Negative Certainties

Negative Certainties PDF Author: Jean-Luc Marion
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680710X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Now in paperback, Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking philosophy of human uncertainty. In Negative Certainties, renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple—but profoundly provocative—question in order to open up an entirely new way of thinking about knowledge: Isn’t our uncertainty, our finitude, and rational limitations, one of the few things we can be certain about? Marion shows how the assumption of knowledge as positive demands a reductive epistemology that disregards immeasurable or disorderly phenomena. He shows that we have experiences every day that have no identifiable causes or predictable reasons and that these constitute a very real knowledge—a knowledge of the limits of what can be known. Establishing this “negative certainty,” Marion applies it to four aporias, or issues of certain uncertainty: the definition of man; the nature of God; the unconditionality of the gift; and the unpredictability of events. Translated for the first time into English, Negative Certainties is an invigorating work of epistemological inquiry that will take a central place in Marion’s oeuvre.

Cognitive Vulnerability

Cognitive Vulnerability PDF Author: Óscar Lucas González-Castán
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110799162
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Vulnerability has become part of our everyday vocabulary. We are used to hearing that we ought to act so as to protect the highly vulnerable; the qualifier suggests that we are all vulnerable. In addition to being of contemporary relevance, the notion of vulnerability has also been at the heart of philosophical reflection since the birth of the discipline, playing a vital role across many different traditions. Its prevalence is unsurprising. Vulnerability, which partially defines us as human beings, has appeared in many guises: mortality, finitude, sin, ignorance, etc. However, no attempt has yet been made to fully apply the notion of vulnerability to the domains of epistemology and the philosophy of science, to relate it to our general human vulnerability, and to explore the wide range of consequences that derive from it. The contributors of this book fill this gap; they present new approaches to classical problems. They highlight different aspects of our cognitive vulnerability, from issues related to the realism/antirealism debate to reflections on epistemic success and trust.

Degrees of Givenness

Degrees of Givenness PDF Author: Christina M. Gschwandtner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301428X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
“Beautifully written . . . advances scholarship on Marion, and offers a sustained and critical analysis of two weaknesses in Marion’s phenomenology.” —Tamsin Jones, author of A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion The philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion has opened new ways of speaking about religious convictions and experiences. In this exploration of Marion’s philosophy and theology, Christina M. Gschwandtner presents a comprehensive and critical analysis of the ideas of saturated phenomena and the phenomenology of givenness. She claims that these phenomena do not always appear in the excessive mode that Marion describes and suggests instead that we consider degrees of saturation. Gschwandtner covers major themes in Marion’s work—the historical event, art, nature, love, gift and sacrifice, prayer, and the Eucharist. She works within the phenomenology of givenness, but suggests that Marion himself has not considered important aspects of his philosophy. “Christina M. Gschwandtner has established herself as a valued reader of contemporary French philosophy in general and of Marion’s writings in particular. She was the first to consider at length Marion’s extensive reflections on Descartes and to evaluate their theological importance, and she has translated two of Marion’s books from the French. This new study, Degrees of Givenness, extends her contribution to our understanding of this fecund philosopher.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Psychology

Psychology PDF Author: Charles Arthur Mercier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
It has long been a favourite tenet of mine, and there are now, I think, others who hold it, that Insanity is no exception to the rule which requires a knowledge of the normal as an indispensable preliminary to a knowledge of the abnormal. The reason why the contrary opinion has been maintained with such vigour, and the contrary practice so generally followed, has seemed to me to be the absence of any work in which normal psychological processes are dealt with from the point of view and for the purposes of the alienist. Of the many excellent works on Psychology which are at the service of the student, there is none that affords him material help in understanding the nature of those disorders of mind which it is the work of his life to study. For instance, the chief labours of the student of the disordered mind are concerned with the existence and nature of Delusion; but, as far as I know, no work on normal psychology gives him any help in settling the preliminary questions of what a delusion is; of how it differs from a normal state of mind; of its mode of origin; or of its varieties. It is true that these are not questions in normal psychology, and it is no reproach to the psychologist who deals with the normal alone that they are excluded from his purview; but it is a great disadvantage to the alienist to be left without guidance in the face of problems of such profound importance to him.

Eucharist and Receptive Ecumenism

Eucharist and Receptive Ecumenism PDF Author: Kimberly Hope Belcher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108865259
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
All doctrinal development and debate occurs against the background of Christian practice and worship. By attending to what Christians have done in the eucharist, Kimberly Belcher provides a new perspective on the history of eucharistic doctrine and Christian divisions today. Stepping back from the metaphysical approaches that divide the churches, she focuses on a phenomenological approach to the eucharist and a retrieval of forgotten elements in Ambrose's and Augustine's work. The core of the eucharist is the act of giving thanks to the Father – for the covenant and for the world. This unitive core allows for significant diversity on questions about presence, sacrifice, ecclesiology, and ministry. Belcher shows that the key is humility about what we know and what we do not, which gives us a willingness to receive differences in Christian teachings as gifts that will allow us to move forward in a new way.

Artificial War

Artificial War PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9814482757
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Semantic Web - ISWC 2009

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2009 PDF Author: Abraham Bernstein
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3642049303
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1007

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Book Description
As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human–computer interaction p- spective – e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human–computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the ?eld.

Incomprehensible Certainty

Incomprehensible Certainty PDF Author: Thomas Pfau
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268202478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1268

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Book Description
Thomas Pfau’s study of images and visual experience is a tour de force linking Platonic metaphysics to modern phenomenology and probing literary, philosophical, and theological accounts of visual experience from Plato to Rilke. Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function—namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

Marion and Theology

Marion and Theology PDF Author: Christina M. Gschwandtner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567660249
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Jean-Luc Marion's early work on Descartes and his more recent writings in phenomenology have not only elicited huge interest in France and the US, but also created huge potential in the field of theology. This book is organised around central questions about the divine raised by Marion's work: how to speak of God, how to approach God, how to experience God, how to receive God, how to believe in God, how to worship God. Within that context it deals with the important aspects of his philosophical work: the inspiration of his writings in what he calls Descartes' "white theology†? and its late medieval context as well as the apophatic theology associated with Dionysius the Areopagite; his important claims about idolatrous and iconic ways of speaking of the divine; his notion of the saturated phenomenon or a phenomenology of revelation and givenness, and his extensive writings on love. Christina M. Gschwandtner also considers Marion's explicitly theological writings and establishes their relationship to his larger phenomenological oeuvre. Overall, it approaches Marion's work not only as a philosophy of religion, but with specifically theological questions in mind. It hence shows how Marion's extensive historical and phenomenological work can be profitable and inspiring for theology today, for both systematic questions and for concerns of spirituality, in a way that holds the theoretical and the practical together.

Research and Development in Expert Systems IX

Research and Development in Expert Systems IX PDF Author: British Computer Society. Specialist Group on Expert Systems. Technical Conference
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521445177
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This volume contains the refereed and invited papers which were presented at Expert Systems 92, the twelfth annual conference of the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on Expert Systems, held in Cambridge in December 1992. Together with its predecessors this is essential reading for those who wish to keep up-to-date with developments and opportunities in this important field.