Can you explain the kind of determinism that the Stoics proclaimed, and maybe compare/contrast to the kind of determinism associated with Newtonian physics? Also, how did the Stoics' determinism imply the impossibility of not doing a specific action?
I don't know much about the Stoic understanding of determinism. As far as I know, it was not so different from the post-Newtonian one. That version was given its definitive version by Laplace, who said that if there were a being capable of knowing, in every detail, the state of the universe at a given time, then that being would be able to predict its state at every subsequent time. In other words, the state of the universe is always simply a function of its previous state (and the laws that determine how it moves from one to the other).
Now as far as I know the Stoics didn't produce a definition quite like that; but they did think that the future is "fixed", as it were, by the present and the past. Human actions are simply part of the causal network of the universe and cannot act upon it from outside, as it were. So we are fated to do what we do and we couldn't do otherwise. Someone used the image of a dog tied to a cart that is rolling downhill; the dog can run alongside the cart willingly, or it can try to resist and be dragged down; but that dog is going down the hill no matter what it does. So the lesson is to embrace your destiny and learn to be happy with what you've got, not try to change things. Of course, your own efforts are part of the system of causes that bring about the future. The idea isn't that you can just sit back and do nothing and let fate do its thang. That's the "lazy reason" which some people deduced from Stoicism. But in fact the idea isn't that fate is some kind of determining thing distinct from your own actions; rather, your actions are an important cause of what will happen to you in the future, but your actions are themselves determined just like everything else.
Now the Platonists argued that this destroyed morality, on the assumption that, for an act to be morally significant, you must have had the ability not to do it. I don't think they ever really argued for that assumption. And even if we grant it, I'm not sure that it really works. Because a Stoic could reply that, whatever you do, you always have the
ability not to do it; it's just that you are predetermined not to exercise that ability.
Well, as Perfection says, you should always read the OP. It's rather rude to say disparaging things about the subject of a thread without even bothering to see what the opener of the thread actually says!
I find it in all narrative writing on the subject of history just plainly as what it is-a narrative of the author who have constructed it.
It's not
just that though. To say that the writing of history is nothing other than the writing of the author's prejudices is as extreme as to say that no historical writing ever involves the author's prejudices. It's an engagement between the author and whatever events they purport to describe. No historian can ignore reality any more than they can fully escape their own prejudices. If you don't see that then you have no means of distinguishing between the writing of history and the writing of novels. And it seems from what you've already said that you don't really believe that all history is nothing but the prejudices of its author. You talked about the Carolingian renaissance, reformation of the monasteries, etc. Presumably you got your knowledge of these events from reading historical accounts that you consider to contain some sort of historical truth, otherwise you would dismiss them as pure fiction.
I wouldn't say hermeneutics due to the fact that concept is not attractive to me but i have to concede your point that you brilliantly executed.-that is,yes,i believe that any attempt to understand authors (the medieval man)from a completely alien culture that is substantially different than ours is not possible.
If you really think that the writings of Homer, Plato, Cicero, Caesar, Augustine, Dante, and all the rest are really completely incomprehensible, and that we have no chance whatsoever of understanding or appreciating a single thing that any of them ever said, then I'm not sure how to respond to that except that it seems to be blatently false. There is, for example, a massive quantity of scholarly literature today devoted to understanding and explainig Aristotle. Are all those scholars completely wasting their time simply because you've ruled, as a sort of inviolable principle, that ancient authors cannot be understood at all?
This is quite apart from the fact that hermeneutics is a perfectly respectable discipline in its own right. I think that just ruling it impossible as a matter of principle is demonstrably wrong, given that there are plenty of people who do it.
Of course ancient or medieval culture is different and we have to understand that culture in order to sympathise with their outlook to the extent necessary to understand them on their own terms. But that's not impossible, even though sometimes it may be hard. You talk of a "completely alien" culture, but neither ancient nor medieval culture was completely alien. They were still human beings and the fundamental similarities between them and us remain even when the cultures are very different.
To put the point a different way, do you think that people from different cultures today are capable of understanding each other? Modern Japanese culture is no less different from modern European culture than medieval European culture is. Does that mean that I don't have the slightest chance of understanding any Japanese book or film, or that I can never talk to a Japanese person without complete incomprehension?
