Will D. Desmond

ZusammenfassungEs ist eine gängige Praxis ethischer Reflexion, zwischen verschiedenen Systemen moralischer Werte zu unterscheiden und dann die einen gegen die anderen auszuspielen. Im Text wird eine Reflexionsform vorgestellt, die gewissermaßen einen ‚Schritt zurück‘ von derartigen vordergründigen Wertsystemen tritt und stattdessen die Quellen des Ethischen betrachtet, Quellen, die wir in unserer alltäglichen ethischen Praxis oft genug nicht beachten oder für selbstverständlich halten. Zu diesen Quellen oder Potentialen des Ethischen zähle ich das, was ich als das Idiotische, das Ästhetische, das Dianoetische, das Eudaimonische, das Transzendentale, das Transzendierende und das Transzendente bezeichne. Ethische ‚Systeme‘ manifestieren diese Potentiale in der einen oder anderen, je eigenen Ausformung. Die ethischen Potentiale gehen auf mancherlei Wegen in ethische Systeme ein, ohne je ganz in einem einzigen System aufzugehen. Der ‚Schritt zurück‘ ist ein Rückgang auf die vielfältigen Quellen des Ethischen in den Potentialen. Er kann uns auch dabei helfen, etwas über die Zukunft der Ethik zu sagen.

This chapter contains section titled: God First Metaphysical Canto: God Being Over—Being Second Metaphysical Canto: God Being (Over)One Third Metaphysical Canto: God Being Eternal—Surplus to Coming to be Fourth Metaphysical Canto: God Being Incorruptible—Agapeic Constancy Fifth Metaphysical Canto: God Being Impassable—Asymmetrical Agapeics Sixth Metaphysical Canto: God Being Absolute—Absolved Agapeics Seventh Metaphysical Canto: God Being Infinite Eighth Metaphysical Canto: God Being (Over)All—Power Ninth Metaphysical Canto: God Being True—Agapeic (Over)All‐Minding Tenth Metaphysical Canto: God Being (too)Good.

William Desmond - Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.3 362-363 Donald Phillip Verene. Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 264. Cloth, $45.00. This is an outstanding book written with elegance and verve, packed with erudition and delivered with wit. It offers insight into both Joyce and Vico in their distinctiveness and in the mutual light they throw on each other. Verene outlines what is peculiar to his own approach in the following way. In the early part of the twentieth century the influence of Croce on the study of..

© 2016, all rights reserved. The liturgy forms an important motif within Eastern-Orthodox Christian ecotheology. In this article, we will explore the manner in which the notion of the liturgical may be meaningful beyond a theological framework, to interpret certain spiritual experiences within the natural world. The philosophy of Jean-Yves Lacoste and William Desmond will prove key in clarifying different aspects of what will be called a liturgical-metaxological experience of nature. The ontological gratitude, originating from such experiences, may engender transformational processes fostering an ethics of generosity. Ascesis, closely linked to the liturgical, provides insight into the behavioural changes made in view of the communion of being. Together, the liturgical and the ascetic form a dynamics that appears to positively alter the discrepancy between environmental values held and actual behaviour, the so-called value-action gap.

Hegel introduced the Phenomenology of Mind as a work on the problem of knowledge. In the first chapter, entitled “Sense Certainty, or the This and Meaning,” he concluded that knowledge cannot consist of an immediate awareness of particulars ). The tradition discusses sense certainty in terms of this failure of immediate knowledge without, however, specifically addressing the problem of reference. Yet reference is distinct from knowledge in the sense that while there can be no knowledge of objects without reference, there may be reference without knowledge. If that is the case, then the failure of immediate knowledge does not entitle us to conclude anything about the success or failure of reference. It is not surprising, then, that a few scholars have begun to examine sense certainty primarily as a thesis about reference.

Rather than abstracting Augustine’s exploration of time from the whole of the Confessions, as philosophers have been tempted to do, I take up his exploration in terms of what I call a ‘companioning relation’ between philosophy and theology. There is a porosity between religion/theology and philosophy in Augustine that need not be taken as a philosophical or theological deficiency. This reflection speaks of Augustine’s intentions and intuitions in terms of the theme: Wording Time. How might one word this wording, and how might Augustine’s approach to time be thus illuminated? I approach the question in different stages, dealing first with theological, ontological, and psychological considerations. Then I follow the breadth of Augustine’s concerns to a sense of sacred heterogeneities that yet are deeply intimate, and to a sense of time that is in communication with what is above time. In keeping with the musical motif that runs through this reflection, I offer some thoughts on agapē as not only an agapē sonans but an agapē personans. I will sometimes be transcribing Augustine’s themes, sometimes offering variations on them, and sometimes composing improvisations in tune with Augustinian themes.

Dialectic has a plurality of meanings which in some respects define the repertoire of possible ways of thinking offered to us by the philosophical tradition. These meanings range from dialectic’s identification with specious reasoning to a method for dissolving specious reasoning. They include its all but identification with logic, as in the Middle Ages, Kant’s view of dialectic in relation to the critique of illusion, when reason strays into contradiction in treating of transcendental objects. They include the Hegelian notion of dialectic as articulating the process of development in being and in mind. Hegel’s successors, Marx notably, apply dialectic to historical process, as does Hegel himself. Dialectic is viewed with suspicion, both by analytical philosophers who often identify it with specious reasoning, pseudo-thinking, and by many of Hegel’s Continental successors who are critical of its imputed totalistic imperialism, an imperialism also imputed to the entire tradition of metaphysics. There are other senses of dialectic connected to Socratic maieutic, to the description of the highest philosophical thinking in Plato’s Republic, to the diaeretic method of the Sophist.