Einstein,his theories,and his aesthetic considerations

This article deals with the question whether aesthetic considerations affected Einstein in formulating both his theories of relativity. The opinions of philosophers and historians alike are divided on this matter. Thus, Gerald Holton supports the view that Einstein employed aesthetic considerations in formulating his theory of special relativity whereas Jim Shelton opposes it, one of his reasons being that Einstein did not mention such considerations. The other theory, namely, that of general relativity, is discussed by John D. Norton. He asserts that the successful completion of this theory was due to Einstein's adherence to mathematical simplicity resulting from experience, as Einstein himself stated, and not from an aesthetic drive, to which he did not refer. The present work attempts to overcome this deficiency indirectly by investigating Einstein's aesthetic awareness and its consequences for his work. It is found that this awareness was imbedded in his perception of nature and is linked to the criteria (such as simplicity) that guided him in formulating his theories. The conclusion thus reached is that aesthetic considerations did play a role in Einstein's endeavour, contrary to the assertions of Shelton and Norton.     

On the Differences Between Rush Rhees and Simone Weil

Rhees seems unaware that Simone Weil differed from him both in her conception of philosophy and of its relation to religion. She differed also in her view of the relation between religion and science. On her view, the aim of science is to find the laws which will allow us to apply deductive reasoning to nature. The necessities revealed had for her a religious significance. But this can be understood only given her view of the relation between God and the world. On her view, the creation of the world did not involve an extension of God's power. It involved a withdrawal of his power, so that there could be an existence independent of himself. God does not interfere in the details of the world but sustains it through a network of necessities. For this reason, these necessities can serve as a sign of God.     

Chalcedonian Christology and beyond: Luther's understanding of the Communicatio Idiomatum

Luther, Zwingli and Calvin are in full accord with the Chalcedonian definition of Christ as one person in two natures, which are united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly and inseparably. The main point of disagreement among them concerns the usage of the so-called communicatio idiomatum . Luther refers to this mainly in his disputes with other theologians such as Nestorius and Zwingli, whereas when he engages in constructive theology or in biblical interpretation, it seems that he does not use it. He could use it because he found it to be in harmony with his own Christological thinking which, he believed, was rooted in the Bible. The doctrine is, for him, an ontological deduction from the cross and the incarnation. The primary purpose of this article is to see how Luther understood the Christological predication, and only in a limited scope bring him in conversation with Zwingli's and Calvin's understanding. Although the traditional interpretation, that the properties of Christ's two natures are communicated to the concretum of his person, predominates in Luther's thought, he went beyond it, affirming a real communication between the two natures. The logic of his usage of the doctrine of the communication of properties enables Luther to move beyond Chalcedonian understanding of Christology, and also sets him apart from the Reformed tradition. Special attention will be given to Luther's usage of the doctrine in relation to the passibility motif, demonstrating that the human idiomatum of suffering and dying belong to God's very being.     

Locke and Leibniz on Religious Faith

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke maintains that ‘Reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing,’ including matters of religious faith, and this commitment to the primacy of reason is not abandoned in his later religious writings. This essay argues that with regard to the relation between reason and religious faith, Locke is primarily concerned not with evidence, but with consistency, meaning, and how human beings ought to respond to their inclinations, including their inclinations to believe. Leibniz, on the other hand, stakes out an alternative conception of the relationship between faith and reason that assigns to faith the role of a primary truth. For Leibniz, some religious propositions can be believed immediately and without an additional examination and evaluation by reason. The essay maintains that the differences between the two regarding faith and reason are tied to a broader disagreement about how much of the human understanding is due, in Locke's words, to ‘Labour, Attention and Industry’.     

The Greatest Christian Hero, Philosopher, and Poet: Christopher Dawson's Italian Trinity

Christopher Dawson (born 1889), a Catholic scholar and renowned philosophical historian, spent his academic life exploring the relationship of religion, sociology and culture. He believed that without an understanding of religion it is impossible to comprehend the culture of humanity or peoples. His magisterial work, Religion and Culture, established him as an historian's historian. He ended his days as Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, the first Catholic to occupy a chair there.     

The oedipal wound in two stories by Kafka: The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor

Kafka read Freud and was interested in psychoanalysis but believed there was no ‘cure’ for what was essentially the problem of living. As always with creative artists, the writer is his own psychoanalyst, and the actual process of writing is his means of self-revelation. The aim of this paper is to consider, in relation to two stories (The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor), Kafka’s use of this background oedipal conflict with his father or received values (the ‘law’) as a springboard for the type of wound that results in creative writing. The wound for him became a kind of personal myth, and was also associated with other painful stimuli, including his tuberculosis and his troubled love affairs, but above all with his identity as a writer. The writing process and the ‘faith-value’ it demands is an underlying metaphor behind these narratives of Kafka’s ‘dream-like inner life’. There are parallels here with Bion’s psychoanalytic philosophy of ‘suffering’ and ‘psyche-lodgement’.     

