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The Absolute

The Absolute

Absolute redirects here. For other uses, see Absolute (disambiguation) The Absolute is the totality of things, all that is, whether it has been discovered or not. It is usually conceived of as a unitary of the external Kosmos and internal spiritual conscious — at least insofar as it can be acknowledged by the human mind — and as intelligible. In some varieties of philosophy, The Absolute describes an ultimate being. It contrasts with finite things, considered individually. Heraclitus concerned himself with the knowable portion of the Absolute with his Logos. Plotinus, a Neo-Platonic philosopher, saw all forms of existence as emanating from "The All". The concept of the Absolute was re-introduced into philosophy by Hegel, Schelling, and their followers; it is associated with various forms of philosophical idealism. The Absolute, either under that name, or as the "Ground of Being," the "Uncaused First Cause," or some similar concept, also figures in several of the attempted proofs of the existence of God, particularly the ontological argument and the cosmological argument. The concept was adopted into neo-Hegelian British idealism (though without Hegel's complex logical and dialectical apparatus), where it received an almost mystical exposition at the hands of F.H. Bradley. Bradley (followed by others including Timothy L.S. Sprigge) conceived the Absolute as a single all-encompassing experience, rather along the lines of Shankara and Advaita Vedanta. Likewise, Josiah Royce in the United States conceived the Absolute as a unitary Knower Whose experience constitutes what we know as the "external" world. Recently, certain philosophers have attempted to reconceive Christianity as a Gnostic religion (see Mary Magdalene). Here "The Absolute" is referred to as "The All." The concept need not be taken to imply a universal unitary consciousness, however. American philosopher Brand Blanshard, for example, conceived the Absolute as a single overarching intelligible system but declined to characterize it in terms of consciousness or experience.

External links

- [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01060c.htm Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Absolute] Category:Philosophical terminology

Absolute (disambiguation)

Absolute may mean:
- Absolute (record compilation), a brand of compilation albums from EVA Records
- Absolute (production team), pop music writing and production team
- The Absolute, a concept in philosophy
- Absolutes, used in aromatherapy
- Absolut Vodka, a Swedish brand of vodka
- Absolute, one of three degrees of comparison in grammar.

Kosmos

Kosmos (the Afrikaans word for Cosmos) is a village in the North West Province of South Africa. It is situated on the banks of the Hartbeespoort Dam.

Spirituality

Spirituality is, in a narrow sense, a concern with matters of the spirit, however that may be defined; but it is also a wide term with many available readings. It may include belief in supernatural powers, as in religion, but the emphasis is on personal experience. It may be an expression for life perceived as higher, more complex or more integrated with one's worldview, as contrasted with the merely sensual.

The spiritual and the religious

An important distinction needs to be made between spirituality in religion and spirituality as opposed to religion. In recent years, spirituality in religion often carries connotations of the believer's faith being more personal, less dogmatic, more open to new ideas and myriad influences, and more pluralistic than the faiths of established religions. It also can connote the nature of a believer's personal relationship with Deity, as opposed to the general relationship with Deity understood to be shared by all members of that faith. Those who speak of spirituality as opposed to religion generally believe that there are many "spiritual paths" and that there is no objective truth about which is the best path to follow. Rather, adherants of this definition of the term emphasize the importance of finding one's own path to Deity, rather than following what others say works. The best way to describe this view is: the path which makes the most sense is the correct one (for oneself). Many adherents of orthodox religions who consider spirituality to be an aspect of their religious experience are more likely to contrast spirituality with secular "worldliness" than with the ritual expression of their religion. Others of a more New Age disposition hold that spirituality is not religion, per se, but the active and vital connection to a force, spirit, or sense of the deep self. As cultural historian and yogi William Irwin Thompson put it, "Religion is not identical with spirituality; rather religion is the form spirituality takes in civilization." (1981, 31)

Directed spirituality

One aspect of 'Being spiritual' is goal-directed, with aims such as: simultaneously improve one's wisdom and willpower, achieve a closer connection to Deity/the universe, and remove illusions or false ideas at the sensory, feeling and thinking aspects of a person. The 'Plato's cave' analogy in book VII of The Republic is one of the most well known descriptions of the spiritual development process, and thus, an excellent aid in understanding what "spiritual development" exactly entails. Others say that spirituality is a two-stroke process: the "upward stroke" is inner growth, changing oneself as one changes his/her relationship with God, and the "downward stroke" is manifesting improvements in the physical reality around oneself as a result of the inward change.

Spirituality and personal well-being

Due to its broad scope and individual nature, spirituality is perhaps better understood by highlighting a number of key concepts that arise for people when asked to describe what spirituality means to them. Research by Martsolf & Mickley (1998) highlighted the following areas as worthy of consideration:
- Meaning – significance of life; making sense of situations; deriving purpose.
- Values – beliefs, standards and ethics that are cherished.
- Transcendence – experience and appreciation of a dimension beyond self.
- Connecting – increased awareness of a connection with self, others, God/Spirit/Divine, and nature.
- Becoming – an unfolding of life that demands reflection and experience; includes a sense of who one is and how one knows. Spirituality, according to most adherants, is an essential part of an individual's holistic health and well-being, by developing an awareness of a "transcendent dimension" to life.

The Spiritual and Science

Analysis of spiritual qualities in science is bedeviled by the imprecision of spiritual concepts, the subjectivity of spiritual experience, and the amount of work required to translate and map observable components of a spiritual system into empirical evidence. Hackwrench 03:07, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Spiritual traditions and communities

- Bahá'í Faith
- Buddhism, Jainism
- Catholic Spirituality
- Feminist spirituality
- Gnosticism
- Hinduism
- Humanism
- Islam, Sufism
- Judaism
- Neo-confucianism, Taoism
- Paganism, Neopaganism, Modern_Gallae
- New Age, New Thought, Spiritualism, The Dances of Universal Peace
- Shamanism
- Sikhism
- Subud
- Surat Shabda Yoga
- Unitarian Universalism

References

- Azeemi,K.S.Muraqaba: The Art and Science of Sufi Meditation. Houston: Plato, 2005.(ISBN 0975887548)
- Bolman, L. G., and Deal, T. E. Leading With Soul. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
- Borysenko, J. A Woman's Journey to God. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999.
- Cannon, K. G. Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum, 1996.
- Deloria, V., Jr. God is Red. 2d Ed. Golden, Co: North American Press, 1992.
- Dillard, C. B.; Abdur-Rashid, D.; and Tyson, C. A. "My Soul is a Witness." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 13, no. 5 (September 2000): 447-462.
- Dirkx, J. M. "Nurturing Soul in Adult Learning." in Transformative Learning in Action. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education No. 74, edited by P. Cranton, pp. 79-88. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.
- Eck, D. A New Religious America. San Francisco: Harper, 2001.
- Elkins D.N. et al (1998)Toward a humanistic-phenomenological spirituality: definition, description and measurement. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 28(4), 5-18
- English, L., and Gillen, M., eds. Addressing the Spiritual Dimensions of Adult Learning. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No. 85. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
- Holtje, D. (1995). [http://www.masterpath.org/masterpath_books/index.htm From Light to Sound: The Spiritual Progression]. Temecula, CA: MasterPath, Inc. ISBN 1885949006
- Martsolf D.S. & Mickley J.R. (1998) "The concept of spirituality in nursing theories: differing world-views and extent of focus" Journal of Advanced Nursing 27, 294-303
- Perry, W. [http://www.fonsvitae.com/treasury.html A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom - An Encyclopedia of Humankind’s Spiritual Truth]. Louisville: Fons Vitae books, 2000
- Thompson, William Irwin, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).