I was only using the example of my limited knowledge of authors before the Italian renaissance.Probably later(hopefully maybe from your enlighten endorsement) I will find the inspiration to learn these said authors that you mentioned.
No doubt, but that doesn't really answer the point, which is that even historical theology isn't devoted solely to the work of people from many centuries ago.
Ok.How about i introduce you a particular essay from Thomas Nagel "What is it like to be a bat" to demostrate in more better and sophisticated manner that i am trying to make:
So in conclusion of what Mr.Nagel is saying and what i am try to provide is a method on how we can
know what a medieval man really is?-What is it like for a medieval man to be a medieval man,not what me or you to be what these authors are in days that are long forgotten?
link:
http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html
Now if you'd read the OP then you'd know I'm doing a PhD in philosophy, so it's just a tad insulting to suggest that you're "introducing" me to one of the most famous papers in modern philosophy... But Nagel's musings on bathood are meant to illuminate the mind-body problem, and are based on the fact that bats are fundamentally alien creatures with a totally different way of sensing and interacting with the world. That is not true of ancient or medieval human beings, who are biologically identical to us. The only differences between us and them are cultural. Thus, what Nagel says about bats is totally irrelevant to the point at issue.
I beg to differ.It is metaphysical,it is just that the language of its form that have been modified but it is still the same.
I'm afraid you're just wrong. Theology is not just about doctrine.
Interesting.Care to share on some of their points on how to do that?
Probably the most well-known figure to attempt this is Don Cupitt. Here's something I wrote on Cupitt and the background to his views recently:
In 1994, an Anglican priest named Anthony Freeman lost his job when the bishop of Chichester withdrew his licence. The case made the national headlines for the reason for Freemans dismissal was that he had written a book arguing that God does not exist as an objective being. Rank-and-file church members were not the only people to be shocked: even those outside the church who heard the story were puzzled for what sort of vicar doesnt believe in God?
Freeman enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the only priest to be dismissed in the Church of England on doctrinal grounds in the twentieth century. But he was not alone. Christian atheism may seem an oxymoron, but it has been a small but vocal presence within the church for the past half a century.
Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead in the 1880s; but it was only in the 1960s that people really took notice. This was the decade when a number of trends and ideas came together to form the movement of radical theology within the church. In particular, three German theologians wielded enormous influence during this time. The first was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been executed by the Nazis in 1945. In his prison cell, Bonhoeffer had mused upon the role of the church in the world, and the nature of its faith; he had suggested that Christianity needed to engage with contemporary culture at its heart rather than skulking on the sidelines in a world of its own. He used the intriguing phrase religionless Christianity to express this idea. Equally important was Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most prominent German theologians of the twentieth century, who achieved the rare distinction of pre-eminence in both biblical studies and doctrinal theology. Bultmann believed that the message of the New Testament was of enduring value, but the language and ideas in which that message was expressed were not. He argued that we have to distinguish between the message and the medium. For example, people in the first century lived in a mythological framework: they believed in angels and demons, and in a heaven above their heads as well as a hell below their feet. People today do not believe such things. But the Gospel, preached by the first-century Christians, does not depend upon the existence of such things, even though the first Christians inevitably spoke about them. The task of theology is therefore to demythologise the New Testament, to look beyond the mythological trappings and extract the real message, which can be translated into terms that modern people can understand. Bultmann believed that the language of existential philosophy provided the best way of doing this. This was a view he shared with the third major German theologian, Paul Tillich. Like the other two, Tillich had clashed with the Nazis in the 1930s; he had fled to the United States, where he did most of his important work. His Systematic theology, published between 1951 and 1963, was one of the most influential Christian books of the twentieth century. Like Bultmann, Tillich sought to express Christianity in language taken from existentialism. He argued that God himself is simply pure Being. On this view, it is wrong to say God exists since that would make God out to be just one existing thing among others rather, God is existence itself, what makes possible the fact that anything exists.
