A Profound Ignorance

A Profound Ignorance PDF Author: Ephraim Radner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481310796
Category : Holy Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Charts the rise of pneumatology alongside developments in modern history and proposes an alternate doctrine of the Spirit to address perennial existential questions"--

A Profound Ignorance

A Profound Ignorance PDF Author: Ephraim Radner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481310796
Category : Holy Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"Charts the rise of pneumatology alongside developments in modern history and proposes an alternate doctrine of the Spirit to address perennial existential questions"--

Profound Ignorance

Profound Ignorance PDF Author: David Lawrence Levine
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149850177X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city’s condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, “the greatest sickness of the soul.” He thereby is able to “foresee” their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom. Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast, shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way, the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the process, Levine brings us to see Plato’s extended apologia or defense of Socrates as “a teacher of tyrants” and his counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought to see how such “value judgments” are possible, how Plato conceives the prospects for practical judgment (phronȇsis). In addition we witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further, is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author’s inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates. The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne needs to be resumed.

The Virtues of Ignorance

The Virtues of Ignorance PDF Author: Bill Vitek
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813138760
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Human dependence on technology has increased exponentially over the past several centuries, and so too has the notion that we can fix environmental problems with scientific applications. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this hubristic, shortsighted, and dangerous worldview. The contributors argue that uncritical faith in scientific knowledge has created many of the problems now threatening the planet and that our wholesale reliance on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. Bill Vitek, Wes Jackson, and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer profound arguments for the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore this philosophy from numerous perspectives, including its origins, its essence, and how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for posterity. All conclude that we must simply accept the proposition that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will. Rejecting the belief that science and technology are benignly at the service of society, the authors argue that recognizing ignorance might be the only path to reliable knowledge. They also uncover an interesting paradox: knowledge and insight accumulate fastest in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview, for by examining the alternatives to a technology-based culture, they expand their imaginations. Demonstrating that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful, The Virtues of Ignorance looks closely at the relationship between the land and the future generations who will depend on it. The authors argue that we can never improve upon nature but that we can, by putting this new perspective to work in our professional and personal lives, live sustainably on Earth.

The End of Ignorance

The End of Ignorance PDF Author: John Mighton
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373444
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A revolutionary call for a new understanding of how people learn. The End of Ignorance conceives of a world in which no child is left behind—a world based on the assumption that each child has the potential to be successful in every subject. John Mighton argues that by recognizing the barriers that we have experienced in our own educational development, by identifying the moment that we became disenchanted with a certain subject and forever closed ourselves off to it, we will be able to eliminate these same barriers from standing in the way of our children. A passionate examination of our present education system, The End of Ignorance shows how we all can work together to reinvent the way that we are taught.

The Way of Ignorance

The Way of Ignorance PDF Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458772497
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The continuing war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the political sniping engendered by the Supreme Court nominations, Terry Schiavo - contemporary American society is characterized by divisive anger, profound loss, and danger. Wendell Berry, one of the country's foremost cultural critics, addresses the menace, responding with hope and intelligence in a series of essays that tackle the major questions of the day. Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the ''free market'' or ''free enterprise?'' What is really involved in our National Security? What is the price of ownership without affection? Berry answers in prose that shuns abstraction for clarity, coherence, and passion, giving us essays that may be the finest of his long career.

Ignorance

Ignorance PDF Author: Robert Graef
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1633883213
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Sums up the many fields of study where ignorance can undermine our understanding, while showing how an awareness of ignorance can lead to exploration and the discovery of new knowledge.The flip side of knowledge is ignorance. This book explores the vast scope of ignorance, even in an age when we think we know more than ever before. By marking off this ocean of ignorance into manageable categories, the author provides a kind of navigational chart to the unknown, and a series of red flags to all those who claim certitude. The book first lays out the many branches of ignorance--in education, the media, politics, religion, science, and other major institutions. It then assesses the costs and consequences of that ignorance. World conflicts, endemic poverty, environmental damage, waste, racism, and the manipulative forces of industry and politics that use propaganda to manipulate the public may all be seen as rooted in ignorance.But there are positive aspects of ignorance as well. Scientists and artists, by recognizing what they don't know, are spurred on to new creative approaches and discoveries, which would never be found by those too comfortable with the tried and true. The author cites Socrates, whom the Delphic Oracle declared to be the wisest of all people simply because he realized how much he didn't know. This book gives you ways to follow in the path that Socrates forged, to counter the closed minds whose false sense of certainty cannot help but distort reality, and to be better prepared to take on even the most serious challenges of today.

Ignorance

Ignorance PDF Author: Stuart Firestein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199939330
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. And it is ignorance--not knowledge--that is the true engine of science. Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, says Firestein, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. The process is more hit-or-miss than you might imagine, with much stumbling and groping after phantoms. But it is exactly this "not knowing," this puzzling over thorny questions or inexplicable data, that gets researchers into the lab early and keeps them there late, the thing that propels them, the very driving force of science. Firestein shows how scientists use ignorance to program their work, to identify what should be done, what the next steps are, and where they should concentrate their energies. And he includes a catalog of how scientists use ignorance, consciously or unconsciously--a remarkable range of approaches that includes looking for connections to other research, revisiting apparently settled questions, using small questions to get at big ones, and tackling a problem simply out of curiosity. The book concludes with four case histories--in cognitive psychology, theoretical physics, astronomy, and neuroscience--that provide a feel for the nuts and bolts of ignorance, the day-to-day battle that goes on in scientific laboratories and in scientific minds with questions that range from the quotidian to the profound. Turning the conventional idea about science on its head, Ignorance opens a new window on the true nature of research. It is a must-read for anyone curious about science.

Form and Reason

Form and Reason PDF Author: Edward C. Halper
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791415818
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book uses the study of philosophical texts to raise and explore metaphysical issues. On one level, each essay addresses a scholarly issue in a classical text, often a text of Aristotle's. On a deeper level, the issues Halper considers are metaphysical. However, unlike thinkers who have brought linguistic analysis and contemporary metaphysical notions to these texts, Halper approaches them to find their formulations of issues and their strategies of pursuit. Halper is not concerned with the defense of metaphysical commitments but with finding and exploring paths of metaphysical inquiry. The essays in this volume are exploratory and exegetical rather than decisive. Their contribution to metaphysics lies in the issues they raise, the methods they explore, and their conception of metaphysics as a discipline rooted in philosophical problems.

Ignorance

Ignorance PDF Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
“Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World “Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence “their memories no longer match.” We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Perspectives on Ignorance from Moral and Social Philosophy

Perspectives on Ignorance from Moral and Social Philosophy PDF Author: Rik Peels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317369548
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This edited collection focuses on the moral and social dimensions of ignorance—an undertheorized category in analytic philosophy. Contributors address such issues as the relation between ignorance and deception, ignorance as a moral excuse, ignorance as a legal excuse, and the relation between ignorance and moral character. In the moral realm, ignorance is sometimes considered as an excuse; some specific kind of ignorance seems to be implied by a moral character; and ignorance is closely related to moral risk. Ignorance has certain social dimensions as well: it has been claimed to be the engine of science; it seems to be entailed by privacy and secrecy; and it is widely thought to constitute a legal excuse in certain circumstances. Together, these contributions provide a sustained inquiry into the nature of ignorance and the pivotal role it plays in the moral and social domains.