External links

- [http://www.fonsvitae.com/MG1.html Resources/Books on World Spirituality]
- [http://www.sahajayoga.org/ sahajayoga.org: a place to experience self realisation for free]
- [http://www.lifetheory.com/ LifeTheory.com: An online forum on life and spirituality]
- [http://www.gnosticweb.com/ Gnosticweb] Providing Free Global Access to Spiritual Information.
- [http://www.edgelife.net/glossary/spirituality.htm A new definition of spirituality]
- [http://www.avatarsearch.com/ AvatarSearch.com: A search engine for spiritual-related topics]
- [http://www.kheper.net/ Kheper.net: An overview of everything spiritual]
- [http://www.ias.org/ International Association of Sufism]
- [http://www.gatheringlight.com/ Long Term (monthly) Private Spiritual Riverside Retreats]
- [http://www.sufiblog.com/ Multi-faith Spirituality]
- [http://www.new-age-spirituality.com/ New Age Spirituality]
- [http://www.sos.org/ Science of Spirituality]
- [http://www.acu-cell.com/sh.html Spiritual aspects of Health and Healing]
- [http://www.masterpath.org/sriGaryOlsen/index.htm Spiritual Awakening and Spiritual Growth]
- [http://www.onespirit.com Spiritual Book Club]
- [http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com/ Spiritual Cinema Circle]
- [http://www.spiritualforums.com/ Spiritual Forums]
- [http://www.quranichealing.com/bp.asp?caid=53 Spiritual Purification and Wellness]
- [http://www.level-of-consciousness.org/ Spirituality and consciousness forum]
- [http://www.rudraksha-ratna.com Spirituality and Rudraksha]
- [http://www.srcm.org/articles/srcmintro.html Spirituality begins where religion ends - Shri Ram Chandra Mission]
- [http://www.ericdigests.org/2002-3/adult.htm Spirituality in Adult and Higher Education]
- [http://amanecerespiritual.tripod.com/index_en.htm Spiritual Dawn - Morality and Philosophy Essay]
- [http://www.arches.uga.edu/~godlas/Sufism.html Sufism -- Sufis -- Sufi Orders] by Dr. Alan Godlas, University of Georgia
- [http://www.sufiblog.com/ SufiBlog ]Sufism online spiritual magazine of Sufi Meditation (Muraqaba) and Healing
- [http://www.thespiritual.org The Spiritual: Journal of Natural Spirituality] An on-line resource of rare texts and reflections on natural spirituality, thoughtless-ness, egoless-ness and mind-brain duality.
- [http://www.spiritualwisdom.org.uk/ Spiritual Wisdom] There is a universal spirituality which can be expressed in many ways, but this site uses the insights of Emanuel Swedenborg to help explain the meaning of our lives.
- [http://www.spirituality.com Spirituality.com] Christian Science perspective on spirituality and healing. simple:Spirituality

Logos

The Greek word λόγος or logos is a word with various meanings. It is often translated into English as "Word" but can also mean thought, speech, reason, principle, standard, or logic among other things. It has varied use in the fields of philosophy, analytical psychology, rhetoric and religion.

Use in ancient philosophy

In ancient philosophy, Logos was used by Heraclitus, one of the more eminent Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, to describe human knowledge and the inherent order in The Absolute universe, a background to the essential change which characterizes day-to-day life. Logos as the inherent rationality of the universe is also something of a precursor to the concept of the collective unconscious, described by Carl Jung, as these two fragments from Heraclitus suggest:

One must follow what is common; but, even though the Logos is common, most people live as though they possessed their own private wisdom. (Fr.2) The common is what is open to all, what can be seen and heard by all. To see is to let in with open eyes what is open to view, i.e. what is lit up and revealed to all. The dead (the completely private ones) neither see nor hear; they are closed. No light (fire) shines in them; no speech sounds in them. And yet, even they participate in the cosmos. The extinguished ones also belong to the continuum of lighting and extinguishing that is the common cosmos. The dead touch upon the living sleeping, who in turn touch upon the living waking. (Fr. 26)

By the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, logos was the term used to describe the faculty of human reason and the knowledge men had of the world and of each other. Plato (who had many mystical tendencies) allowed his characters to engage in the conceit of describing logos as a living being in some of his dialogues. Aristotle, who studied under Plato and who was much more of a practical thinker, first developed the concept of logic as a depiction of the rules of human rationality. The Stoics understood Logos as the animating power of the universe, which further influenced how this word was understood later on (in 20th century psychology, for instance).

Use in rhetoric

In rhetoric, logos is one of the three modes of persuasion (the other two are pathos, emotional appeal, and ethos, the qualification of the speaker). Logos refers to logical appeal, and in fact the term logic evolves from it. Logos normally implies numbers, polls, and other mathematical or scientific data. Logos has many advantages:
- Data is hard to manipulate, meaning that it is harder to argue against a logos argument.
- For the same reason, it may sway cynical listeners to the speaker's opinion.
- Logos enhances ethos by making the speaker look prepared and knowledgeable to the audience. Logos also has many disadvantages:
- Numbers may not be obvious to many listeners, so the argument may pass unheeded.
- Logos asks the question, "But why should I care?" because they are not as involving as emotional appeal.
- Logos can be downright confusing in some instances. The best way to present an argument is to combine logos with the other forms of appeal.

Use in Christianity

In Christianity, the prologue of the Gospel of John calls Jesus the Logos (usually translated as "the Word" in English bibles such as the KJV) and played a central role in establishing the doctrine of Jesus' divinity and the Trinity. (See Christology.) The opening verse reads: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God". Scholars of the Bible have suggested that John made creative use of double meaning in the word "Logos" to communicate to both Jews, who were familiar with the Wisdom tradition in Judaism, and Hellenists, especially followers of Philo. Each of these two groups had its own history associated with the concept of the Logos, and each could understand John's use of the term from one or both of those contexts. Especially for the Hellenists, however, John turns the concept of the Logos on its head when he claimed "the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us" (v. 14). Similarly, some translations of the Gospel of John into Chinese have used the word "Tao (道)" to translate the "Logos" in a provocative way. Gordon Clark famously translated Logos as "Logic" in the opening verses of the Gospel: "In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God." He meant to imply by this translation that the laws of logic were contained in the Bible itself and were therefore not a secular principle imposed on the Christian worldview. On April 1, 2005, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict XVI) referred to the Christian religion as the religion of the Logos: :"From the beginning, Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, as the religion according to reason...It has always defined men, all men without distinction, as creatures and images of God, proclaiming for them...the same dignity. In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith....It was and is the merit of the Enlightenment to have again proposed these original values of Christianity and of having given back to reason its own voice... Today, this should be precisely [Christianity's] philosophical strength, in so far as the problem is whether the world comes from the irrational, and reason is not other than a 'sub-product,' on occasion even harmful of its development -- or whether the world comes from reason, and is, as a consequence, its criterion and goal...In the so necessary dialogue between secularists and Catholics, we Christians must be very careful to remain faithful to this fundamental line: to live a faith that comes from the Logos, from creative reason, and that, because of this, is also open to all that is truly rational." [http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=74864]

Similar concepts

Within Eastern religions there are ideas with varying degrees of similarity to the philosophical and Christian uses. Two concepts with some parallels to Logos are Tao, dharma, and Aum (from Hindu cosmology). In New Age mysticism, the Odic force is sometimes described as "the physical manifestation of the creative Logos." In ancient Egyptian mythology, Hu was the deification of the word spoken to create existence. In Surat Shabda Yoga, Shabda is considered to be analogous to the Logos as representative of the supreme being in Christianity.

