Displaying: 1-20 of 121 documents

0.138 sec

1. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Thomas A. F. Kelly Editor's Introduction
2. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
John J. Cleary Timaeus 47-68: Filling the Democritean Void
3. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
James McEvoy Foreword
4. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Michael Dunne Some Early Fourteenth-Century Views at Oxford on Time, Motion and Infinity
5. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
James McEvoy Early Humanists and the Ideal of Friendship: Erasmus and More
6. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Anne Mette Maria Lebech What is Bio-ethics?
7. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Thomas A. F. Kelly Hume and Causality: Towards Substituting a 'Juster Definition': From a work in progress
8. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
James McGuirk A Reading of the Speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium
9. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Éamonn Gaines The Metaphysics of Personhood: a Defence
10. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Paul McLaughlin An Outline of Anarchism
11. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Daniel Shine Process, Personal Identity and the Other
12. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 1
Kevin O'Reilly Beauty and the Transcendentals in the Thought of Aquinas
13. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
Philipp W. Rosemann By Way of Introduction: A Note on Our Cover
14. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
Philipp W. Rosemann The Creative Word: Reflections on the Augustinian Episteme
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Book XI of his Confessions contains Augustine’s celebrated ‘treatise’ on time. In reality, however, the ‘treatise’ is no such thing, but rather an integral part of a discussion of God’s creation through the Word: if God creates by speaking, as Scripture affirms, then how can God speak, given the fact that he must be thought not to be subject to time? What is a timeless word? While these are the questions that Augustine explicitly addresses in Book XI, there is something very important that he does not justify at all: namely, the possibility of speaking the world into existence. My paper investigates the episteme within which such a claim can make sense. How must one conceive of the relationship between the world and words to be able to assume that the latter can ‘make’ the former?
15. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
Jeffrey P. Bishop Building Moral Brains: Moral Bioenhancement and the Being of Technology
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Technology is evolving at a rate faster than human evolution, especially human moral evolution. There are those who claim that we must morally bioenhance the human due to existential threats (such as climate change and the looming possibility of cognitive enhancement) and due to the fact that the human animal has a weak moral will. To address these existential threats, we must design human morality into human beings technologically. By moral bioenhancement, these authors mean that we must intervene technologically in the biology of the human animal in order to get it to behave morally to address these existential threats. I will bring the idea of moral bioenhancement into conversation with two philosophers of technology. Bernard Stiegler has argued that technology and culture, and thus technology and human beings, have always evolved hand in hand. Peter-Paul Verbeek notes that we have always designed morality into technology, and thus he sees technology as mediating human morality. When we offload human intentionality onto technology, Verbeek argues, technological objects and systems participate in shaping the moral subjectivity of the human actor. I will show that modern technological bioenhancement obliterates human being. Whereas in the past, human culture was handed from generation to generation through the mediation of technology, in the modern era, the human becomes the raw material upon which a technological will (imperative) rides.
16. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
William Desmond Wording Time. On Augustine’s Confessions XI: Transcriptions, Variations, Improvisations
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Rather than abstracting Augustine’s exploration of time from the whole of the Confessions, as philosophers have been tempted to do, I take up his exploration in terms of what I call a ‘companioning relation’ between philosophy and theology. There is a porosity between religion/theology and philosophy in Augustine that need not be taken as a philosophical or theological deficiency. This reflection speaks of Augustine’s intentions and intuitions in terms of the theme: Wording Time. How might one word this wording, and how might Augustine’s approach to time be thus illuminated? I approach the question in different stages, dealing first with theological, ontological, and psychological considerations. Then I follow the breadth of Augustine’s concerns to a sense of sacred heterogeneities that yet are deeply intimate, and to a sense of time that is in communication with what is above time. In keeping with the musical motif that runs through this reflection, I offer some thoughts on agapē as not only an agapē sonans but an agapē personans. I will sometimes be transcribing Augustine’s themes, sometimes offering variations on them, and sometimes composing improvisations in tune with Augustinian themes.
17. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
Philip J. P. Gonzales Violence and the Exception of Christian Revelation: René Girard and Giorgio Agamben in Conversation with Benedict XVI
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
If violence is not the exception but the nomos under which we live, how can one gain a view of violence from outside the regime of violence and the history of its effects? This essay argues that the only way to confront the regime of violence’s history is to have recourse to a Judeo-Christian understanding of revelation and its exceptional non-violent message. A Christocentric philosophy of history, of broadly Augustinian contours, is presented which seeks to confront the nomos of violence with the Logos of peace. The enactment of this Christocentric perspective will be accomplished via a confrontation between René Girard and Giorgio Agamben read in view of their respective engagements with the thought of Benedict XVI.
18. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
James McEvoy, Mette Lebech Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem: A Latin Liturgical Source Contributing to the Conceptualization History of Human Dignity
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
This article explores the history of the prayer Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem as a contribution to the conceptualization history of human dignity. It is argued that the prayer can be traced back to pre-Carolingian times, that it forms part of an early tradition of reflection on human dignity, and that it was adapted to use at the offertory, such that an association was made between human dignity and the holy exchange of gifts. In this way, the prayer significantly shaped the Christian concept of human dignity as the holy ‘place’ of commerce with God.
19. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 10
John Milbank The Confession of Time in Augustine
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can be resolved if it is understood that he regarded cosmic time and the finite things it engenders as being of itself, in some sense, both psychic and self-recording. This interpretation holds whether or not Augustine affirms a world soul. It is justifiable in terms of the continued applicability of his earlier liberal-arts writings to his later texts and his blending of Plotinian vitalism, Porphyrian spiritualism, and his own ‘theurgism’ (especially in his commentary on the Psalms), which is parallel to that of Iamblichus. Augustine’s ‘musical ontology’, which is also a metaphysics of number, word, and seminal reason, leads him to develop a theory of time and memory that anticipates more the spiritual realism of Bergson than it does idealist and phenomenological philosophies. However, for Augustine, time as an image of eternity remains aporetic, and its aporia is ‘resolved’ only by the Incarnation and its sustaining as the liturgical and political community of the Church. Through Christological, and not just angelic, mediation, our memories and expectations truly reach to past and future realities, just as our intentions reach to really located things, but only because all of these are both inherently psychic/intellectual and sustained by the divine eternity.
20. Maynooth Philosophical Papers: Volume > 11
D. Vincent Twomey SVD Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address and the Role of Theology in the University
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Ever since his inaugural lecture as professor in 1959, Joseph Ratzinger has been engaged with the intellectual crisis of our times. Reason, he argues, has been reduced to what can be quantitatively assessed. Such a self-limitation of reason, he contends, has had, and continues to have, serious negative consequences for European civilization and its global outreach. Returning to his former university as Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, he used the occasion to give a lecture on the relationship between faith and reason, and how each needs the other. His main thesis was to demonstrate the indispensable role of theology as an academic discipline on the university: namely, to keep reason open to what is beyond reason and so to ensure that reason and its artifacts—science and technology—remain truly human, serve humanity, and do not destroy it.