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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Metaphysics & ontology
The philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870-c. 950 CE) is a key
Arabic intermediary figure. He knew Aristotle, and in particular
Aristotle's logic, through Greek Neoplatonist interpretations
translated into Arabic via Syriac and possibly Persian. For
example, he revised a general description of Aristotle's logic by
the 6th century Paul the Persian, and further influenced famous
later philosophers and theologians writing in Arabic in the 11th to
12th centuries: Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Avempace and Averroes.
Averroes' reports on Farabi were subsequently transmitted to the
West in Latin translation. This book is an abridgement of
Aristotle's Prior Analytics, rather than a commentary on successive
passages. In it Farabi discusses Aristotle's invention, the
syllogism, and aims to codify the deductively valid arguments in
all disciplines. He describes Aristotle's categorical syllogisms in
detail; these are syllogisms with premises such as 'Every A is a B'
and 'No A is a B'. He adds a discussion of how categorical
syllogisms can codify arguments by induction from known examples or
by analogy, and also some kinds of theological argument from
perceived facts to conclusions lying beyond perception. He also
describes post-Aristotelian hypothetical syllogisms, which draw
conclusions from premises such as 'If P then Q' and 'Either P or
Q'. His treatment of categorical syllogisms is one of the first to
recognise logically productive pairs of premises by using
'conditions of productivity', a device that had appeared in the
Greek Philoponus in 6th century Alexandria.
The Holy Science is a book of theology written by Swami Sri Yukteswar
Giri in 1894. The text provides a close comparison of parts of the
Christian Bible to the Hindu Upanishads, meant "to show as clearly as
possible that there is an essential unity in all religions...and that
there is but one Goal admitted by all scriptures."
Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri was born Priya Nath Karar in 1855 to a wealthy
family. As a young man, he was a brilliant student of math and science,
astrology and astronomy. He joined a Christian missionary school where
he studied the Bible and later spent two years in medical school.
After completing his formal education, Priya Nath married and had a
daughter. But he continued his intellectual and spiritual pursuits,
depending on the income from his property to support himself and his
family.
After the death of his wife, he entered the monastic Swami order and
became Sri Yuktesvar Giri, before becoming a disciple of famed guru
Lahiri Mahasaya, known for his revitalization of Kriya Yoga. Then in
1894, Sri Yuktesvar Giri met Mahavatar Babaji, an ageless wise man who
is said to have lived for untold hundreds of years. At this meeting,
Mahavatar Babaji gave Sri Yuktesvar the title of Swami, and asked him
to write this book comparing Hindu scriptures and the Christian Bible.
Swami Sri Yuktesvar obeyed.
He also founded two ashrams, including one in his ancestral home. He
lived simply as a swami and yogi, devoted to disciplining his body and
mind, and thus to liberating his soul. Among his disciples was
Paramahansa Yogananda, credited with bringing yoga and meditation to
millions of Westerners.
The Holy Science consists of four chapters. The first is titled "The
Gospel," and is intended to "establish the fundamental truth of
creation." Next is "The Goal," which discusses the three things all
creatures are seeking: "Existence, Consciousness, and Bliss."
Chapter three, "The Procedure," is the most practical of the sections.
It describes the natural way to live for purity and health of body and
mind. The final chapter is called "The Revelation," and discusses the
end of the path for those who are near the "three ideals of life."
Swami Sri Yukteswar also displays his impressive knowledge and
understanding of astrology by proposing his theory of the Yuga Cycle.
Each yuga is an age of the world that tracks the movement of the sun,
Earth, and planets. Each age represents a different state of humanity.
There are four yugas:
- Satya Yuga is the highest and most enlightened age of truth and
perfection.
- Treta Yuga is the age of thought and is more spiritually advanced
than Dwapara Yuga and Kali Yuga.
- Dwapara Yuga is an energetic age, although not a wise one. During
this yuga, people are often self-serving and greedy. The age is marked
by war and disease.
- Kali Yuga is the age of darkness, ignorance, and materialism. This is
the least evolved age.
Today, The Holy Science is highly respected among those seeking to
understand the relationships between world religions and cultures.
While some still believe that we are in Kali Yuga, many others believe
that Swami Sri Yukteswar was accurate, and that his calculations
correct previous errors that artificially inflated the length of the
Yuga Cycle.
Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney
examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary
oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their
shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes
the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that
the representations that make up the world of appearances are
inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their
problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more
fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence.
According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images
will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as
if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and
the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as
Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to
expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the
fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving
away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels,
sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span
of Genet's work, from his early novels to the
posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with
psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet,
Lacan and our wanting being.
This book proposes a bold idea. Living beings are distinguishing
distinctions. Single cells and multicellular organisms maintain
themselves distinct by drawing distinctions. This
is what organisms are and what they do.
From this starting point, key issues examined range across
ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, logic, and ethics. Topics
discussed include the origin of life, the nature and purpose of
biology, the relation between life and logic, the nature and limits
of formal logic, the nature of subjects, the subject-object
relation, subject-subject relationships and the deep roots of
ethics. The book provides a radical new foundation to think about
philosophy and biology and appeals to researchers and students in
these fields. It powerfully debunks mechanical thinking about
living beings and shows the vast reservoir of insights into
aliveness available in the arts and humanities. Â Â
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