References

- [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2363773 The entry for "logos"] in the standard work A Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and H. Stuart Jones
- D. A. Carson (1991). The Gospel According to John. ISBN 085111749X
- Leon Morris (1995). The Gospel According to John (New International Commentary on the New Testament). ISBN 0802825044
- [http://www.forananswer.org/John/Jn1_1.htm The Apologist's Bible Commentary]
- John Robbins (1993). [http://www.trinityfoundation.org/PDF/101a-AnIntroductiontoGordonHClark.pdf "An Introduction to Gordon H. Clark"] in The Trinity Review, July/August 1993. Category:Philosophical terminology Category:Rhetoric Category:Christianity ja:ロゴス

Being

A being, in the most general sense, is anything that is alive. Being with a capital 'B', on the other hand, is often used in philosophy to refer to divine Being, God, or ultimate reality. In philosophy, a being is anything that can be said to be. Ontology is the philosophical study of being. See also categories of being and "I think, therefore I am". In linguistics, "to be" is a copula.

Being in historical philosophy

Being and substance in Aristotle

Among the first inquiries into what "being" encompassed was undertaken by Aristotle. The term "substance" in Aristotle was a precise metaphysical term denoting an individual thing about which specific assertions may be made. Since the Aristotelian view of matter is negative, the "substance" or "being" is a real thing that exists. Since matter renders things more obscure to our perception, it follows that the true essence of an object is independent of matter, its "being" is independent of the material world. To Aristotle, only spirits and God are independent of matter, and thus these entities are purely "substance" or "being." This is the origin of the phrase "One in substance with the Father" or modernly "One in being with the Father" in the Catholic Nicene Creed.

Being in continental philosophy and existentialism

Some philosophers deny that the concept of "being" has any meaning at all, since we only define an object's existence by its relation to other objects, and actions it undertakes. The term "I am" has no meaning by itself; it must have an action or relation appended to it. This in turn has led to the thought that "being" and nothingness are closely related, developed in existential philosophy. Existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, as well as continental philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger have also written extensively on the concept of being. Hegel distinguishes between the being of objects (being in itself) and the being of people (Geist (philosophy). Hegel, however, did not think there was much hope for deliniating a "meaning" of being, because being stripped of all predicates is simply nothing. Heidegger, in his quest to pioneer the path by which we might learn how to meaningfully ask the question of the meaning of being, distinguishes between different modes of being, which are present-to-hand (or objective presence - the kind of being possesed by objects), readiness-to-hand, which is the kind of being possessed by tools, and Da-sein ("there-being"), which is the kind of being possessed by the beings which we ourselves are. Sartre, popularly understood as mis-reading Heidegger (a reading supported by Heidegger's essay "Letter on Humanism" which responds to Sartre's famous address, "Existentialism is a Humanism"), employs modes of being in an attempt to ground his concept of freedom ontologically by distinguishing between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

Being in popular culture

The film "Being There" starring Peter Sellers was influenced by existentialism and the works of Martin Heidegger. Eckhart Tolle in his best-selling book, The Power of Now, uses the word "Being" as a substitute and more accurate word for "God".

External links

- [http://www.formalontology.it/being.htm Being in philosophy and linguistics] Category:Ontology simple:Being

Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus (Greek Herakleitos) (about 535 - 475 BC), known as 'The Obscure,' was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor. As with other pre-Socratics, his writings only survive in fragments quoted by other authors. He disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance and claimed instead that everything is derived from the Greek classical element fire, rather than from air, water, or earth. This led to the belief that change is real, and stability illusory. For Heraclitus everything is "in flux", as exemplified in his famous aphorism "Panta Rhei":

Everything flows, nothing stands still

Heraclitus is recognized as one of the earliest dialectical philosophers with his acknowledgement of the universality of change and development through internal contradictions, as in his statements:

"By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change. Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining bodies die and rise again in smoke called incence."

"Men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonises with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like that of the bow and the lyre."

He is famous for expressing the notion that no man can cross the same river twice:

ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν
εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
We both step and do not step in the same rivers.
We are and are not.

The idea of the logos is also credited to him, as he proclaims that everything originates out of the logos. Further, Heraclitus said

"I am as I am not,"

and

"He who hears not me but the logos will say: All is one."

Heraclitus held that an explanation of change was foundational to any theory of nature. This view was strongly opposed by Parmenides, who argued that change is an illusion and that everything is fundamentally static. He appears to have taught by means of small, oracular aphorisms meant to encourage thinking based on natural law and reason. The brevity and elliptical logic of his aphorisms earned Heraclitus the epithet 'Obscure'. The technique, as well as the teaching, is redolent of Zen Buddhism's koans. Moreover, the Heraclitean emphasis on the nature of things and existence as one of constant change, expressed with language of polarity, is particularly reminiscent of another ancient philosophical tradition, that of Taoism: the Tao (or "the Way") often refers to a space-time sequence, and is similarly expressed with seemingly-contradictory language (e.g., "The Way is like an empty vessel / that may still be drawn from / without ever needing to be filled"). Indeed, parallels may be drawn between the fundamental concepts of the logos (as it was understood during Heraclitus's time) and the Tao. Heraclitus is described as having a melancholy disposition, and is sometimes referred to as the "weeping philosopher," as opposed to Democritus, who is known as the "laughing philosopher."

References

- Heraclitus, Herakleitos and Diogenes, translated by Guy Davenport, Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1979. ISBN 0912516364 (Complete fragments of Heraclitus translated into English)
- Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton, forward by James Hillman, (parallel English & Greek), Viking Penguin 2001 ISBN 0-670-89195-9.
- Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, translated by Charles H. Seibert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993). ISBN 0810110679. (Transcript of seminar in which two major German philosophers engage in detailed analysis and discussion of Heraclitus texts)

External links

- [http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/h/heraclit.htm Heraclitus] at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- [http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM Heraclitus] at Washington State University
- [http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/heraclitus.html The Flux and Fire Philosophy of Heraclitus]
- [http://philoctetes.free.fr/heraclitus.htm Fragments of Heraclitus]
- [http://plato.evansville.edu/public/burnet/ch3a.htm John Burnet Early Greek Philosophy: brief analysis; the fragments] Category:535 BC births Category:475 BC deaths Category:Ancient Greek philosophers Category:Presocratic philosophers ko:헤라클레이토스 ja:ヘラクレイトス

