Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0004
G. Flood
This chapter examines the vitalism entailed in Vedic sacrifice, the Axial transformation of that theme in the Upaniṣads, and the philosophies that attempted to categorize and analyse life into specific components. Finally, we will see how a full philosophy of life comes to articulation in the tantric traditions. All these modes of thinking and practice were deeply concerned about offering repair, correcting ignorance and giving relief from the constant suffering entailed by life, and the desire for life that has so often been negatively evaluated in this history. The chapter examines the earliest sources that articulate some understanding of the category of life itself in terms of sacrifice, namely the Vedic scriptures, and goes on to discuss medieval Brahmanism, the tantric traditions, and modernity.
{"title":"The Sacrificial Imaginary","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the vitalism entailed in Vedic sacrifice, the Axial transformation of that theme in the Upaniṣads, and the philosophies that attempted to categorize and analyse life into specific components. Finally, we will see how a full philosophy of life comes to articulation in the tantric traditions. All these modes of thinking and practice were deeply concerned about offering repair, correcting ignorance and giving relief from the constant suffering entailed by life, and the desire for life that has so often been negatively evaluated in this history. The chapter examines the earliest sources that articulate some understanding of the category of life itself in terms of sacrifice, namely the Vedic scriptures, and goes on to discuss medieval Brahmanism, the tantric traditions, and modernity.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117098172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0005
G. Flood
China developed the notion of life as a sustaining power of living beings, but in contrast to India, did not pursue the idea of transcendence as its source. In contrast to any Gnostic view of flight to a higher reality that we find in India or Greece, China throughout its history has maintained a positive evaluation of life, placing human life within a cosmos. In particular, pre-modern Chinese civilization emphasized harmony in the relationship between heaven (tian), earth (di), and humanity (jen): there should be a ‘unity of heaven and humanity’. Heaven is the source of all things and generally, with some philosophical exceptions, humanity is thought to be perfectible. There is a continuity between the political and natural orders that the chapter examines.
{"title":"Earth under Heaven","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"China developed the notion of life as a sustaining power of living beings, but in contrast to India, did not pursue the idea of transcendence as its source. In contrast to any Gnostic view of flight to a higher reality that we find in India or Greece, China throughout its history has maintained a positive evaluation of life, placing human life within a cosmos. In particular, pre-modern Chinese civilization emphasized harmony in the relationship between heaven (tian), earth (di), and humanity (jen): there should be a ‘unity of heaven and humanity’. Heaven is the source of all things and generally, with some philosophical exceptions, humanity is thought to be perfectible. There is a continuity between the political and natural orders that the chapter examines.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127876771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0001
G. Flood
The idea that there is an animating principle, a life force, that drives the living, that life itself comes to form through the manifold appearances of the world, is very ancient and can be found in Greece, China, and India. We also have more recent philosophical arguments that have understood life in terms of a vital principle or essence. Philosophies rooted in biology have tended to be sceptical of vitalist philosophies, while vitalist philosophies have rejected eliminative, materialist explanations. With reference to these concerns, the chapter examines the question of whether we are to understand life primarily in terms of human purposes, desires, fears, and hopes; or are we to explain life primarily in terms of impersonal, biological drives?
{"title":"The Theory and Philosophy of Life","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The idea that there is an animating principle, a life force, that drives the living, that life itself comes to form through the manifold appearances of the world, is very ancient and can be found in Greece, China, and India. We also have more recent philosophical arguments that have understood life in terms of a vital principle or essence. Philosophies rooted in biology have tended to be sceptical of vitalist philosophies, while vitalist philosophies have rejected eliminative, materialist explanations. With reference to these concerns, the chapter examines the question of whether we are to understand life primarily in terms of human purposes, desires, fears, and hopes; or are we to explain life primarily in terms of impersonal, biological drives?","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"375 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122839494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0002
G. Flood
The communicative practices that comprise religions have their roots in human niche construction. But this is not a cognitivist argument that locates religion in particular regions of the brain, or a naturalist, biological reductionism that maintains the hegemony of the genes; rather, it contends that forms of communicative practice that are constitutive of religions, while being rooted in human biology, function at a cultural level that has autonomy from the cellular. Religions are niche constructions that create worlds of meaning through imagination within which people can live complete and competent lives and that function eschatologically to facilitate self-repair; their roots are in the pro-social emotions, language development, and ritual behaviour.
{"title":"The Emergence of Religion","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The communicative practices that comprise religions have their roots in human niche construction. But this is not a cognitivist argument that locates religion in particular regions of the brain, or a naturalist, biological reductionism that maintains the hegemony of the genes; rather, it contends that forms of communicative practice that are constitutive of religions, while being rooted in human biology, function at a cultural level that has autonomy from the cellular. Religions are niche constructions that create worlds of meaning through imagination within which people can live complete and competent lives and that function eschatologically to facilitate self-repair; their roots are in the pro-social emotions, language development, and ritual behaviour.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132178668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0010
G. Flood
Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.
