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Introduction The primary assumption of this study is that there exists a uniquely human selfhood. Consequently, the subsequent assumption, that there are structural and phenomenological similarities in the selves of all persons, necessarily follows. A model of the self which is able to explain a number of different experiences of selfhood will be the one…
The Science and Religion Dialogue as Natural Philosophy My topic today is “natural philosophy” and the various meanings associated with that term. Many will recognize the term natural philosophy from the history of science, for it is the name of the activity that the luminaries of the Scientific Revolution understood themselves to be undertaking. For…
Models of the methodological relation of science and religion Today the science-religion dialogue is getting more and more important in academic discussion. Methodologically, there seem to be three possibilities how the relationship between science and religion can be sketched: a) Science and religion can directly interact with each other. Both domains share basic presuppositions and…
Poetic visions often passed on from age to age through rote repetition. In our own times, not many learn to recite by rote a verse of even a dozen lines. But all the lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey were once transmitted from generation to generation through their imprints on human memory. Hundreds of…
“Life is a game.” People interpret the parallel between life and games in two ways. The most common implies that like a game, life is no big deal, so you should just relax. This notion can be a comfort when you’re feeling stressed—stressed, in fact by the other way to take the statement: that in…
Whether it is the joy or the despair of love, the celebration of life or the gloom of grief, whether it is anger or anguish or mirth or moaning, every state of the human heart and every mode of the human condition has been brought to words by the poet’s pen. When we read…
“Don’t say I don’t care. I do care.” Like many words, care means different kinds of things. It has its descriptive meaning–its denotation: Caring is a certain kind of behavior. But it also has its prescriptive meaning–its connotation: Caring is good. You should care. Being uncaring is bad. Combining denotation and connotation you get a…
Among the many capacities of the human brain are imagination and creativity. The two are not unrelated. If imagination is the brain’s ability to bring forth for our mental perception objects and events that are not in our immediate vicinity, creativity conjures up entities that are endowed with charm and beauty, even meaning and substance…
“I can’t believe how closed-minded he is.” We might conclude that the person who says this is pretty open-minded. After all the more open-minded one is, the less one is able to believe how closed-minded other people can be, right? Not necessarily. For three reasons, it’s easier to detect others’ closed-mindedness than one’s own. First,…
From the perspective of traditional religions, life-forms were invariably created very soon after the creation of the physical world. Here is another context in which science differs radically in its view of biogenesis. For, per current science, it was only billions of years after cosmogenesis that biogenesis occurred. In the remote past, more than three…