Plotinus

Plotinus (ca. 205–270) is widely considered the father of Neoplatonism. Much of our biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads. Porphyry believed Plotinus was sixty-six years old when he died in the second year of the reign of the emperor Claudius II, and estimated the year of his teacher's birth as around 205. Plotinus disliked "being in the body", so he never discussed his ancestry, or his place or date of birth. Eunapius however reports that he was born in Lyco or Lycopolis in Egypt. He took up the study of philosophy at the age of twenty-seven, around the year 232, and went to Alexandria to study. Plotinus was dissatisfied with every teacher he met until a friend suggested he go to Ammonius Saccas. Upon hearing Ammonius lecture, he declared to his friend, "this was the man I was looking for," and began to study intently under this teacher. Plotinus spent the next eleven years in Alexandria until his 38th year, when he decided to investigate the philosophical teachings of the Persians and the Indians. As a result he left Alexandria and joined the army of Gordian III as it marched on Persia. However, on Gordian's death he found himself abandoned in a hostile land, and with difficulty found his way back to safety in Antioch. At the age of forty, during the reign of Philip the Arab, he came to Rome, where he lived for most of the remainder of his life. He attracted a number of students in that city. His innermost circle included Porphyry, Gentilianus Amelius of Tuscany, the Senator Castricius Firmus, and Eustochius of Alexandria— a doctor who devoted himself to learning from Plotinus and attended to him until his death. Others included: Zethos, an Arab by ancestry who died before Plotinus and left him a legacy and some land; Zoticus, a critic and poet; Paulinus, a doctor of Scythopolis; and Serapion from Alexandria. He had students amongst the Roman Senate beside Castricius, such as Marcellus Orontius, Sabinillus, and Rogantianus. Women were also numbered amongst his students, including Gemina, in whose house he lived during his residence in Rome, and her daughter Gemina; and Amphiclea, the wife of Ariston the son of Iamblichus. He was a correspondent of the philosopher Cassius Longinus. He also had the respect of the Emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonica. At one point Plotinus attempted to interest Gallienus in rebuilding an abandoned settlement in Campania known as the City of Philosophers, where the inhabitants would live under the constitution set out in Plato's Laws. An Imperial subsidy was never granted, for reasons unknown to Porphyry. After Porphyry went to live in Sicily, word came to him that Plotinus had died. The philosopher spent his final days in seclusion on an estate in Campania, which his friend Zethos had bequeathed him. According to the account of Eustochius, who attended upon him at the end, Plotinus' final words were: "Strive to give back the Divine in yourselves to the Divine in the All." At that moment a snake crept under the bed where Plotinus lay, and slipped away through a hole in the wall; at the same moment Plotinus died. Besides Ammonius, Plotinus was greatly influenced by the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Numenius. Plotinus wrote the essays that became the Enneads over a period of years, from ca. 253 to a few months before his death. Plotinus was unable to revise his own work due to his poor eyesight. Yet his writings badly needed editing, according to Porphyry: Plotinus' handwriting was atrocious, he did not properly separate his words, and he cared nothing for spelling. He disliked the process of rewriting them, so he gave the task to Porphyry, who not only polished them but put them into the arrangement we now have. Although Plotinus attacked Gnosticism, he was silent about Christianity, of which he must have been aware. From all accounts his personal and social life exhibited the highest moral and spiritual standards.

Teachings

Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent "One", which is beyond all categories of being and non-being. The concept of "being" is derived by us from the objects of human experience, but the infinite, transcendent One is beyond all such objects, and therefore is beyond the concepts derived from them. "Being" or "existence" is an attribute, and the One is beyond all attributes as their source. The One "cannot be any existing thing", and cannot be merely the sum of all such things, but "is prior to all existents". The One emanated the rest of the universe as a sequence of lesser beings. Later Neoplatonic philosophers, especially Iamblichus, added hundreds of intermediate beings as emanations between the One and humanity; but Plotinus' system was much simpler in comparison. The One contains no division, multiplicity or distinction. Compare, for example, Advaita Vedanta, ("advaita" = "not two", or "non-dual"). Thus, no attributes can be assigned to the One. Thought cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies distinction between a thinker and an object of thought. Likewise, neither will nor activity can be ascribed to the One, since doing so would logically require distinction between an "agent" of will or act, and its object. The One, beyond all attributes, including being and non-being, is the source of the world not through any act of creation, willful or otherwise, since activity cannot be ascribed to the unchangeable, immutable One. Plotinus resorts to a logical principle that the "less perfect" must, of necessity, "emanate", or issue forth, from the "perfect" or "more perfect". Thus, all of "creation" emanates from the One in succeeding (not temporal) stages of lesser and lesser perfection. Plotinus offers an alternative to the orthodox Christian notion of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), which would make God suffer the deliberations of a mind and actions of a will. Emanation ex deo (out of God), confirms the absolute transcendence of the One making the unfolding of the cosmos purely a consequence of the existence of the One. The One is in no way affected or diminished by the emanations. The One does not divide itself into multitudes of lesser beings, or parcel himself out piece by piece. Plotinus uses the analogy of the Sun which emanates light indiscriminately without thereby "lessening" itself, or a mirror reflection which in no way diminishes the object reflected. The first emanation is Thought (Nous), identified with the "demiurge" in Plato's Timaeus. From Nous proceeds the "World Soul", which Plotinus divides into "upper" and "lower", identifying the lower with Nature. From the World Soul proceed individual human souls, and finally, matter, at the lowest level of being and perfection. Although the "material world" is at the lowest level of the "chain of being", Plotinus criticized the Gnostic disdain for matter. Plotinus asserted the ultimately divine nature of material creation since it is the product of Nous (the demiurge) and the World Soul. The essentially religious nature of Plotinus' philosophy may be further illustrated by his concept of attaining "ecstatic" union with the One. Porphyry relates that Plotinus achieved "union" several times during the years he knew him. Compare, of course, "enlightenment", "liberation", and other concepts of mystical union common to many Eastern and Western traditions. Neoplatonism was sometimes used as a philosophical foundation for paganism, and as a means of defending paganism against Christianity; but many Christians were also influenced by Neoplatonism. The teachings of Plotinus influenced many of the early Christian Fathers, e.g., St. Augustine. In the 20th century, American philosopher Ken Wilber has drawn heavily upon Plotinus in his cosmology, reaching some similar metaphysical conclusions.

References

- Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy: Vol. 1, Part 2. ISBN 0385002106
- Plotinus. The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna and John Dillon. London: Penguin, 1991. ISBN 014044520X

External links

- [http://www.acadine.org/w/Plotinus_-_Occultists_and_Mystics_of_All_Ages Plotinus] chapter from the book Occultists and Mystics of All Ages, published in the early 1900's.
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry]
- [http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/plotinus Plotinus's work: the Enneads] Category:Ancient philosophers Category:Late Antique writers Category:Neoplatonists Category:Roman era philosophers Category:205 births Category:270 deaths

Neo-Platonic

Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) was a school of philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century A.D. Though based on the teachings of Plato and the Platonists, it interpreted Plato in many new ways, so that Neoplatonism was quite different from what Plato had written, though many Neoplatonists would prefer to say that what they advocated had been previously taught by Plato. The prefix "neo" (Greek for "new") was only added by modern scholars to distinguish between the two, but the practitioners of the time called themselves Platonists. Neoplatonism took definitive shape with the philosopher Plotinus, who claimed to have received his teachings from Ammonius Saccas, a humble dock worker and philosopher in Alexandria. Plotinus's student Porphyry assembled his teachings into the six Enneads. Subsequent Neoplatonic philosophers included Hypatia of Alexandria, Proclus, Simplicius of Cilicia, and Damascius, who wrote On First Principles. He was born at Damascus and was the last teacher of Neoplatonism at Athens.