In the 1940s and 50s, these ideas remained the preserve of experts. Few people especially in the English-speaking world were in the habit of reading the works of German academic theologians. But this began to change when Bonheoffers Letters and papers from prison was published in 1953: people read his book because of the moving insight it offered into the mind of a man doomed to die for his principles, but they also read his views on how the role and perhaps the belief of the church had to change. Ten years later, the views of Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and Tillich became widely known with the publication of John Robinsons Honest to God. This small book, mostly a study of these theologians ideas together with suggestions about how traditional Christian doctrines should be modified in the modern world, was enormously popular and controversial. Its author, an Anglican bishop, became a notorious celebrity, and the book itself was probably the most widely read work of theology of the twentieth century. Many were shocked that a bishop could say such things, but many others were inspired too. For these ideas became widespread at a time when the church itself was experiencing something of a crisis throughout the western world. For a variety of reasons, the 1960s was a time when many people questioned the old religious verities: church attendance began to drop, and it continued to do so throughout most of Europe and Canada in the decades which followed. If any single decade saw the transformation of the west from a predominantly Christian society to a predominantly secular one, it was the 1960s. Little wonder than many Christians felt that Christianity itself had to change or perish. And many other Christians felt that such an attitude was extremely dangerous, a symptom of the dangerous times in which they were living. So there was a series of theological controversies, where theologians and other Christians called for the re-interpretation of traditional doctrines, and their conservative opponents denounced them. The huge row over Honest to God was one; another revolved around Lloyd Geering, a biblical scholar and minister in the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand. He suggested that Jesus resurrection was not a bodily one, and found himself called to what was in effect a heresy trial before the General Assembly of his church. The charges against him were dismissed, but the controversy continued to rumble on.
[Cut out a bit on Thomas Altizer here, since he is a metaphysician of sorts.]
One of the most influential radical Christians since Thomas Altizer has been the Cambridge theologian Don Cupitt. In his 1984 BBC TV series and book The sea of faith, Cupitt argued that a non-realist view of God was actually the most authentically Christian one. He took his title from the poem Dover beach by Matthew Arnold, which likened Christianity to waves breaking on a beach: it alternately advances and retreats. In his book, Cupitt traced some of the ways in which traditional Christianity had been forced to retreat in recent centuries and suggested the way in which the religion might advance once more. In his view, belief in an objective God has little to do with true religious character. He cites the example of Descartes and Pascal: Descartes had no doubt that God objectively existed, and even provided several proofs that he did but he did not live in a notably religious way. Pascal, by contrast, sought the God of the heart, not of the head: he believed in a God who is lived rather than known. Belief in God isnt about accepting that a certain set of statements (such as There exists an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being) to be true; it is about living in a certain kind of way.
In recent centuries the factual or descriptive elements of belief have been steadily whittled away, until nothing serious is left of them. When the purge is complete, we see that spirituality is everything. Doctrines that used to be regarded as describing supernatural facts are now seen as prescribing a supernatural mode of existence. Disagreements between different religions and philosophies of life are not disagreements about what is the case, but disagreements about ways of constituting human existence, disagreements about forms of consciousness and moral policies. The sea of faith p. 263
His conclusion is simple. Religion including Christianity is fundamentally about ethics. The other elements of religion, such as doctrine, are actually reflections of this basic concern.
The way we construct our world, and even the way we constitute our own selves, depends on the set of values to which we commit ourselves. Our preferences reveal what we are, and are reflected in the world we establish around ourselves. The outer world reflects the inner, and the constitution of both is ultimately ethical. In many world-views metaphysics comes first, and then ethics finds a place as best it can: but the truth is rather the other way round. Ethics comes first; and religion is our way of representing to ourselves, and renewing our commitment to, the complex of moral and spiritual values through which we shape our world, constitute ourselves, gain our identity and give worth to our lives. The sea of faith p. 269
Rather than believing a set of propositions, and then behaving as they tell us to do, we behave in a certain way and then construct the propositions to reflect this. For example, it is not the case that we behave in a loving way because we have been taught that God is love rather, we say that God is love because we believe we should behave in a loving way. In fact, that is what the statement means. In other words, the word God does not refer to some entity floating about in the sky. It is a symbol that reflects what we most value. As we saw earlier, the logical positivists rejected theism partly on the basis of Wittgensteins early theory of language. But Cupitt rejects the traditional interpretation of theism partly on the basis of Wittgensteins later theory of language for Wittgenstein came to believe that the meaning of a word is simply a matter of how we use it. If we apply this to religious matters, then the real question, Cupitt suggests, is not whether we believe that God exists; it is what the word God means to us.
