SCIENCE AND THE FORTUNES OF NATURAL THEOLOGY: SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract. The object is to examine strategies commonly used to heighten a sense of the sacred in nature. It is argued that moves designed to reinforce a concept of Providence have been the very ones to release new opportunities for secular readings. Several case studies reveal this fluidity across a sacred-secular divide. The irony whereby sacred readings of nature would graduate into the secular is also shown to operate in reverse as anti-providentialist strategies invited their own refutation. The analysis is used to support the claim that the sciences have put fewer constraints on religious belief than is generally assumed.     

THE PLACE OF FAITH IN A WORLD OF FACT

Abstract. The relation of religion and science is presented in terms of the interrelationship of domains generated within a reflexive real world concept by status assignment. The domain of religion is articulated by the concepts of ultimacy, totality, and eternity, which are boundary conditions on all status assignments. The domain of science is a status assignment, that of determining the facts and constraints of the real world, and is articulated by the concepts of empiricism, objectivity, and order. The interrelationship of domains is illustrated by examining the concepts of order, disorder, entropy, evil, freedom, creation, and resurrection.     

THE IDEA OF DEFENSE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY THINKING ABOUT JUST WAR

What is, or should be, the role of defense in thinking about the justification of use of armed force? Contemporary just war thinking prioritizes defense as the principal, and perhaps the only, just cause for resorting to armed force. By contrast, classic just war tradition, while recognizing defense as justification for use of force by private persons, did not reason from self‐defense to the justification of the use of force on behalf of the political community, but instead rendered the idea of just cause for resort to force in terms of the sovereign's responsibility to maintain justice, vindicating those who had suffered from injustice and punishing evildoers. This paper moves through three major stages in the historical development of just war thinking, first examining a critical phase in the formation of the classical idea of just cause as the responsibility to maintain justice, then discussing the shift, characteristic of the modern period, to an idea of sovereignty as connected to the state and the prioritization of defense of the state as just cause for use of force, and lastly showing how this conception of the priority of defense became part of the recovery of just war thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper concludes by noting recent changes in thought on international law that tend to emphasize justice at the expense of the right of self‐defense, suggesting that the roots of just war thinking imply the need for a similar rethinking of contemporary just war discourse.     

理性与文化:一个多元化世界中的道德基础争论

近来我聆听了一场有趣的晚餐桌上的辩论,它是在我十几岁的孩子们中间展开的。在我看来,他们的争论点显然提出了与多种合理性相遇这一主题密切相关的问题。在关于肯尼亚原住民发型的对话中,我的儿子本想知道为什么马萨伊人“让”他们的妇女剃光头,而年轻男子却时髦地将头发编成一种已成为非洲女性而不是男性的流行和时尚的发型。我的女儿是一个很有天赋的辩论者,她回答说这仅仅是传统,传统从不回答任何人的“为什么”问题,尤其当提问者仅仅是被期望去实践规范的局内人时。我的儿子显然被挫败了,满脸疑惑。然后,他尽力想知道如果提问的人是像…     

CONSCIENCE, CASUISTRY, AND MORAL DECISION: SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES*

The body of this paper is devoted to tracing out some aspects of the development of the idea of conscience in the Church of England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Surely, it may seem, a subject of limited interest to the readers of this journal! Yet I hope they will find otherwise. I chose to describe this phase of the history of conscience in the West because it illustrates a decisive shift in ideas about conscience which has occurred in many Western cultures besides England's: the belief that the individual ought in many cases to seek the aid of others in forming his moral judgments gives way to the belief that he ought to be self-reliant in such matters. A knowledge of this shift can advance the philosophical understanding of the idea of conscience and the work to be done in the comparative study of conscience 'East'and 'West.'     

DUNS SCOTUS: HIS HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE

This essay offers an attempt to explore the relation of Duns Scotus’ philosophy to modernity and post‐modernity. The latter seems but an advanced version of the former, in which the inseparability of univocity, representation and flattened causal interaction along a single plane becomes more fully realised. One might also contend that according to a post‐Scotist perspective, there is no “modern” phase at all, and so also no “pre‐modern” to which one might nostalgically appeal. Instead, there is a certain middle ages which has never ceased to be dominant. Where, in the midst of all these epochs, which turn out not to be epochs at all, is one to look?     

AN ESSAY ON BEAUTY: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF BEAUTY IN THE NATURAL WORLD

Abstract. The beauty of the universe presented by modern science under the positivist approach is regarded as sufficiently great that human contemplative capabilities are exceeded. An example of bottom-up viewing is presented and described as capable of producing levels of excitement best described as dangerous neurological storms. The existential quiescence resulting from apprehension of so much grandeur is discussed. It is suggested that our religious propensities need extensive rehabilitation and that appreciation of the beauty revealed by the positivists is likely to result in a cosmic paradigm shift that could destabilize traditional views of human identity.     

我国生理心理研究工作的历程及几个基本问题的回顾

新中国成立以来,我国心理学工作者以马列主义、毛泽东思想为指导,对于如何开展科学心理学研究工作,以便更好地为社会主义服务的问题,曾进行过不少的工作和争论。心理活动的生理机制问题,也即生理心理的工作,也是其中之一。本文试图以三十年来的科研实践为基础,对这个领域的工作,作一概略的历史回顾并就有关的几个心理学基本问题加以简要评论。回顾和评论过去是为了展望未来,希望能因此而引起争鸣,促进问题的深入探讨。     

THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM: AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL MEANING IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

The rapid rise of varieties of historicism in Germany, during the mid‐ to late‐nineteenth century, and subsequently in England and America, resulted in a radical transformation of the principles of coherence and methods of analysis within biblical studies. 1 This paper will argue that the foundational ‘subject/object’ metaphysics of historicism has been subverted over the past century. For this reason, historical positivism should no longer be accorded the status of ‘normative paradigm’ and ‘gatekeeper’ over and against other interpretive approaches. This paper next lays out five principles for a renewed practice of historical inquiry. It argues, first, that historical inquiry continues to serve a vital function within biblical studies in its ability to call attention to historical difference, and, thereby, to contribute to a strategy of resistance to ideology and to totalizing theories; second, that the traditional appeal to historical ‘context’ and ‘author’ in the interpretation of texts continues to be a useful practice – despite the provisional and constructed nature of both – as a way of taking into account extra‐lingual reference and of avoiding presentism; third, that the substitution of new ‘grand narratives’ of Christian origins in place of the (quasi‐theological) ‘historical’ narrative of traditional Christianity – under the claim of historical objectivity – should be abandoned because the very concept of ‘origins’ is the result of a literalizing of a metaphor. Such totalizing narratives always reduce history's inherent polycentricism. Fourth, I will argue that the continued use of historicism in the antiquarian attempt to reconstruct the past, disconnected from both a quest for social justice and a desire for personal self‐creation, represents a form of thought that alienates scholars from themselves and from their real material contexts. Finally, and following on the previous point, this paper submits that the practice of historical analysis has an ethical dimension by virtue of the fact that the personhood of the biblical historian is indissolubly linked to other dimensions of life including the social and ethical aspects of life. These added dimensions complicate the making of choices, which is implicit within all practices of interpretation. These five principles are here suggested as points of departure for the reconceptualization of the scope and function of historical inquiry within the discipline of New Testament studies.