The Breadth of Glory: A Trinitarian Eschatology for the Earth through Critical Engagement with Hans Urs von Balthasar

This article asks to what extent non-human creatures might share in eschatological promises of wonder in the mode of glory understood in a trinitarian perspective. Widening Hans Urs von Balthasar's notion of theodrama raises important theological questions about the meaning and significance of creation. Balthasar portrays creation as imago Trinitatis . I argue that the way he envisages trinitarian notions of difference, sexuality and freedom is anthropocentric and androcentric, straining his analogy of being between creator and created. I propose a more qualified trinitarian eschatology that is more modest in its epistemological claims, but more inclusive in relation to creaturely beings.     

Nietzsche on Honesty and the Will to Truth

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche values intellectual honesty, but is dubious about what he calls the will to truth. This is puzzling since intellectual honesty is a component of the will to truth. In this paper, I show that this puzzle tells us something important about how Nietzsche conceives of our pursuit of truth. For Nietzsche, those who pursue truth occupy unstable ground, since being honest about the ultimate reasons for that pursuit would mean that truth could no longer satisfy the important human needs it satisfies at present. We can pursue truth, or be honest about what in us is served by such a pursuit, but not both. Nietzsche aims to show that understanding and owning up to this instability is the sort of affirmation of human life to which we ought to aspire, and is the price we pay for being free from otherworldly morality.     

The Internal Logic of Holy Saturday in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Abstract:  While consensus reigns that Balthasar's theology of Christ's descent into hell on Holy Saturday constitutes both the center of his theology and his most significant innovation on the tradition, the question remains open whether that innovation marks a true development on this theologoumenon or a radical departure from it. This article argues for the former alternative by drawing on all those elements in the history of theology, both Catholic and Protestant, that point to an increasing – indeed inevitable – radicalization of this doctrine. Then, using the norms set forth by Cardinal Newman's Essay on Development , it shows how Balthasar's 'innovations' meet Newman's criteria for authentic development.     

‘Are you a woman—or a flower?’: The capacity to experience beauty1

Being surprised by beauty, being drawn to and moved by it and surrendering to its sensory nature are all part of beauty's emotionally transformative power. And yet, psychoanalysis has had little to say about such an enriching dimension of psychological life. The author highlights how experiencing beauty is a capacity that is not isolated but is part of the lifelong experience of being changed by and changing the experience of the world we live in. She suggests that the capacity to experience beauty takes different forms at distinct points in development and in psychoanalytic treatments. The author describes two clinical occasions from a case where an analytic pair struggled to develop a greater capacity to experience beauty over time. She discusses how a theory of the aesthetic conflict was useful in helping to understand her patient's inner object world but was not sufficient when it came to understanding the experience of beauty. She shows how for both patient and analyst, experiencing beauty's full effect required responding to the call toward emotional life, surrendering to the surprise and the unknown, and letting go of the mind's struggle to find meaning and opening up to transforming and being transformed through sensory experience.     

THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: RETHINKING THE ROLE OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN THE THEOLOGY OF HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

Sexual difference plays a pivotal role in Balthasar's thought, as an analogy for the Trinity and as an analogy for the relation between Christ and the church. This essay examines the influence of the analogy of being on his interpretations of these analogies, his understanding of created masculinity, and his use of the language of sexual difference for the Holy Spirit. Ultimately many of Balthasar's best insights about human love as an analogy for divine love can be retained without connecting femininity uniquely with creation, and his trinitarian theology provides the best interpretive key for doing so.     

DIVINE GLORY IN A DARWINIAN WORLD

Faced with the ambiguities of this world, in which ugliness and suffering co‐exist with beauty, the article rejects the attribution of disvalues to a Fall‐event. Instead it faces God's involvement even in violence and ugliness. It explores the concept of divine glory, understood principally as a sign of the divine reality. This includes both the great theophanies of the Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ glorification in his Passion and Crucifixion. It then considers the contemplation of the natural world, using the terminology of “inscape” and “instress.” Divine glory can be discerned even in events as tragic as the Indian Ocean tsunami or the activity of the malarial mosquito. A full Christian contemplation of these events will include scientific understanding and poetic apprehension, and consideration of soteriology and eschatology as well as the theology of creation. Glory is understood to include God's power and sovereignty, and also the divine humility and sacrifice.     

RE-ASSESSING THE MEANING OF THOUGHT: HANS URS VON BALTHASAR'S RETRIEVAL OF GREGORY OF NYSSA

[In order to counter the dominance of subjectivity in modern German philosophy since Kant, the young Hans Urs von Balthasar appealed to the theocentric epistemology of Gregory of Nyssa. By means of a study of Balthasar's Présence et Pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse , the purpose of this essay will be to elucidate Balthasar's interpretation of the meaning and orientation of thought according to Gregory of Nyssa's epistemology. After an initial presentation of Balthasar's contention that for Gregory of Nyssa God qua Being (to einai) serves as the constitutive source of thought and, therefore, the necessary orientation for any philosophical reckoning of the meaning of thought, the following issues are addressed: 1.) The meaning of thought as erotic and egressive, 2.) the interpretation of imago dei in relation to thought, 3.) the Incarnation and the ultimate horizon of thought.]     

