The absence of any reference to belief in my statements on knowledge and knowing will be immediately noticed. The absence is intended, and though rare today in discussions of knowledge it is by no means unique in the history of the theory of knowledge. … Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well-known analysis of knowledge as “justified, true belief.” But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, an be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.
More Christians than ever before are studying and working in music, painting, sculpture, theater, television, film, architecture and more. Are you one of them? If so, you, like artists in every discipline, face the challenge of working in a way that is both wholly Christian and wholly contemporary. Hilary Brand and Adrienne Chaplin have written this practical and inspirational guide for you. In Art and Soul you’ll find encouragement for developing a Christian worldview from which you can approach your craft. Here the best teaching on Christianity and the arts during the past fifty years is digested and reapplied, supported by a wealth of quotes from artists, critics and Christian thinkers. A wide range of illustrations, both historical and contemporary, illuminates the text as Brand and Chaplin explore the conflicting influences on Christians entering or working in the arts. They correlate the major biblical themes of creation, fall and redemption to the business of making art. And they examine the nature and purpose of the arts — along with the way you experience and interpret them. Finally, you’ll find helpful guidelines on practicing and developing your art. Here is the book to help you meet the challenges facing you today — both from the world of art and from the world of the church.
Prisoner 174517 was thirsty. Seeing a fat icicle hanging just outside his hut in the Auschwitz extermination camp, he reached out of the window and broke it off to quench his thirst. But before he could get the icicle to his mouth, a guard snatched it out of his hands and dashed it to pieces on the filthy ground. “Warum?” the prisoner burst out instinctively — “Why?” “Hier ist kein warum,” the guard answered with brutal finality — “Here there is no why.” ¶ That for Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish scientist and writer, was the essence of the death camps — places not only of unchallengable, arbitrary authority but of absolute evil that defied all explanation. In the face of such wickedness, explanations born of psychology, sociology, and economics were pathetic in their inadequacy. One could only shoulder the weight of such an experience and bear witness to the world. “Never again” was too confident an assertion. You never know was the needed refrain.
Intellectuals are inclined to think that they are certified as intellectuals by virtue of their capacity to complexify, and the messiness of history is such that any conflict provides ample opportunities to highlight evidence contrary to the general truth. In the present war and the larger story of which it is part, I continue to believe that America is — on balance and considering the alternatives — a force for good in the world. And I continue to be impressed by how many otherwise sensible people criticize that proposition as an instance of uncritical chauvinism rather than the carefully nuanced moral judgment that it is.
One could retreat to a mere methodological naturalism and say that scientific method is our only hope as human beings. Whether or not we can adequately specify naturalism or know it to be true, one might say, the “scientific method” must be exclusively followed for human well-being. Naturalism would then be a humane proposal, not a philosophical claim. The proposal would be to assume in our inquiries that only the physical (or the empirical) exists and to see if inquiry based upon that assumption is not more successful in promoting human ends than any other type of inquiry.
I take knowledge in the dispositional sense to be identical with the capacity to represent a respective subject matter as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and/or experience. In the occurrent sense it consists in actually representing, at a point in time, the respective subject matter as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and/or experience. This is not intended as an analysis or definition of knowledge, but as an initial description of cases which count as knowledge or knowing.
Here is the thesis of this paper. Morality as we are familiar with it in our culture originally made sense against the background of a set of beliefs and practices in traditional theism. In elite Western culture these beliefs and practices have now been widely abandoned. The result is that morality no longer makes sense within that culture the way it once did. There are two problem areas in particular that I will stress. The first is the gap between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to meet it. This gap produces the question: Can we be morally good? The second problem area is the source of the authority of morality. This produces the question: Why should we be morally good? The traditional answer to these questions has been that God enables us to live in the way we should, and that we should live that way because God calls us to live that way. I will be looking at various kinds of incoherence that arise when these traditional answers are no longer available. [Also see, “Can We Be Good With God?”]
Happiness isn’t impossible to describe. But, paradoxically, no one can listen to descriptions of happiness for long. Compare Dante’s Inferno with Dante’s Paradiso. Dante’s beloved Beatrice would have died of boredom if he had tried reading to her from Paradiso rough drafts. On a less exalted plane, let any huggy-lovey couple show you their honeymoon slides.
“Aesthetics” and “theological aesthetics” usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts: only the final pages of this work take up that problem. The central theme of the book is beauty. The author employs a new typology of western texts on beauty and a theological analysis of the image of God and redemption to counter the centuries-long tendency to ignore or marginalize beauty and the aesthetic as part of the life of faith. Studying the interpretation of beauty in ancient Greece, 18th-century England, the work of Jonathan Edwards, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophies of human self-transcendence, the author explores whether Christian existence, the life of faith, and the ethical exlude or require an aesthetic dimension in the sense of beauty.
After a lifetime of writing and editing prose, Jacques Barzun has set down his view of the best ways to improve one’s style. His discussions of diction, syntax, tone, meaning, composition, and revision guide the reader through the technique of making the written word clear and agreeable to read. Exercises, model passages both literary and casual, and hundreds of amusing examples of usage gone wrong show how to choose the right path to self-expression in forceful and distinctive words. ~ Product Description • Rare is the book that causes one to consider — ponder? appraise? examine? inspect? contemplate? — one’s every word. Simple & Direct, a classic text on the craft of writing by the educator Jacques Barzun, does so — with style. His object, says Barzun, is "to resensitize the mind to words." Do not use a word unless you know both its meaning and its connotations, its "quality" and its "atmosphere," and the ways in which it joins with other words. Barzun is an exacting taskmaster, railing against abstractions, "fancy" wordings, contemporary slang (which "prey[s] upon the vocabulary rather than nourish[es] it"), misprints ("it is rudeness to let them appear"), and the like. He bemoans what he sees as "a fury at work in the people to make war on hyphens," and he loathes those new words, such as condominium, that have been "cobbled together out of shavings and leftovers." Still, no stodgy codger he. Barzun merely asks that you "have a point and make it by means of the best word." If that means splitting an infinitive or substituting a "which" for a "that," so be it. Just be sure that the decision to do so is conscious and informed. Once you’ve found the right word, you can move on to writing sentences and then leaning them against one another until they form paragraphs. Only when you’ve gotten it all down, says Barzun, should you allow yourself the pleasure of revision. "Unlike the sculptor," he says, "the writer can start carving and enjoying himself only after he has dug the marble out of his own head." ~ Jane Steinberg