Teachings

Neoplatonism is a form of idealistic monism. Plotinus taught the existence of an ineffable and transcendent One, from which emanated the rest of the universe as a sequence of lesser beings. Later Neoplatonic philosophers, especially Iamblichus, added hundreds of intermediate gods, angels and daemons, and other beings as emanations between the One and humanity. Plotinus' system was much simpler in comparison. Neoplatonists believed human perfection and happiness were attainable in this world, without awaiting an afterlife. Perfection and happiness— seen as synonymous— could be achieved through philosophical contemplation. They did not believe in evil as positively existing. They compared it to darkness, which does not exist in itself, but only as the absence of light. So too, evil is simply the absence of good. Things are good insofar as they exist. They are evil only insofar as they are imperfect, lacking some good that they should have. It is also a cornerstone of Neoplatonism to teach that all people return to the Source. The Source, Absolute or One, is what all things spring from and as a superconsciousness is where all things return. It can be said that all consciousness is wiped clean and returned to a blank slate when returning to the source.

Christian Neo-Platonism

This aspect of Neoplatonism helped the great Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, on learning of it, to abandon dualistic Manichaeism and convert to Christianity. When, three or four years after his 387 baptism, he wrote his treatise On True Religion, he was still thinking of Christianity in Neoplatonic terms. But, after he was ordained priest and bishop and had acquired greater familiarity with Scripture, he came to see contradictions between Neoplatonism and Christianity. Arnold Toynbee believed that when classical paganism found itself giving way before Christianity, it had turned to Neoplatonism as a philosophical foundation, unsuccessfully attempting to use it as what Toynbee called a "counter-religion" and a "counter-church" (A Study of History, 1972 p. 56-8). Nevertheless, many Christians were influenced by Neoplatonism. They identified the One as God. The most important and influential of them was the fifth century author known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. His works were significant for both Eastern Orthodox and Western branches of Christiantiy. John Scotus's ninth century Latin translation of the writing of pseudo-Dionysius was widely studied during the Middle Ages. Neoplatonism also had links with the belief systems known as Gnosticism. Plotinus, however, rebuked Gnosticism in the ninth tractate of the second Ennead: "Against Those That Affirm The Creator of The Kosmos and The Kosmos Itself to Be Evil" (generally quoted as "Against The Gnostics"). Being grounded in platonic thought, the neoplatonists would have rejected the gnostic vilification of Platos's demiurge, a deity discussed in Timaeus. In the Middle Ages, Neoplatonist ideas influenced the thinking of Jewish Kabbalists, such as Isaac the Blind. However, the Kabbalists modified Neoplatonism according to their own monotheistic belief. A famous Jewish Neoplatonic philosopher from the early Middle Ages was Solomon ibn Gabirol. During this period, Neoplatonist ideas also influenced Islamic and Sufi thinkers such as al Farabi and through him Avicenna. Neoplatonism survived in the Eastern Christian Church as an independent tradition and was reintroduced to the west by Plethon. It was subsequently revived in the Italian Renaissance by figures such as Marsilio Ficino, the Medici and Sandro Botticelli. Thomas Taylor, "The English Platonist", wrote extensively on Platonism and translated almost the entire Platonic corpus into English. Neoplatonism has influenced some modern Christian theologians as well.

Modern Neo-Platonism

In the essay "Inner and Outer Realities: Jean Gebser in a Cultural/Historical Perspective", Integral philosopher Allan Combs claims that ten modern thinkers can be called Neo-Platonists: Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, Rudolf Steiner, C. G. Jung, Jean Gebser and the modern theorist Brian Goodwin. He sees these thinkers as participating in a tradition that can be distinguished from the empiricist, rationalist, dualist and materialist Western philosophical traditions[http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/Realities.htm].

Publications

- Ruelle, an edition of On First Principles, (Paris, 1889)
- Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists, (Cambridge, 1901) Category:Philosophical movements Category:Philosophical schools and traditions ja:ネオプラトニズム

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. He became fascinated by the works of Spinoza, Kant, and Rousseau, and by the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality -- consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society -- leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts of a larger, evolutionary whole. This whole is mental because it is mind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. The rational, self-conscious whole is not a thing or being that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself. Many consider Hegel's thought to represent the summit of early 19th-Century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel's specific dialectical idealism, such as Existentialism, the historical materialism of Karl Marx, historicism, and British Idealism. At the same time, modern analytic and positivistic philosophers have considered Hegel a principal target because of what they consider the obscurantism of his philosophy. Hegel was aware of his 'obscurantism' and saw it as part of philosophical thinking that grasps the limitations of everyday thought and concepts and tries to go beyond them. Hegel wrote in his essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?" that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly but the person on the street, who uses concepts as fixed, unchangeable givens, without any context. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because he or she goes beyond the limits of everyday concepts and understands their larger context. This can make philosophical thought and language seem mysterious or obscure to the person on the street. Hegel influenced Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, although all of them opposed the most central themes of Hegel's philosophy. Nor did Hegel have any influence on the nationalist movement in Germany. After less than a generation, Hegel's philosophy was suppressed and even banned by the Prussian right-wing, and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in multiple official writings. After the period of Bruno Bauer, Hegel's influence did not make itself felt again until the philosophy of British Idealism and the 20th-century Hegelian Neo-Marxism that began with Georg Lukacs.

Life and work

Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August, 1770. As a child he was a voracious reader of literature, newspapers, philosophical essays, and writings on various other topics. In part, Hegel's literate childhood can be attributed to his uncharacteristically progressive mother who actively nurtured her children's intellectual development. The Hegels were a well-established middle class family in Stuttgart - his father was a civil servant in the administrative government of Württemberg. Hegel was a sickly child and almost died of illness before he was six. He received his education at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he was friends with the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. In their shared dislike for what was regarded as the restrictive environment of the Tübingen seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. The three watched the unfolding of the French Revolution and immersed themselves in the emerging criticism of the idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Hegel published only four books during his life: the Phenomenology of Spirit (or Phenomenology of Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807; the Science of Logic, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy, in three volumes, published in 1811, 1812, and 1816 (revised 1831); Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827 and 1830; and the (Elements of the) Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1822. He also published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin period. A number of other works on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously. Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy and the world itself, often described as a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement. For example, the French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real freedom into western societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. Hegel's dense and demanding writing style can be difficult to read; he is described by Bertrand Russell in the History of Western Philosophy as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. This is partly because Hegel tried to develop a new form of thinking and logic, which he called, 'speculative reason' and which is today popularly called, 'dialectics,' to try to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both common sense and of traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems and the relation between thought and reality. His work also can be perplexing for modern audiences because he had a teleological and rationalistic view of human society and history that are at odds with recent intellectual trends. And for English readers there is the additional challenge posed by the difficulty of translating his terminology and idiom into English.