Development of Doctrine,or Denial?Balthasar's Holy Saturday and Newman's Essay

Edward Oakes generalized Newman's seven tests for doctrinal development as 'internal logic' and 'developmental consistency'. Using this reduction, he claimed Newman's support for Balthasar's theology of Christ's descent into hell. In fairness to Newman and for a more adequate evaluation of Balthasar, I let Newman speak for himself. His norms are applied to both the traditional doctrine and Balthasar's. Since Balthasar's lacks all seven , it follows it is not a development of doctrine, but a corruption. Oakes' other arguments insufficiently counterbalance this deduction, while the traditional doctrine offers insights into the questions of pluralism and the salvation of the non-baptized.     

Predicting Divine Action

This article sets out a formal procedure for determining the probability that God would do a specified action, using our moral knowledge and understanding God as a perfect being. To motivate developing the procedure I show how natural theology – design arguments, the problems of evil and divine hiddenness, and the treatment of miracles and religious experiences as evidence for claims about God – routinely appeals to judgments involving these probabilities. To set out the procedure, I describe a decision-theoretic model for practical reasoning which is deontological so as to appeal to theists, but is designed not to presuppose any substantive moral commitments, and to accommodate normative and non-normative uncertainty. Then I explain how judgments about what we probably ought to do can be transformed into judgments about what God would probably do. Then I show the usefulness of the procedure by describing how it can help structure discussions in natural theology and a-theology, and how it offers an attractive alternative to ‘skeptical theism’.     

Personal Identity And Integration: Von Balthasar's Phenomenology Of Human Holiness

In the view of Hans Urs von Balthasar, what is needed to bring a human life to fulfilment—to become 'whole'—is the death of one's 'personality', and the acquisition of one's specific 'personhood', which is given to one, along with one's mission, by God. Moreover, according to von Balthasar, a human being becomes a 'unique person' when encountering God in contemplative prayer. And it is within contemplative prayer that one comes into contact with one's 'Idea', which is actualised when one' personal identity is fully developed, and which it is one's mission to conform to. Thus this article shows how the fundamental components of von Balthasar's distinctive phenomenological model of human holiness fit together, in actual practice as lived, around his core concept of 'mission'.     

So close no matter how far: counterfactuals in history of science and the inevitability/contingency controversy

This paper has a twofold purpose. First, it aims at highlighting one difference (albeit in degree and not in kind) in how counterfactuals work in general history, on the one hand, and in history of the natural sciences, on the other hand. As we show, both in general history and in history of science good counterfactual narratives need to be plausible, where plausibility is construed as appropriate continuity of both the antecedent and the consequent of the counterfactual with what we know about the world. However, in general history it is often possible to imagine a consequent dramatically different from the actual historical development, and yet plausible; in history of science, due to plausibility concerns, imagining a consequent far removed from the results of actual science seems more complicated. The second aim of the paper is to assess whether and to what degree counterfactual histories of science can advance the cause of the so-called “contingency thesis,” namely, the claim that history of science might have followed a path leading to alternative, non-equivalent theories, as successful as the ones that we currently embrace. We distinguish various versions of the contingency thesis and argue that counterfactual histories of science support weak versions of the thesis.

     

Facial attractiveness is appraised in a glance

Those who are physically attractive reap many benefits--from higher average wages to a wider variety of mate choices. Recent studies have investigated what constitutes beauty and how beauty affects explicit social judgments, but little is known about the perceptual or cognitive processing that is affected by aesthetic judgments of faces and why beauty affects our behavior. In this study, the authors show that beauty is perceived when information is minimized by masking or rapid presentation. Perceiving and processing beauty appear to require little attention and to bias subsequent cognitive processes. These facts may make beauty difficult to ignore, possibly leading to its importance in social evaluations.     

Before Analogy: Recovering Barth'sOntological Development

What is the nature of Barth's development over the 1920s? Barth himself understood this period as his "apprenticeship," and cites his 1931 book on Anselm as a significant juncture in moving beyond this stage in his thinking. Barth's emphasis upon both change and continuity lies at the heart of the discrepancy between two prominent interpreters of his theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack. On the surface it appears as though their disagreement centers around Barth's employment of dialectic and analogy in his theology. However, our thesis is that this focus conceals the ontological strategies Barth's multifarious uses of analogy and dialectic always implied. Although McCormack is right to suggest that Balthasar's depiction of a shift from dialectic to analogy is inadequate, in the end McCormack's account of Barth's development over the 1920s conceals as much as it reveals. The following essay attempts to demonstrate the kinds of insights which can be made of the past accounts of Barth's development which focused on the transition from dialectic to analogy. Far from relegating these accounts to the sidelines, McCormack's work helps us see all the more clearly just what was at stake in figures like Balthasar's work. By looking past McCormack and Balthasar's respective periodizations of Barth's development, a clearer focus upon Barth's theological ontology can begin to take place.     