Gewalt als Selbstschutz gegen Angst

The article reports on the treatment of a radically right wing young man. His ideology, acts of and inclination to violence and his ownership of weapons, including weapons of war, gave him the feeling of being different from the others and also gave him protection from anxiety, especially the fear of death, and some stability to his fragile ego. In his childhood, he functioned as the object of unfulfilled wishes of his mother, who was a war baby and was unable to empathise his feelings. During treatment, he relived traumatic childhood experiences. His powerful feelings and corresponding countertransference experience, opened ways for a comprehensive understanding of his inclination to violence and to new experiences.     

Pyrrhonism in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

The importance of Pyrrhonism to Hobbes's political philosophy is much greater than has been recognized. He seems to have used Pyrrhonist arguments to support a doctrine of moral relativity, but he was not a sceptic in the Pyrrhonist sense. These arguments helped him to develop his teaching that there is no absolute good or evil; to minimise the purchase of natural law in the state of nature and its restrictions on the right of nature; virtually to collapse natural law into civil law; and to make the sovereign the political, moral and theological epicenter of his political system.     

A Plea against Apologies

What, if anything, gives us the right to ask the victim of our wrongdoing for forgiveness? After some conceptual clarifications, I attempt to lay open a paradoxical structure in apologies. Apologies are made in a spirit of humility: if the offender recognizes his guilt, he will see the victim?s negative emotions towards him as proper and justified. Nevertheless, by begging for forgiveness, he tries to change the victim?s negative feelings towards him. Thus, by apologizing, the offender tries to bring about a state of affairs which, if genuinely repentant and remorseful, he has no reason to want to bring about. In what follows, I examine various attempts to dissolve this paradox. These include offering reasons for apologies that are independent of our wish to alter the victim?s feeling of resentment and construing apologies as expressive or as mixed speech acts. All of these attempts, or so I argue, fail. Some of them fail to provide justificatory reasons for asking for forgiveness, others fall short of explaining why apologies can be accepted or rejected, still others cannot give a convincing account of the relation between remorse and asking for forgiveness or fail to distinguish between redressing a harm and redressing a moral wrong. The upshot of the argument is that an offender who recognizes his own guilt has no rational reason for asking for forgiveness. In many cases, not offering one?s apologies is a sign of taking guilt seriously.     

Albert Einstein and Bernard Lonergan on Empirical Method

In the science–and–theology dialogue, it becomes imperative that theologians develop sophistication in empirical method. Albert Einstein stated that to understand what physicists do we should not listen to what they say but watch what they do. Still, he wrote incisively about method in physics. Theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan developed a methodical approach to theology that was influenced by the natural sciences. I present Einstein's thought on epistemology and the relationship between sense experience and theory. I then turn to Lonergan's understanding of empirical method in the natural sciences, generalized empirical method, and his treatment of Einstein's work.     

“IF I WERE GOD”: EINSTEIN AND RELIGION

Designed as an introductory lecture for the conference “Einstein, God and Time,” this essay provides a brief survey of three sets of relations—between Einstein and time, God and time, and Einstein and God. The question is raised whether Einstein's rejection of absolute time held any implications for theology. It is argued that, despite Einstein's denial and his exemplary caution, the fact that Isaac Newton had associated absolute space and absolute time with a deity who constituted them meant that a revisitation of theological questions was inevitable. Consideration is then given to the time‐lessness and changelessness of God, with a brief reference to eschatological issues. The question whether there might be parallels between the renunciation of Newtonian time by physicists and by Christian theologians is discussed with reference to recent commentary on the eschatological thinking of Jürgen Moltmann. Whether Einstein himself would have sympathized with these theologies is to be doubted, given his antipathy to anthropomorphic and anthropopathic concepts of deity. Finally, in exploring Einstein's sometimes whimsical use of theological language, it becomes necessary to acknowledge that his well‐known affirmation of the complementarity of science and religion rested on a distinctive construction of religion that allowed him to say he was a “deeply religious unbeliever.” Attempts to categorize his convictions, or to appropriate them for conventional theistic purposes, miss their subtlety and their apophatic resonances.     