{"title":"Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134119024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0008
G. Flood
The philosophies of life that emphasize life as a plane of immanence, in which there is no outside and no transcendence beyond the world, have expressed a modern non-dualism that is compatible with contemporary developments in neuroscience, social cognition, and evolution. A strong philosophical claim is that the immanence view expresses a truth about life itself, supported by science, against which the history of religions can be measured. A weak claim is that modern articulations of life itself are no more adequate than those of tradition, but the modern view is simply another approximation in expressing the field of immanence. The chapter argues for the weak view.
{"title":"The Philosophy of Life as the Field of Immanence","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The philosophies of life that emphasize life as a plane of immanence, in which there is no outside and no transcendence beyond the world, have expressed a modern non-dualism that is compatible with contemporary developments in neuroscience, social cognition, and evolution. A strong philosophical claim is that the immanence view expresses a truth about life itself, supported by science, against which the history of religions can be measured. A weak claim is that modern articulations of life itself are no more adequate than those of tradition, but the modern view is simply another approximation in expressing the field of immanence. The chapter argues for the weak view.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129097421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0009
G. Flood
This chapter takes up more explicitly the problem concerning the relationship between life understood as a system or process and life in relation to the person. This is to re-tell the story of the relation of life to the living from a different perspective of twentieth-century philosophy. There is a tension between the living system rooted in a materialist metaphysics and the lived reality of persons, between system and lifeworld. This chapter traces the development of the phenomenology of life focused on human experience, juxtaposing this with a new materialism that emphasizes the objective constancy of life itself as material reality beyond the human. This involves delineating the contours of the discussion to show how this debate is relevant to some contemporary religious understandings of the person.
{"title":"The Phenomenology of Life","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter takes up more explicitly the problem concerning the relationship between life understood as a system or process and life in relation to the person. This is to re-tell the story of the relation of life to the living from a different perspective of twentieth-century philosophy. There is a tension between the living system rooted in a materialist metaphysics and the lived reality of persons, between system and lifeworld. This chapter traces the development of the phenomenology of life focused on human experience, juxtaposing this with a new materialism that emphasizes the objective constancy of life itself as material reality beyond the human. This involves delineating the contours of the discussion to show how this debate is relevant to some contemporary religious understandings of the person.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123265624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0003
G. Flood
The affirmation of life through a culture of hunting was a major element in early human practices, but with the Neolithic farming revolution, we have new modes of producing food and new kinds of societies that could be much larger; the first urban landscapes beginning to appear in places such as Jericho, along with the emergence of religion characterized by sacrifice. While the origins of sacrifice are obscure, sacrifice is a category central to our understanding of religion and of human cultural life generally. Sacrifice has had a central place in the history of civilizations as an attempt at human self-repair and bringing people into a fullness of life, attempting to fulfil the desire for life itself and to go beyond death.
{"title":"Sacrifice","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The affirmation of life through a culture of hunting was a major element in early human practices, but with the Neolithic farming revolution, we have new modes of producing food and new kinds of societies that could be much larger; the first urban landscapes beginning to appear in places such as Jericho, along with the emergence of religion characterized by sacrifice. While the origins of sacrifice are obscure, sacrifice is a category central to our understanding of religion and of human cultural life generally. Sacrifice has had a central place in the history of civilizations as an attempt at human self-repair and bringing people into a fullness of life, attempting to fulfil the desire for life itself and to go beyond death.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131455076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0007
G. Flood
On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.
{"title":"Philosophies of Life","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836124.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131952287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0011
G. Flood
This final chapter seeks, first, to account for some recent explanations of human interaction in terms of cognition and evolutionary neuroscience; and second, to show how social cognition is transformed through religion at a cultural level as a system in relation to the environment; religion is a form of bio-sociology. This transformation is echoed in the history of Homo sapiens as a move from sign to symbol, suggesting, third, an abductive philosophical claim that life itself comes to articulation through religion; religions are the transformation of bio-energy expressed at an interpersonal level in human face-to-face encounter re-articulated at structurally higher levels of religious systems comprising practice, doctrine, narrative, and law. This transformation of human bio-sociology into religion is the way in which civilization seeks to repair the human and to bring us more acutely into life through the integration of higher linguistic consciousness with deeper, pre-linguistic forms of life.
{"title":"Religion and the Bio-Sociology of Transformation","authors":"G. Flood","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836124.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This final chapter seeks, first, to account for some recent explanations of human interaction in terms of cognition and evolutionary neuroscience; and second, to show how social cognition is transformed through religion at a cultural level as a system in relation to the environment; religion is a form of bio-sociology. This transformation is echoed in the history of Homo sapiens as a move from sign to symbol, suggesting, third, an abductive philosophical claim that life itself comes to articulation through religion; religions are the transformation of bio-energy expressed at an interpersonal level in human face-to-face encounter re-articulated at structurally higher levels of religious systems comprising practice, doctrine, narrative, and law. This transformation of human bio-sociology into religion is the way in which civilization seeks to repair the human and to bring us more acutely into life through the integration of higher linguistic consciousness with deeper, pre-linguistic forms of life.","PeriodicalId":413632,"journal":{"name":"Religion and the Philosophy of Life","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132284062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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