1,720,977 research outputs found
Majesty and poverty of metaphysics: the journey from the meaning of being to mysticism in the life and philosophy of Jacques Maritain
Get PDFThis study is concerned with the spiritual impetus and the lived dimension of
the philosophy of the French Thomist Jacques Maritain in light of John
Caputo’s Heideggerian critique of Thomist metaphysics. In Heidegger and
Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics, Caputo argues that the
thought of Thomas Aquinas, probably the most important and most
representative figure of orthodox Catholic thinking, is a paradigmatic case of
what Martin Heidegger calls ‘ontotheology’. This is the dominating tendency of
Western philosophy and theology to view Being not as a mystery, but
metaphysically as a mere collection of things which are simply present—
external to the human being and the value of which is use. For Aquinas,
according to Caputo, God is the highest ‘being’ that creates other ‘beings’, and
it is in virtue of this relationship that human beings, allegedly made in God’s
image, view the world simply as a collection of things to be manipulated. The
first question constituting this study’s point of departure, then, is: if Aquinas is
indeed an exemplar of ontotheological thinking, is the same true of Jacques
Maritain, perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential follower and
interpreter of Thomas Aquinas?
Yet in the same work Caputo also proclaims that what has been said is
not the whole truth about Aquinas, and the argument that his thought is an
instance of ontotheology is in fact what Caputo sets out to respond to—for the
sake of recovering an Aquinas who was not a ‘cold rationalist’, but a spiritually
gifted contemplative, a Catholic saint. Caputo makes the case that we can, by
employing a method of ‘retrieval’ or ‘deconstruction’—inspired by Heidegger
and Jacques Derrida—find that which is hidden or left ‘unthought’ in Aquinas
but which nevertheless determines his entire philosophical and religious life.
This, Caputo argues, is a pre-metaphysical, mystical tendency directed
towards the mystery of being, which overcomes metaphysics and escapes
ontotheology. Here I apply this Heideggerian critique and retrieval to Maritain,
and I argue that while there is in Maritain the same ‘ontotheological’ tendency
to view reality as a collection of things and God as paradigmatic maker of
things—the prima causa so richly expressed in Thomistic doctrines of the
‘transcendentals’ and participative being—there is in him a deep pre-metaphysical,
mystical tendency which is, in fact, far more explicit than in
Aquinas.
In the first part of the study, I compare the philosophical doctrines and
projects of Maritain and his first teacher and guide, Henri Bergson, and then of
Heidegger in relation to Maritain. I also give a sketch of Maritain’s religious and
intellectual development, identifying the key religious and artistic figures
involved: the novelist Léon Bloy and the painter Georges Rouault. In light of
the philosophical analyses and what can be gleaned from Maritain’s
biographical notes, his correspondence, and the biographical insights provided
by those close to him, I argue that we can see in Maritain the same concern
for the question of the meaning of being in relation to human life that we find
in Heidegger, and that, like Heidegger, this concern underlies his philosophical
thought and serves as the impetus for something beyond philosophy. I show
that from his Bergsonian beginnings to his later days as a Little Brother of
Jesus, Maritain has a profound sense of the pre-conceptual and intuitive kinds
of knowledge that we find in existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, and also
artists and mystics. I posit that while Maritain claims what he calls the ‘intuition
of being’ is the most primordial experience human beings can have of ultimate
reality, there is, in fact, an experience, or aspiration to have such an
experience, which is even more basic, with greater implications for overcoming
metaphysics and ontotheology: mystical communion with ultimate reality. The
aspiration for such communion is, I claim, the ‘unthought’ in Maritain that must
be sought out for the purpose of retrieving a Maritain who goes beyond
metaphysics.
Mapping out the main branches of Maritain’s thinking about being in
terms of the classical doctrine of the ‘transcendentals’ and corresponding
instances of connatural knowledge, the second part of the study is devoted to
finding where, in Maritain’s thought, a retrieval might be possible. Examining
Maritain’s conceptions of the connatural experience-knowledge of the moral
good and mystical experience, I conclude that we cannot discover any
overcoming of metaphysics and ontotheology in either when they are taken on
their own terms. For underlying both conceptions, I claim, is Maritain’s ‘master
concept’ of the ‘act of existence’, or esse, the metaphysical principle which
makes it possible for the human being to take hold of their own existence and
participate in the moral and divine life. The distinction between esse and the
essence of beings (essentia) and a stress on the former, as Caputo argues
with regard to Aquinas, in fact only supports Heidegger’s thesis on the
ontotheological character of Thomist thought. For a stress on esse, the
principle by which God creates and sustains things in existence is only the
outcome of a preoccupation with conceiving God primarily as the ‘maker’ of
things. And what of esse when it comes to mystical experience? Mystical
experience, Maritain says, is that of which metaphysical wisdom ‘awakens a
desire’ even while it is unable to attain it, such that the testimony of it, such as
that provided by St. John of the Cross, ‘no philosophical commentary will ever
efface’. Yet here, too, esse only serves to make an unbridgeable ontological
and cognitive divide between God as viewed in terms of His causal
transcendence and as an intentional object of consciousness, as presence—
something or someone external to oneself. This is so even as one is, in virtue
of the connatural experience-knowledge of love, united with Him in ‘one spirit’,
as Maritain says, following St. John of the Cross.
Given this, I seek a retrieval of Maritain elsewhere, in the richest and
most original areas of his thought: the connatural experience-knowledge of the
artist and the relationship between the artist and the mystic. For Maritain, true
artists and mystics are not concerned with reducing reality to manageable
chunks but with expressing the mystery of reality, and, as I demonstrate in the
final two chapters, it is when the vocations of the Catholic artist and the
Catholic mystic converge in Maritain’s reflections—in the cases of Léon Bloy,
St. John of the Cross, and Maritain’s wife Raïssa—that we are able to retrieve
a Maritain that, while very much remaining a Catholic philosopher, is also a
mystic. I claim that it is when his thought is situated in its wider existential and
religious context that Maritain as both thinker and contemplative escapes the
charge of ontotheology because there exists in him a primordial and utterly
determining mystical aspiration to experience a communion in love with
ultimate reality, best expressed in terms of poetic and mystical language,
rather than the metaphysical language of Thomist philosophy. Essential in
demonstrating this are events in Maritain’s life as well as people—artists and
mystics—who reveal the mystery of Being to him. Toward the end of the study,
I claim that this immanent mysticism in Maritain—which, unlike that of Caputo’s
retrieved Aquinas—balances apophatic and cataphatic elements and, as such,
is complex and profound enough to render the categories of contemporary
debate on the nature of mysticism and mystical experience in need of revision
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Haynes, Anthony
No full textSee entry in Bullock County, volume 2, page 43: https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voter1867/id/79
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Haynes, Anthony
No full textSee entry in Bullock County, volume 1, page 7: https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voter1867/id/53
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