God (and this is a definition) is the sum of our values, representing to us their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power. Mythologically, he has been portrayed as an objective being, because ancient thought tended to personify values in the belief that important words must stand for things... The view that religious belief consists in holding that a number of picturesque propositions are descriptively true is encouraged by the continuing grip on peoples minds of a decadent and mystifying dogmatic theology. In effect I am arguing that for the sake of clarity it should be discarded entirely, and replaced by the practice of religion ethics and spirituality and the philosophy of religion. Then religion can become itself again, with a clear conscience at last. The sea of faith pp. 269-270
In The sea of faith, Cupitt hints at a position that he would work out more clearly in his later books, one of quite radical non-realism. On his view, it is not only God who exists solely as a construct of human language so does everything. We live in a world made of words, and the way that these words function is solely determined by how we use them. So if God is just a word, there is nothing surprising about that, because so is everything else.
Cupitts ideas seem not to get discussed much in academic theological circles, but they have proved popular in some quarters: indeed, there is a Sea of faith movement which draws its inspiration from him and other radical theologians. Like Anthony Freeman, they tend to be well-educated priests and laymen rather than academics.
That it is silly to me.I can't help thinking of that.It is just what i instinctively feel that it is wrong all-together.
So you're saying that it wrong for people from one intellectual or cultural tradition to adopt ideas or methods from another? Why? Doesn't this happen all the time?
They did started the practice,or do you beg to differ?
I think the Chinese and the Indians would certainly beg to differ. However, this is completely irrelevant. So what if the philosophical method was first devised by pagan Greeks? It doesn't follow that pagan Greeks are the only people allowed to use it. English was invented by the English but I see plenty of non-English people writing in it on this very forum, and I don't mind.
ALWAYS READ THE OP!
(Plot, I have not forgotten our debate, at some point I will make a more suitable venue where we can delve into this interesting mess)
That's good - give me the link when you do so I don't miss it.
Wild question:
Did any Islamic religious ideas ever diffuse into Christianity?
It's very hard to tell. There was certainly some diffusion the other way, though the details are not clear. Muhammad himself seems to have been influenced, to at least some degree, by Monophysite Christianity, which was the dominant form of Christianity among the Arabs in the seventh century. There are other intriguing similarities: for example, the title "Seal of the prophets", applied by Muslims to Muhammad, was first used by the Christian theologian Tertullian to refer to Christ.
There are only two major possible influences of doctrine from Islam to Christianity that I can think of. The first is iconoclasm. The caliph Iezid II, who reigned from 720-724, ordered the destruction of all Christian images in his domains not because they were Christian, but because they broke the Koran's prohibition of all representational art. This was immediately before the beginning of the iconoclasm controversy in Byzantium, which began in 724, when two Anatolian bishops complained to the patriarch of Constantinople that icons were idolatrous; in 725, the emperor Leo III proclaimed himself in favour of this view (for unknown reasons) and proceed to have icons throughout the empire destroyed. Now it's not known if Christian iconoclasm was influenced by the Muslim attitude towards images in general, but certainly the dates are suspiciously close together.
The other possible influence, which I actually think is a lot less likely, is the fundamentalist attitude to the Bible. Muslims, as we know, are "people of the Book" and regard the Koran as quite literally divinely written, to such an extent that even the language in which it is written is believed to be holy in virtue of that fact. For most of their history, Christians have not had such an attitude to the Bible. But in the last two hundred years, Christian fundamentalism has developed a view of the Bible not unlike that of Muslims to the Koran. Thus we find, for example, west African Muslims and west African Christians saying exactly the same things about their respective holy books. However, I don't think this is really a matter of influence. I think that the development of fundamentalist biblicism can be understood wholly as the result of factors within evangelical Christianity and developments in western culture to which some evangelicals reacted. But I suspect that the increasing contact between Christians and Muslims, especially in areas like west Africa over the past century, has reinforced this development.
but you are right,that it is your assumption and not mine ,of course you are not shy of telling me from the assumption that you just supposed that i was assuming.
