or informative than the latter, a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, we used the given versus new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The speaker emphasized the new information in each gesture by making it larger, clearer, etc. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or less precise, which is similar to findings for given versus new information in words. Thus the immediate communicative function (e.g., to convey information that is common ground or that is new) played a major role in determining the physical form of the gestures.

The History of Emotions and Nationalism Studies: a Сognitive Turn in Contemporary Historiography

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Olga Vorobieva
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
National Character ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Cognitive Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
The Common ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
The Relationship

The article considers the cognitive potential of the history of emotions in the study of nationalism in historiographical discussions of 1990—2000s. The authors analyze the works, which criticize constructivist approaches and problematize the relationship between nationalism, “national character”, “emotional mode” and everyday behavioral practices. Based on P. Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’ and its modification in N. Elias's historical sociology, the article highlights the common ground and productive interaction between histories of emotion and nationalism studies. This reciprocal movement is interpreted as a symptom of the search for a common conceptual platform and vocabulary for the mutual translation of their research practices. The authors believe that a productive trend within this dialogue could be a more active address to cognitive studies advocating a rethinking of the relationship between individual consciousness and collective regimes of knowledge-power of sentimental, modern and “post-modern” eras.

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