Hegel's legacy

Some of Hegel's writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his "Encyclopedia" was intended as a textbook in a university course. Nevertheless, like many philosophers, Hegel assumed that his readers would be well-versed in Western philosophy, up to and including Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. For those wishing to read his work without this background, introductions to Hegel and commentaries about Hegel may suffice. However, even this is hotly debated since the reader must choose from multiple interpretations of Hegel's writings from incompatible schools of philosophy. Reading Hegel directly would be the best way to learn about Hegel, but this task has historically proved to be beyond the average reader of philosophy. This difficulty may be the most urgent problem with respect to the legacy of Hegel. One especially difficult aspect of Hegel's work is his innovation in logic. In response to Immanuel Kant's challenge to the limits of Pure Reason, Hegel developed a radically new form of logic, which he called speculation, and which is today popularly called dialectics. The difficulty in reading Hegel was perceived in Hegel's own day, and persists into the 21st century. To understand Hegel fully requires paying attention to his critique of standard logic (e.g. law of contradiction, the law of the excluded middle) and, whether one accepts or rejects it, at least taking it seriously. Many philosophers who came after Hegel and were influenced by him, whether adopting or rejecting his ideas, did so without fully absorbing his new speculative or dialectical logic. Another confusing aspect about the interpretation of Hegel's work is the fact that past historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the allegedly direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), advocated a Protestant orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. The Left Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics. In more recent studies, however, this old paradigm has been questioned. For one thing, no Hegelians of the period ever referred to themselves as Right Hegelians. That was a term of insult that David Strauss (a self-styled Left-Hegelian) hurled at Bruno Bauer (who has most often been classified by historians as a Left-Hegelian, but who rejected both titles for himself). For another thing, no self-styled "Left Hegelian" described himself as a follower of Hegel. This includes Karl Marx. Several "Left Hegelians" openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel's philosophy. Even Marx stated that to make Hegel's philosophy useful for his purposes, he had to "turn Hegel upside down." Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the so-called "Left Hegelian" movement was actually an anti-Hegelian movement. Nevertheless, this historical category continues to persist in modern literature. The critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" led the line of Hegel's thinking into radically new directions - and form a disproportionately large part of the literature on and about Hegel. Twentieth-century interpretations of Hegel have been shaped by several schools of thought: British Idealism, logical positivism, Marxism, and postmodernism. Since the fall of the USSR, a new wave of Hegel scholarship has arisen in the West, without the preconceptions of these particular schools of thought. Walter Jaeschke and Otto Poeggler in Germany, as well as Peter Hodgson and Howard Kainz in America, are notable in this regard. In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism — to undergraduate classes, for example — Hegel's dialectic was most often characterized as a three-step process, namely, "thesis" (e.g. the French Revolution), "antithesis" (the Reign of Terror that followed), and "synthesis" (the Constitutional state of free citizens). However, Hegel used this classification only once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed earlier by Fichte the neo-Kantian. Believing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, like Raya Dunayevskaya have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Furthermore, in Hegel's language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical". To the contrary, scholars like Howard Kainz explain that Hegel's philosophy contains thousands of triads. However, instead of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," Hegel used different terms to speak about triads, for example, "immediate-mediate-concrete," as well as, "abstract-negative-concrete." Hegel's works speak of synthetic logic. Nevertheless, it is widely admitted today that the old-fashioned description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" was always inaccurate.

Detractors

Hegel used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but he has had many critics over the centuries. Some critics suggested that Hegel seems to gloss over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold. Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that the Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. This view of Hegel as an apologist of state power and precursor of 20th century totalitarianism was criticized thoroughly by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, on the grounds that Hegel was not an apologist for any state or form of authority simply because it existed: for Hegel the state must always be rational. Other scholars, e.g. Walter Kaufmann, have also criticized Popper's theories about Hegel. Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter's alleged historicism (among other reasons), and decried Hegel's work as obscurantist "pseudo-philosophy". Schopenhauer, once a colleague of Hegel's at the University of Berlin said: "The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity." Some newer philosophers who prefer to follow the tradition of British Philosophy have made similar statements. In Britain, Hegel exercised an influence on the philosophical school called "British Idealism," which included Francis Herbert Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, in England, and Josiah Royce at Harvard. Analytic philosophy, which dominated philosophy departments in the United States and the United Kingdom, was virtually founded when G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell rejected British Idealism and their colleagues' admiration for Hegel. Hegel remained largely out of fashion in these departments for much of the twentieth century.

Advocates

In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due to: (a) the rediscovery and reevaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything; and (c) an increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhaps Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those published prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. More recently two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as the Pittsburgh Hegelians), have exhibited a marked Hegelian influence. Beginning in the 1960's, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system. This view, often referred to as the 'non-metaphysical option', has had a decided influence on many major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years. The works of U.S. neoconservative Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by a famous Hegel interpreter from the Marxist school, Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicist David Bohm, the mathematician William Lawvere, the logician Kurt Godel and the biologist Ernst Mayr have been deeply interested in or influenced by Hegel's philosophical work. The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has also advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies. Beginning in the 1990's, after the fall of the USSR, a fresh reading of Hegel took place in the West. For these scholars, fairly well represented by the Hegel Society of America in cooperation with German scholars such as Otto Poeggler and Walter Jaeschke, Hegel's works should be read without preconceptions. Marx plays a minor role in these new readings, and actually some contemporary scholars have suggested that Marx's interpretation of Hegel is irrelevant to a proper reading of Hegel. Since 1990 new aspects of Hegel's philosophy have been published that were not typically seen in the West. Here is one example: the essence of Hegel's philosophy is the idea of Freedom. With the idea of Freedom Hegel attempts to explain world history, fine art, political science, the free thinking that is science, the attainments of spirituality and the resolution to problems of metaphysics.

Major works

- Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes Sometimes translated as Phenomenology of Mind) 1807 (See battle of Jena)
- Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) 1812-1816 (last edition of the first part 1831)
- Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften) 1817-1830
- Divided into three Major Sections:
- The Logic
- Philosophy of Nature
- Philosophy of Mind
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) 1821
- Lectures on Aesthetics
- Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy
- Lectures on Philosophy of Religion

Secondary literature

- Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994, translated by Shierry M. Nicholsen, with an introduction by Shierry M. Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, ISBN 0262510804 (essays on Hegel's concept of spirit/mind, Hegel's concept of experience, and why Hegel is difficult to read).
- Frederick C. Beiser, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0521387116 (The Cambridge Companions are always a good way to start learning about a particular philosopher, and this Companion is no exception.)
- R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. ISBN 0192853066 (includes a powerful statement of the case that Hegel authorized an over-powering state, i.e. that his philosophy is a dangerous opponent of individual liberty).
- Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-521-33035-1 (Provides a fascinating account of how "Hegel became Hegel", using the guiding hypothesis that Hegel "was basically a theologian manqué".)
- John N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. ISBN 0195198794
- Michael Forster Hegel and Skepticism. Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN 0674387074
- Michael Forster Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0226257428
- H.S. Harris Hegel: Phenomenology and System, a distillation of the author's magisterial two-volume Hegel's Ladder, now the standard commentary on the Phenomenology.
- Justus Hartnack, An Introduction to Hegel's Logic. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. ISBN 0-87220-424-3
- [http://www.johnkadvany.com John Kadvany](2001). Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-2659-0
- Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ISBN 0801492033 (Fundamental read, striking commentary of Hegel)
- Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. London, 1941 (An introduction to the philosophy of Hegel, devoted to debunking the myth that Hegel's work included in nuce the Fascist totalitarianism of National Socialism; the negation of philosophy through historical materialism)
- Terry P. Pinkard, Hegel: a biography. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0521496799 (Lucid biography by a leading American Hegelian philosopher. It debunks popular misconceptions about Hegel's thought).
- Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0521379237 (interpretation that advocates the recognition of a stronger continuity between Hegel and Kant's idealism).
- Georg Lukacs, The Young Hegel. ISBN 0262120704
- Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegel's Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. ISBN 0-87220-645-9
- Charles Taylor, Hegel. Cambridge University Press, 1975. ISBN 0521291992 (A comprehensive study and singularly lucid exposition by the important Canadian philosopher of Hegel's thought and its impact on the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his own time and to some degree ours)
- Robert M. Wallace, Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-84484-3 (Argues that Hegel's major positions in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind and the will are, in fact, plausible and defensible, and defends them against influential criticisms by, among others, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Charles Taylor).

