What is Contemplation?

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Calogero ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Bernard Lonergan ◽  
Unique Mode ◽  
The World ◽  
Eric Voegelin

The argument is developed by drawing on the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Eric Voegelin, and Bernard Lonergan. Contemplation is possible because the self is constituted by self-presence in its engagement with being. Self-presence does not precede one’s engagement with being and is not an alternative to this engagement, but is the unique mode of human participation in being. Immersed in the frenetic give and take of the world, one is present to oneself. Self-presence also includes the unique quality of human existence in tension between the immanent and transcendent. The contemplative experience is characterized by awe, humility, joy, and mystery. In contemplation, one cedes for a time the practical preoccupations evoked by the pull of immanence and gives way to the questing disposition—what the Greeks called wonder—toward transcendence. Contemplation is the questing disposition of self-presence toward being.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

Two Currents in Contemporary English Political Theory

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Peardon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
Eric Voegelin

There is widespread discontent today with the state of English political theory. This does not seem to have been so a generation ago. In 1915, Ernest Barker certainly revealed uneasiness about some intellectual tendencies of the time, but his overriding belief was that the new psychology and the new awareness of the personality of groups within society would enrich thinking in the long run. Ten years later, Lewis Rockow was distinctly optimistic at the end of his Contemporary English Political Thought. Having surveyed the first quarter of this century, he was impressed by “the richness of the contemporary mind” and the boldness of its political speculation. How different is the self-judgment of our own day. “In the present generation,” declared Professor Catlin in 1952, “England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries.” There were only a few men—Laski, Barker, Oakeshott, E. H. Carr—whom he would put in a high category, while apart from them he went on to say, “a drear darkness has fallen on British political theory which was so bright.” A little later, and speaking of the world in general rather than of England alone, Professor Cobban lamented “a general tendency to cease thinking about society in terms of political theory.” He could find no original thought since the eighteenth century and concluded that the idea of democracy had become a mere shibboleth—and not even a serviceable one, since all camps used it. He felt that the study of politics had taken a wrong turn, being corrupted by a neglect of the moral element, by an indifference to the practical problems besetting men, and by a deep pessimism about the possibility of resolving the dilemma between “moral man and immoral society.” Eric Voegelin seems at first to strike a more cheerful note when he speaks of “the revival, not to say the outburst, of political philosophy at Oxford in recent years,” but his article is critical of some of its tendencies and even goes so far at one point as to refer to its “distressing state.”

On the Biblical Notion of the “Fear of God” as a Condition for Human Existence

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 433-453
Author(s):  
Job Y. Jindo
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Hebrew Word ◽  
The World ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Fear Of God

This article examines the biblical notion of the “fear of God” as a fundamental normative category for all human beings. First, the Hebrew word for “fear” is examined in correspondence with the word for “knowledge,” for they oftentimes appear as synonyms in the Bible. Fear of God is thereby identified as a particular state of mind that directs one’s perception of the world and the self and qualifies, essentially, one’s existence as human. This study is part of a work-in-progress that explores the conceptual world of biblical authors.

Greek Connections: Genesis 1–11 and the Poetry of Hesiod

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Gnuse
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1

A comparison between Genesis 1–11 and the poetry of Hesiod reveals many interesting similarities that suggest the biblical authors, the Yahwist Historian and the Priestly Editors, were familiar with Hesiod's works in the fifth century BCE. Interesting similarities include the decline in the quality of human existence, the distancing of God/ gods from the world, creation of the world, woman and the “fall,” divine-human offspring, the descendants of the food hero, segmented genealogies, and other themes.

scholarly journals Formas de exercer a paternidade em Belém e Évora

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-41
Author(s):  
Adelma PIMENTEL
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Emotional Development ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
The Family ◽  
Living Together ◽  
The World ◽  
Civil Status ◽  
Strong Performance

The form of exert the paternity in the world is modifying itself. However living together in the same culture traditional and attempt of the establishing a new identity for the father. Brazil and Portugal are two countries whose the man’s cultural formation is still marked by patriarchal gender orientations that they set a strong performance of the man in functions less participation in the family, what resound in the affectionate estrangement and in the children’s education. This horizon based the accomplishment of the exploratory qualitative research accomplished in Belem, Para, Brazil and in Ever, Portugal, trying to delineate some characteristics in the ways that Brazilian and the Portuguese fathers exercise the paternity. Objective: To identify the self-perception of the paternity focusing models, functions, values and the conception of love of the informers. Procedures: Application of 89 questionnaires: 70 in Évora and 19 in Belem to the fathers of the children’s in kindergarten. Analyze were focalized for the singular and the intersubjetive. in the results we found: presence of the pater sense as nutritor, that is, the parents had the intention of to conceive the son and to form with them a stable entail; the civil status (married or stable union) it doesn’t mean that there is an united participation with the mother in the care with the children, in other words, in the healthy emotional development that requests the father’s presence or at least the quality of the coexistence.

