I feel like talking a little theology. Razib, would you boil down the idea of the ‘god of the philosophers’ in layman’s terms? And explain how, in theory, this god is ideologically and functionally different from a religious deity?
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razib 8:16 pm on May 28, 2009 Permalink |
Razib, would you boil down the idea of the ‘god of the philosophers’ in layman’s terms? And explain how, in theory, this god is ideologically and functionally different from a religious deity?
lol. this is a big cookie, ain’t it? i guess all i would say is the classic, ‘it all starts with plato.’ philosophers have a hard time agreeing on anything, so obviously they disagree on the particulars, but i guess to me it has more to do with how you talk about god. despite disagreements philosophers tend to use the same semantic currency, various abstract categories which fit together in a jigsaw puzzle, and so forth. you use words like ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ with the god of the philosophers. words like pantheism, monism, dualism, panentheism, etc. all get used pro & con. so to me it seems a way of talking about the issue. i know that some religions, such as sunni islam and some radical sects of protestantism (as well as mormonism) reject the greek philosophy which catholic and orthodox christianity accept wholeheartedly, but i think religious professionals in most ‘higher religions’ basically engage in philosophy even if it isn’t in greek terms (in fact, the ostensibly anti-philosophical stance of some monotheists buys into the general framework in my opinion by even engaging as a negation).
as for the god which i would assert most believers in the world conceptualize in their day to day life, i think that that’s more a concrete supernatural person, as opposed to an abstract entity. this concrete supernatural person invariant cross-culturally. and adherents of religions which notionally avow a transcendent god and those which notionally reject personal gods seem to still operationally behave with the supernatural person in the background.
BuzzK 3:16 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
Ishraghi Philosophers have tried to integrate philosophical and religious ‘gods’ with some success (Suhrawardi). I am hoping to receive a book from Australia I ordered off Alibris that a disciple of Seyyed Hosein Nasr wrote about Mulla Sadra’s attempt to describe the fusion of revelation, mystical insight and philosophical speculation. The author, Dr. Zailan Moris, is Indonesian I think and she is sort of a new scholar in the Nasr, Frithjof Schuon tradition.
razib 3:42 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
hm. i’ve read about schuon & nasr and their traditionalist outlook. there are some interesting outcomes, but i’m generally skeptical of their methodologies and presuppositions. i really don’t think they can be ‘integrated’ in any natural way because what i’m talking about are different forms of cognition. you can form analogies to bridge them these forms of course.
BuzzK 3:56 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
Revelation (wahi), Mystical Insight (Irfan) and Philosophical Speculation (Hikmat) are different forms of cognition. Of course. That is the whole trick of these scholars
writings (Suhrawardi, Sadra): to see if they can explain how these different routes of knowledge can coexist and not contradict or collide.
razib 4:37 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
i guess what i’m trying to say is that on some level (the material neurological one) coexistence, contradiction or collision isn’t really an issue. it’s like saying 4 contradicts red, but is coexistent with a buzzing sound
the dissonance is, i think, a function of the fact that our prefrontal cortex, our explicit conscious mind, ties to tie everything together into one system.
BuzzK 11:56 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink
Granted. On the physical level, the topic of multiple intelligences isn’t so contentious. But the subject is a little theology. The Unseen by physical eyes. When speculatively describing ‘heaven,’ ‘hell,’ ‘eternity,’ ’salvation,’ etc. this is where it gets complicated. Can we use the same tools we use to describe motion of bodies in space and how to grow wheat to debate the Physical Ascension (Miraj)?
So you have a debate with a lot of history from Muslim influenced by Aristotle and Plato to Al-Ghazali who rejected those methods to Ibn Rushd who rejected the rejection.
To my thinking, the whole debate gets to the center of what it means to Muslim.
Ergo Ratio 7:54 pm on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
Isn’t it the job of the person speaking on behalf of the religious deity to explain why it is congruent with the philosophical deity? And not the philosopher’s job to explain why it is not?