External links

- [http://wiki.hegel.net The new HegelWiki]
- [http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm Hegel by HyperText], reference archive on Marxists.org.
- [http://hegel.net Hegel.net - resources available under the GNU FDL]
- [http://wiki.hegel.net/index.php/Hegel Hegel.net - wiki article on Hegel]
- [http://hegel.net/en/hegelbio.htm Links on Hegel's life]
- [http://hegel.net/en/links.htm Commented link list]
- [http://hegel.net/en/ml.htm Hegel mailing lists in the internet]
- [http://hegel-system.de/en/ Explanation of Hegel, mostly in German]
- [http://www.kat.gr/kat/history/Mod/Th/Hegelianism.htm Discussion of the Hegelian tradition, including the Left and Right schism.]
- [http://ca.geocities.com/jazzchul2000/glossary/hegelianism.htm An extensive bibliography]
- [http://www.hegel.org/ The Hegel Society of America]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/ Hegel in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
- http://www.gwfhegel.org/
- [http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/hegel.html Hegel page in 'The History Guide']

Hegel texts online

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- [http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20-%20Philosophy%20of%20History.htm Philosophy of History Introduction] Hegel, Georg Hegel, Georg Hegel, Georg Hegel, Georg Hegel, Georg Hegel, Georg Hegel, Georg ja:ゲオルク・ヴィルヘルム・フリードリヒ・ヘーゲル ko:게오르크 빌헬름 프리드리히 헤겔 nb:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

This article is about the the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. For the American economist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Crombie Schelling see Thomas Schelling. right Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (January 27, 1775 - August 20, 1854) was a German philosopher.

Life

Schelling was born at Leonberg in Württemberg. He was first educated at the cloister school of Bebenhausen, near Tübingen, where his father was chaplain and an Orientalist professor. Three years early, he then enrolled at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he became friends with the future philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin. In 1792 he graduated from the philosophical faculty, and in 1793 contributed to Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus's Memorabilien; in 1795 he finished his thesis for his theological degree, De Marcione Paullinarum epistolarum emendatore. Meanwhile, he had begun to study Kant and Fichte. The Review of Aenesidemus and the tractate On the Notion of Wissenschaftslehre greatly influenced him. Schelling had no sooner grasped the leading ideas of Fichte's amended form of the critical philosophy than he eagerly put together his impressions of it in his Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794). Although unoriginal, his work showed such depth of appreciation for the new ideas of the Fichtean method that it was acknowledged by Fichte himself, and immediately made for Schelling a reputation among philosophical writers. His more elaborate work, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen 1798, while still remaining within the limits of the Fichtean idealism, exhibited unmistakable traces of a tendency to give the Fichtean method a more objective application, and to amalgamate Spinoza's views with it. After two years tutoring two youths of an aristocratic family, and at only 23 years of age, Schelling was called as an extraordinary professor of philosophy to Jena midsummer 1798. He had already contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Fichte and Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and had thrown himself with characteristic impetuosity into the study of physical and medical science. From 1796 date the Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus, an admirably written critique of the ultimate issues of the Kantian system; from 1797 the essay entitled Neue Deduction des Naturrechts, which to some extent anticipated Fichte's treatment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts, published in 1796, but not before Schelling's essay had been received by the editors of the Journal. His studies of physical science bore rapid fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (1798). The philosophical renown of Jena reached its culmination during the years 1798-1803, when Schelling was resident there. His intellectual sympathies united him closely with some of the most active literary tendencies of the time. With Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who viewed with interest and appreciation the poetical fashion of treating fact characteristic of the Naturphilosophie, he was on excellent terms, but on the other hand he was repelled by Friedrich Schiller's less expansive disposition, and was unsympathetic to the ethical idealism that animated Schiller's work. He soon became the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school whose impetuous litterateurs had begun to tire of the cold abstractions of Fichte. In Schelling, essentially a self-conscious genius, eager and rash, yet with undeniable power, they hailed a personality of the true Romantic type. With August Wilhelm von Schlegel and his gifted wife, Karoline, herself the embodiment of the Romantic spirit, Schelling's relations were of the most intimate kind, and a marriage between Schelling and Karoline's young daughter, Auguste Böhmer, was vaguely contemplated by both. Auguste's death in 1800 (due partly to Schelling's rash confidence in his medical knowledge) drew Schelling and Karoline together. Schlegel had removed to Berlin, and a divorce was arranged, apparently with his consent. On June 2 1803 Schelling and Karoline were married, and Schelling's time at Jena came to an end. Schelling's self-confidence had involved him in a series of disputes and quarrels at Jena, which led to his departure. From September 1803 until April 1806 Schelling was professor at the new University of Würzburg. This period was marked by considerable flux in his views and by a final breach with Fichte and with Hegel. In Würzburg, Schelling had had many enemies. He antagonized his colleagues and also the government. In Munich, to which he moved in 1806, he found a quiet residence. A position as state official, at first as associate of the academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical section of the academy of sciences, provided him ease and leisure. Without resigning his official position, he lectured for a short time at Stuttgart, and seven years at Erlangen (1820-1827). In 1809 Karoline died, and three years later Schelling married one of her closest friends, Pauline Gotter, in whom he found a faithful companion. During the long stay at Munich (1806-1841) Schelling's literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The "Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie contained in the Jahrbucher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806-1808) are for the most part extracts from the Würzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn forth by the special incident of Jacobi's work. The only writing of significance is the "Philosophische Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften. vol. i. (1809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to mysticism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophie und Religion. In 1815 appeared the tract Über die Gottheiten zu Samothrace, ostensibly a portion of a great work, Die Weltalter, frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which little was ever written. It is possible that it was the overpowering strength and influence of the Hegelian system that constrained Schelling, for it was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a preface to a translation by H. Beckers of a work by Cousin, he gave public utterance to the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian, and to his own earlier conceptions of philosophy. The antagonism certainly was not then a new fact; the Erlangen lectures on the history of philosophy of 1822 express the same in a pointed fashion, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true positive complements to the negative of logical or speculative philosophy. Public attention was powerfully attracted by these vague hints of a new system which promised something more positive, especially in its treatment of religion, than the apparent results of Hegel's teaching. For the appearance of the critical writings of Strauss, Feuerbach and Bauer, and the evident disunion in the Hegelian school itself had alienated the sympathies of many from the then dominant philosophy. In Berlin, the headquarters of the Hegelians, the desire found expression in attempts to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system which he was understood to have in reserve. The realization of the desire did not come about till 1841, when the appointment of Schelling as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university. Among his students there were Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, and Friedrich Engels. The opening lecture of his course was listened to by a large and appreciative audience. The enmity of his old foe, H.E.G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling's apparent success, led to the surreptitious publication of a verbatim report of the lectures on the philosophy of revelation, and, as Schelling did not succeed in obtaining legal condemnation and suppression of this piracy, he in 1845 ceased the delivery of any public courses. No authentic information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death (at Bad Ragatz, on the 20th of August 1854), when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures: vol. i. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii. Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv. Philosophy of Revelation (1858).