Dependency, Relationality, Power, and Situatedness

Being Born ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 85-117
Author(s):  
Alison Stone
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Adult Care ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Care Givers ◽  
The World

This chapter looks at four features of human existence—dependency, the relationality of the self, embeddedness in social power, and situatedness—and shows how they are connected with birth. We are dependent both as infants and children—natal dependency—and also to varying degrees throughout life. Because we begin life dependent on adult care, we attach to our care-givers very intensely; these attachments shape our selves and personality structures, partly through processes of identification as they are theorized in psychoanalysis. This makes us highly receptive in early life to social power relations, which even shape our possibilities for criticizing social power in later life. Finally, at birth we begin life situated within the world with respect to many variables, including culture; gender, race, class, and other social divisions; geography; history; body; and placement in a specific set of personal and wider relationships such as kin networks and generations.

The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The West ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Urgent Task ◽  
The World ◽  
Border Thinking

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Kierkegaard

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kangas
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Thematic Content ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the intersection of religion and emotion in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Emotions—or, more generally, affectivity—play a central role in Kierkegaard's analyses of human existence. Coming after German idealism and Romanticism, and giving extraordinary new life to the heritage of pietism, Kierkegaard finds in the affective life of human beings the key disclosures concerning our being-in-the-world. In addition, Kierkegaardian “religion” takes shape in terms of certain affects and virtues that emerge in face of such existential disclosures. This essay examines how Kierkegaard frames the problem of emotion in terms of his understanding of selfhood. In particular, it looks at the way Kierkegaard's phenomenology challenges an understanding that links emotions to judgments (whether cognitive or evaluative). The latter understanding, an inheritance of Aristotle, depends on a classical ontology that privileges determination, measure, presence, and intentionality. For the “classical” tradition, emotions offer thematic content about the world, guide moral reasoning and decision-making, predispose one toward certain virtues or vices, and can be altered by a resolution toward right thinking.

scholarly journals Gaetano Roberto Buccola, Forme del centro. Percorsi analitici dal “Viaggio al centro della Terra” al nucleo dell’uomo (Palermo: Nuova Ipsa, 2013)

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Baruchello
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The World ◽  
Psychic Energy

“The human being, whatever her creed or culture, tends toward individualisation or, in other words, differentiation from her fellow beings in order to retrieve her own exclusive place in the world, via an incessant process of movement towards the centre allowing her to approach more and more closely her own soul’s nucleus. The tendency to move towards the Self corresponds, especially in certain stages of human existence, to a lesser investment of psychic energy into the closest components of consciousness and a partial renunciation of the most superficial psychic parts.” (185)

Stanisław Kowalczyk. Filozofia kultury. Próba personalistycznego ujęcia problematyki [A Philosophy of Culture. The Inspirations of Personalism]

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-268
Author(s):  
Artur Rybowicz
Keyword(s):  
Human Person ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human History ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
Philosophy Of Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Characteristic

As the title suggests, the book is an attempt to analyse and interpret the phenomenon of culture from the perspective of personalism. The tools chosen by the author for an interpretation of culture are the principles of the Christian anthropology and ontology. The main thesis of the book is that culture is an essentially personal phenomenon, to the point that it well may define what it means to be human person. The ability to create, to transform a basic elements, a row matter into an expression of our inner personal existence, our feelings, reason and most of all of our personal intentions and values is an exclusively human characteristic, and there is no other similar in the world of living beings. Culture, art and civilization are an important expressions of our human existence, and of our freedom as the only creatures, which transcend determinism of Nature and natural processes. As the author writes, culture is a faithful companion of our human history. It appeared with us, and is the inseparable attribute of our life. We are ontologically joined with the phenomenon of culture, so that a mystery of our existence is in some sense a mystery of our internal and external culture, and our value, as a concrete human individuals or as a society is a consequence of the quality of our culture.

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