Elia Kazan’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">America America</Emphasis>: A Message for America

Elia Kazan’s 1963 film, America America is a tribute to the immigrant experience of his own forebears, and has relevance to the refugee crisis of today. In stark black and white cinematography, the film provides insight into the refugee-immigrant experience, personified in Stavros, a young man longing for freedom, obsessed with an idealized America. His hope and innocence cannot safeguard him. His memories of his happy childhood and loving family create idealizing transferences to a world of others who manipulate and betray him as he undertakes his quest. Eventually he too learns to manipulate and betray, unconsciously identifying with the aggressor. History will offer ethical challenges, the black and white cinematography mirroring the black and white perception of good and bad, the shades of grey evoking a maturation of understanding.     

Barry Guitar: Reflections on a career

This is the third in a series of papers that provides an historical record in this journal of contributions made by the most influential figures in the field of fluency disorders. The paper reflects on the long and productive career of Barry Guitar, documenting his outstanding achievements. The paper is based on interviews with him during 2022. Like no one else in our field, Barry Guitar has an understanding of the experience of stuttering and how to cope with it, and, throughout his career, he has used that understanding to inspire others to cope with it.     

II. The origin of Frege's realism

An explanation of Frege's change from objective idealism to platonism is offered. Frege had originally thought that numbers are transparent to reason, but the character of his Axiom of Courses of Values undermined this view, and led him to think that numbers exist independently of reason. I then use these results to suggest a view of Frege's mathematical epistemology.     

Playing with reality

The authors explore the interpersonal aspects of the early development of an experience of external reality and the roots of this experience in primary intersubjectivity. They suggest some implications that this has for psychoanalytic work with the patient's experience of external reality. They argue that the external world is not an independently existing 'given', for the infant to discover, as is sometimes implicitly assumed. Infants acquire knowledge about the world not just through their own explorations of it but by using other minds as teachers. The experience of external reality is invariably shaped through subjectivities. The authors argue that at first the infant assumes that his knowledge is knowledge held by all, that what he knows is known by others and that what is known by others is accessible to him. Only slowly does the uniqueness of his own perspective differentiate so that a sense of mental self can develop. In clinical work we frequently observe the undoing of this process of differentiation, and understanding the underlying mechanisms can be helpful in managing the transference and countertransference consequences when the process has been derailed.     

The question of the other in French phenomenology

I would like to show how with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, we have to do with three different ways of understanding the experience of the other. For Sartre it is a visual experience, the experience of being looked at by the other, so that the experience of the other is understood as a confrontation; for Merleau-Ponty, the experience of the other necessarily implies coexistence and what he calls “intercorporeality,” so that for him the other is never to be found in front, but instead beside me, in reciprocity with me; for Levinas, the experience of the other is the experience of a non-reciprocity, of an assymetrical relation, because the experience of the other is for him an ethical and not an ontological experience, and because this experience of the face of the other is the experience of a speaking and not in the first place corporeal presence. There are consequently three different ways of finding an access to the other : the look for Sartre, intercorporeality for Merleau-Ponty and the face for Levinas.     

Is transference the ‘total situation’?

This paper examines through the detailed explication of analytic material the author's experience of a psychoanalytic and a Jungian way of understanding the interactions between him and his patient. This comparative approach considers where the differences lie with respect to timing and content of interpretations and where the differences are essentially tactical rather than theoretical.     

Kaiho Seiryō on ‘What it is to be a Human Being’

Kaiho Seiryō (1755–1817) is probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships. I examine in this paper the view of human beings that led him to this conclusion. Giving up previous definitions of humans, Seiryō focuses on the faculty of practical reason. While this leads him to recognize a hierarchy of humans, some having more humanity than others, it also allows him to develop the most modern understanding of social relationship available in his time. His radical reinterpretation of what it is to be a human being is all the more remarkable because it was done with the concepts and ideas provided by the Chinese Classics. Establishing new connections, giving new life to ideas that were never exploited, Seiryō showed it was possible to make sense of modernity without using foreign concepts.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">W</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Bold">ang</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Bold">Fuzhi’s Criticism of Buddhism and Its Limitations</Emphasis>

Wang Fuzhi’s 王夫之 remarks on Buddhism have not been given sufficient attention despite increasing research on him. The few works on this topic either focus on just one aspect of his view of Buddhism or fail to disclose the purpose and uniqueness of his attack of it. This essay analyzes his view of Buddhism comprehensively, in particular his insight into the paradox of Buddhist universal love and his rejection of Buddhist retribution and reincarnation from Confucian righteousness and qi 氣-monism. In addition, it also explores the reason, context, and limitations of his criticism, that is, his reaction to the popular approach of “understanding Confucian classics through learning Buddhism” in the late Ming 明, his response to Zongmi’s 宗密 criticism of Confucian cosmology and human nature, and his misunderstanding of some Buddhist concepts. Yet his criticism is still illuminating to our understanding of the interaction of Confucianism with Buddhism and other religions.