对希波克拉底警句的深层解读--审美修养是从医之必需

试图透过医学与艺术的联系,深入到医学与美学关系的层面,进而发掘希波克拉底关于"医学的艺术乃是一切艺术之中最为卓越的艺术"这一论断的深刻内涵,指出希波克拉底警句蕴涵着:医学是美的职业,它具有崇高地位和独特的重要性;医学所追求的是健康而美好的人生,医学所创造的是健康之美、生命之美、至善之美、仁爱之美.既然医学是最为卓越的艺术,医务工作者就应该重视美学修养,并让医学审美意识牢牢植根于自己的医学实践之中.换句话说,审美修养是从医之必需.     

Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty

Cosmetic surgery provides a problematic case for feminist theorizing about femininity and women's relationship with their bodies. Feminist accounts of femininity and beauty are unable to explain cosmetic surgery without undermining the women who opt for it. I argue that cosmetic surgery may have less to do with beauty and more to do with being ordinary, taking one's life into one's own hands, and determining how much suffering is fair.     

Practical Skills and Practical Wisdom in Virtue

This paper challenges a frequent objection to conceptualizing virtues as skills, which is that skills are merely capacities to act well, while virtues additionally require being properly motivated to act well. I discuss several cases that purport to show the supposed motivational difference by drawing our attention to the differing intuitions we have about virtues and skills. However, this putative difference between virtue and skill disappears when we switch our focus in the skill examples from the performance to the performer. The ends of a practice can be used to judge not only the skilfulness of a performance, but also the motivational commitment of the performer. Being virtuous requires both acting well and being properly motivated to do so, which can be captured by viewing virtues as the moral subset of skills. In claiming this, though, I resist the idea that there is no element in virtue that is not found in other skills. Virtue requires being practically wise about how practices fit into a conception of the good life, but other skills do not. I further argue that this difference doesn't undermine the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis, as it's the connection between virtues and morality that requires practical wisdom.     

Future Contingents and Relative Truth

If it is not now determined whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow, can an assertion that there will be one be true? The problem has persisted because there are compelling arguments on both sides. If there are objectively possible futures which would make the prediction true and others which would make it false, symmetry considerations seem to forbid counting it either true or false. Yet if we think about how we would assess the prediction tomorrow, when a sea battle is raging (or not), it seems we must assign the utterance a definite truth-value. I argue that both arguments must be given their due, and that this requires relativizing utterance-truth to a context of assessment. I show how this relativization can be handled in a rigorous formal semantics, and I argue that we can make coherent sense of assertion without assuming that utterances have their truth-values absolutely.     

Li Zehou and Moritz Schlick on the Roots of Beauty

Beginning from the Enlightenment view that beauty or art is ＂useless,＂ the attempts to explain how aesthetic experience and judgment are possible presented by Moritz Schlick and Li Zehou are examined, compared and contrasted. The paper treats three main subjects, the anthropological origins of beauty, the origins of aesthetic judgments and the problem of the purpose or function of beauty or aesthetic experience. In the first--the historical-causal roots of beauty--the problem discussed is how to account for aesthetics in light of the practical needs and pursuits of human beings. For Schlick, the problem is couched in terms of how aesthetic experience can be made consistent with natural selection. The second main subject-the philosophical roots of beauty-is a discussion of the origin in the sense of justification of aesthetic judgments. And the third examines the problem of assigning some purpose to aesthetic feelings and attitudes. An apparent contrast is made, and perhaps resolved, between the respective views of Schlick and Li.     

I know you are beautiful even without looking at you: discrimination of facial beauty in peripheral vision

Earlier research suggests that facial attractiveness may capture attention at parafovea. However, little is known about how well facial beauty can be detected at parafoveal and peripheral vision. Participants in this study judged relative attractiveness of a face pair presented simultaneously at several eccentricities from the central fixation. The results show that beauty is not only detectable at parafovea but also at periphery. The discrimination performance at parafovea was indistinguishable from the performance around the fovea. Moreover, performance was well above chance even at the periphery. The results show that the visual system is able to use the low-spatial-frequency information to appraise attractiveness. These findings not only provide an explanation why a beautiful face could capture attention when central vision is already engaged elsewhere, but also reveal the potential means by which a crowd of faces is quickly scanned for attractiveness.     

Schopenhauer on the aimlessness of the will

Schopenhauer asserts that ‘the will, which is objectified in human life as it is in every appearance, is a striving without aim and without end’. The article rejects some recent readings of this claim, and offers the following positive interpretation: however many specific aims of my specific desires I manage to attain, none is a final aim, in the sense that none terminates my ‘willing as a whole’, none turns me into a non-willing being. To understand Schopenhauer’s claim we must recognize his central contrast between happiness and will-lessness. Happiness is the satisfaction of individual desire, but no act of will that succeeds in satisfying individual desire is the attainment of a final aim, in that none brings about a conscious state in which the subject experiences no more unfulfilled desires. Such a state is the ultimate goal of existence, in Schopenhauer’s view, but happiness does not provide a route along which it can be attained.