Philosophy

Whatever judgment one may form of the total worth of Schelling as a philosopher, his place in German philosophy is unmistakable and assured. It happened to him, as he himself claimed, to turn a page in the history of thought, and one cannot ignore the actual advance upon his predecessor achieved by him or the brilliant fertility of the genius by which that achievement was accomplished. On the other hand he nowhere succeeds in attaining to a complete scientific system. His philosophical writings are the successive manifestations of a restless highly endowed spirit, striving unsuccessfully after a solution of its own problems. Such unity as they possess is a unity of tendency and endeavour; in some respects the final form they assumed is the least satisfactory. Hence it has come about that Schelling remains for the philosophic student but a moment of historical value in the development of thought, and that his works have for the most part ceased now to have more than historic interest. It is fair to connect the apparent failings of Schelling's philosophizing with the historical accidents of his career. In his early writings, for example, more particularly those making up 'Naturphilosophie', one finds in painful abundance the evidences of hastily acquired knowledge, impatience at the prospect of the hard labour and requisite minute thought, over-confidence in the force of individual genius, and desire to instantaneously present even in the crudest fashion the newest idea which has dawned upon the thinker. Schelling was prematurely thrust into the position of a foremost productive thinker; and when the lengthened period of quiet meditation was at last forced upon him, there unfortunately lay before him a system which achieved what had dimly been involved in his ardent and impetuous desires. It is not possible to acquit Schelling of a certain disingenuousness in regard to the Hegelian philosophy; and if we claim for him perfect disinterestedness of view we must accuse him of deficient insight. At all stages of his thought he called to his aid the forms of some other system. Thus Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the mystics, and finally, the great Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give respectively colouring to particular works. But Schelling did not merely borrow, he had genuine philosophic spirit and no small measure of philosophic insight, and under all the differences of exposition which seem to constitute so many differing systems, there is one and the same philosophic effort and spirit. But what Schelling did want was power to work out his ideas methodically. Hence he could only find expression for himself in forms of this or that earlier philosophy, and hence too the frequent formlessness of his own thought, the tendency to relapse into mere impatient despair of ever finding an adequate vehicle for transmitting thought. It is fair in dealing with Schelling's development to take into account the indications of his own opinion regarding its more significant momenta. In his own view the turning points seem to have been: #the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature-- the advance, in other words, to Naturphilosophie #the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, that is, the thought of the identical, indifferent, absolute substratum of both nature and spirit, the advance to Identitatsphilosophie; #the opposition of negative and positive philosophy, an opposition which is the theme of the Berlin lectures, though its germs may be traced back to 1804. Only what falls under the first and second of the divisions so indicated can be said to have discharged a function in developing philosophy; only so much constitutes Schelling's philosophy proper.

Bibliography

Selected works are listed below. For a more complete listing, see [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schelling/#Bib this page].
- Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794) (On the Possibility of an Absolute Form of Philosophy), Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795) (Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge), Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (1795) (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism) in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four early essays 1794-6 (1980) translation and commentary by F. Marti, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
- Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft (1797) Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1988) translated by E.E. Harris and P. Heath, introduction R. Stern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800) System of Transcendental Idealism (1978) translated by P. Heath, introduction M. Vater, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
- Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge (1802) Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things (1984) translated with an introduction by M. Vater, Albany: State University of New York Press.
- Philosophie der Kunst (1802-3) The Philosophy of Art (1989) Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.
- Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803) On University Studies (1966) translated E.S. Morgan, edited N. Guterman, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
- Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809) Of Human Freedom (1936) a translation with critical introduction and notes by J. Gutmann, Chicago: Open Court.
- Die Weltalter (1811-15). The Ages of the World (1967) translated with introduction and notes by F. de W. Bolman, jr., New York: Columbia University Press. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (1997), trans. Judith Norman, with an essay by Slavoj Zizek, Anne Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
- Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1815) Schelling's Treatise on ‘The Deities of Samothrace’ (1977) a translation and introduction by R.F. Brown, Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press.
- Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (probably 1833-4) On the History of Modern Philosophy (1994) translation and introduction by A. Bowie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schelling/ Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
- [http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Schelling.htm Links to texts]
- [http://radicalacademy.com/philschelling.htm Article on Schelling] Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von ko:프리드리히 셸링 ja:フリードリヒ・シェリング

Arguments for the existence of God

Many arguments for the existence of God have been made over the years.

Arguments for the necessity of God

These arguments can be classified under two headings. First are the strictly logical or metaphysical arguments; these arguments seek to prove that the existence of a being with at least one attribute that only God could have is logically necessary.

Metaphysical arguments

The chief such arguments are:
- The Cosmological argument, which argues that God must have been around at the start of things in order to be the "first cause".
- The Mathematical argument defines God as the Absolute Infinite, a mathematical concept.
- The Ontological argument, based on arguments about the "being greater than which nothing can be conceived".
- The Pantheistic argument defines God as All; it is similar to panentheism and cosmology.

Empirical arguments

Other arguments avail themselves of data beyond definitions and axioms. Some of these arguments require only that one assume that a non-random universe able to support life exists. Others are more strongly tied to the testimony of certain witnesses or the propositions of a specific revealed religion. These arguments include:
- The Teleological argument, which argues that since the universe is (superficially) non-random, it must have been designed by an intelligent designer, i.e. God.
- The Anthropic argument focuses on basic facts, such as our existence, to prove God.
- Witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and throughout the ages.
- The religious or Christological argument is specific to religions such as Christianity. An example would be the assertion that the life of Jesus as written in the New Testament establishes his credibility, so we can believe the truth of his statements about God.
- The Majority argument: people in all times and in different places have believed in God, so it is unlikely that he does not exist.
- The Moral argument argues that morality cannot exist without God.
- The Anthropological argument, which argues that our conception of perfection can only be possible if such perfection exists.
- The Transcendental argument, which argues that logic, science, ethics, and other good things don't make sense if there is no God. Therefore, arguments against the existence of God must ultimately refute themselves if pressed with rigorous consistency.

Arguments for the belief in God

There are innumerable informal arguments for belief in God. Some, for example, claim to have had personal experiences with God, or revelations. Some attribute to God miraculous healings, and striking insights gained in response to prayer, worship, or other spiritual circumstances. And some attribute the manner in which events in their lives have unfolded, or fortuitous circumstances in their lives, to the influence of God. There are also formal arguments for the belief in God. Perhaps the most famous is Pascal's Wager: Rather than arguing that God exists, Pascal seeks to show that belief in God is the best and safest "bet".
- The Argument from a Proper Basis argues that belief in God is "properly basic"--that is, similar to statements such as "I see a chair" or "I feel pain." Such beliefs are non-falsifiable and, thus, neither able to be proved nor disproved; they concern perceptual beliefs or indisputable mental states.

The theological status of the arguments

The theological standing of arguments for the existence of God is also subject to some debate among believers. Within the Christian tradition there are two sharply opposed viewpoints. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, following the Thomist tradition of St Thomas Aquinas, affirms that it is a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church that God's existence can in fact be rationally demonstrated. Other Christians in different denominations hold similar views. On the other hand, some believers hold a contrary position. These believers note that the Christian faith teaches salvation is by faith, and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God, which has little to do with the believer's ability to comprehend that in which he trusts. In other words, if Christian theology is true, then God's existence can never be demonstrated, either by empirical means or by philosophical argument. The most extreme example of this position is called

The Absolute

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

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Arguments for the existence of God

Arguments for the necessity of God

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Arguments for the belief in God

The theological status of the arguments