ON A PARADOX OF CHRISTIAN LOVE

The two love commands attributed to Jesus clearly show the basic feature of Christianity as a “religion of love.” However, it may be argued that there is conflict between these commands, so that the Christian idea of love confronts a deep paradox: on the one hand, it takes loving God as the ultimate foundation of loving one's neighbor and loving one's neighbor as the perfect manifestation of loving God. On the other hand, it gives supremacy to loving God over loving one's neighbor, with the result that, in cases of conflict, Christianity has to sacrifice loving one's neighbor to loving God and thus to negate the second great command by the first.     

A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE BIOLOGICAL SCENE

Abstract. The interaction of scientific, ethical, and theological concerns raises several distinct but related problems of continuity and discontinuity. The theologian's task is to articulate a unifying vision of God and the world. He must do justice to the discontinuities which exist between the sociobiological and the ethical points of view, but he cannot accept them as ultimate. Within his own discipline he is already confronted with analogous problems of continuity and discontinuity, for example, between creation and redemption. Concepts associated with love, such as freedom, risk, and patience, may prove more persuasive and coherent than concepts associated with omnipotence.     

SOME THOUGHTS ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ETHICS

The author attempts to establish a framework for understanding the contribution of psychoanalysis to ethics through examining the work of certain philosophers, especially Kant. After reviewing the development of Freudian thought and going beyond the ‘psychoanalysis and/or psychiatry?’ question, he asserts that the space of the psychoanalytical cure revolves around an ethical problem. Thus, the limits of analysis should be determined by the subject's capacity for developing a structure of belief in the unconscious, with the concomitant capacity to go beyond equivocation in respect of an ethical conflict that underlies all cases where psychical suffering is manifested. Indeed, only human beings are called upon to deal with an ethical paradox “equally a logical one”which could be stated thus: there is Good in Evil and Evil in Good. This ethical paradox is the consequence of human subjection to the constituent laws of the Oedipus complex, which distances the human being, in his/her dealings with Evil and with Good, from any naturalist stance. In respect of the cure, then, we must take into account that Evil does not proceed from any particular drive‐based characteristic, but is rather the expression of specific subjection to an unconscious Other, towards which it directs its affects. Finally, the author proposes a principle that emerges from the preceding discussion: let us not impute to or place in the Other our own subjective splitting or pain at existing.     

和内省有关的几个问题

本文指出内省有各种各样的,不宜不加区别地赞成或反对内省。一直受到批评的只是古典内省,而这种内省在铁钦纳1927年逝世以后,在实验室中已经无人使用。现在还经常使用的内省,如被试对刺激的评价或判断等,包括激进的行为主义者在内,从来没人反对过,并且已成为心理实验的惯例。作者认为被试只能报告他心理过程的结果,要求他报告出心理过程本身实际上是不可能的。如果在赞成和反对哪种内省方面没有重大分歧,可否采取求同存异的原则,对其它枝节问题先放一放,等到新的事实累积多些时,再来讨论这个问题?     

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF KARL CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH KRAUSE'S PANENTHEISM

Panentheism is an often‐discussed alternative to Classical theism, and almost any discussion of panentheism starts by way of acknowledging Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) as the person who coined the term.¹ However, apart from this tribute, Krause's own panentheism is almost completely unknown. In what follows, I first present a brief overview of Krause's life and correct some misconceptions of his work before I turn to the core ideas of Krause's own panentheistic system of philosophy. In brief, Krause elaborates a scientific holism that is anchored in intellectual intuition of the Absolute as the one principle of being and recognition. The task of philosophical speculation consequently is twofold: the analytic‐ascending part of philosophy proceeds by way of transcendental reflection and according to Krause enables us to obtain intellectual intuition. The synthetic‐descending part of philosophy starts by way of showing that science as a whole is an explication of the original union of the Absolute as apprehended in intellectual intuition. Once this is achieved, Krause argues that the emerging philosophy of science is most adequately referred to as “panentheism” since everything is what it is “in and through” the Absolute, while the Absolute itself is not reducible to anything in particular. I end by showing how to relate Krause's panentheism to recent philosophical discussion.     

THIRD THOUGHTS ON GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ANTISEMITISM

The last forty years have seen an explosion of scholarly writings on the subject of German and Austrian antisemitism, in contrast to the paucity of such publications in the preceding decades. While some interpretations, like those derived from Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, have declined in favour, there has been an increase in sophisticated studies of local developments and of the role of antisemitism in party political, associational and cultural life. This has resulted in a much better understanding of the temporal, geographical and ideological fluctuations of antisemitic sentiment, and of its general place in the political development of Germany and Austria.1     

JEFFREY STOUT ON DEMOCRACY AND ITS CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN CRITICS

Jeffrey Stout addresses two of the main criticisms of liberal democracy by its contemporary neotraditionalist Christian critics: that liberal democracy is destructive of social tradition, and thereby of virtue in the citizenry, and that liberal democracy is inherently secular, committed to expunging religious voices from the public arena. I judge that Stout effectively answers these charges: liberal democracy has its own tradition, it cultivates the virtues relevant to that, and it is not inherently hostile to piety. What Stout does not do, I suggest, is take the next step of showing, positively, that Christianity can and should affirm the substance of liberal democratic society. This is due, in good measure, to the fact that Stout never tells us, except in off‐hand comments, what he takes the substance of liberal democracy to be. And this, in turn, is due to his way of employing pragmatism: he uses pragmatism to give an account of human society generally, not of liberal democratic society. I raise some questions about the general account that pragmatism gives of human society, and thus about the account that it would give of liberal democracy.     

ON THE TENACITY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI‐JUDAISM1

Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son and Spirit demonstrated that the supersessionist gambit Christianity had introduced against Judaism is a logic any successor can employ. Modernity (cf. modo, “now”) is constituted by a relentless supersessionist logic; the modern issue is less supersessionism than a conflict of supersessionisms. Christianity has repeatedly overspiritualized God's “bodily covenant” with Israel (Wyschogrod). This distortive tendency is intensified in modernity by Christianity's anxiety that it too will appear old/“Jewish” vis‐à‐vis a new New Testament of infinite spiritual freedom (cf. Romanticism.) One corrective would be for Christianity to return to a more Jewish understanding of election.     

孔子教学过程的心理学思想初探

本文根据普通心理学的结构和教育心理学的内容,对孔子的教学过程进行了心理学的分析和整理。全文分认识心理学思想、情感心理学思想、意志心理学思想和个性心理学思想四大部分。试图较为系统地探究孔子教学过程中的心理学思想遗产。     

ASTROTHEOLOGY: ON EXOPLANETS,CHRISTIAN CONCERNS,AND HUMAN HOPES

Are there planets beyond our solar system? What may appear quite plausible now had only been a hypothesis until about twenty years ago. The search for exoplanets is driven by the interest in the “habitable” ones among them. Could such planets one day in the far future provide resources or even shelter for humankind? Will we find one day a habitable planet that is even inhabited? These kinds of imaginative speculations drive public interest in the subject. Imagining alien intelligent life in the universe is not at all new. When Ted Peters called for establishing the field of “astrotheology,” he was certainly thinking less of historical precedents than of something analogous to the emerging field of astrobiology. Will astrotheology result in the decentering of humanity in cosmic dimensions? One could also conclude that we are alone, at least for all practical purposes.