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A six week series of presentations and facilitated discussions on the encyclical, Fides et ratio, by Pope John Paul II, are being offered on Wednesday nights, starting April 16 at 7:00 pm, at Immaculate Heart of Mary in the St. Thomas More Center. |
Week 1 - April 16, 2008Ground rules, introduction to the encyclical, discussion of philosophical systems |
Week 2 - April 23, 2008Chapter I - The Revelations of God's Wisdom |
Week 3 - April 30, 2008Chapter III - Intellego Ut Credam |
Week 4 - May 7, 2008Chapter V - The Magisterium's Interventions in Philosophical Matters |
Week 5 - May 14, 2008Chapter VI - The Interaction Between Philosophy and Theology, Continued |
Week 6 - May 21, 2008Conclusions |
Eclecticism originated as a philosophical method whereby ideas from various philosophies would be combined into a new and, hopefully, better philosophy. However, some eclectic philosophers state that truth can only be known as a probability and that truth is best discerned by combining philosophical ideas without regard to their cohesiveness but only with regard to their probability (however that is determined).
According to an article in the New Advent Encyclopedia, eclectic theories tend to arise after periods of skepticism.
Fideism is the idea that humans are incapable of knowing truth purely through the use of natural reason and that truth may only be known through an act of faith. This act of faith must be verified by an authority (e.g. revelation).
An argument against this is that we must first believe that there is an ultimate authority (God), that He has revealed the truth to us, and that His revelation is worthy of belief. This contradicts the fundamental tenet of fideism since there is no other authority that can verify those beliefs. Thus fideism finds itself opposed to faith as well as reason. For a more detailed exposition of this argument, see CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Fideism.
The Church holds that the existence of God can be known with certainty by natural reason.
Biblical hermeneutics is the comprehensive set of rules (science) of Biblical exegesis. I.e. it is the method by which we extend our understanding of biblical truths.
Historicism is the method of interpreting literature in its historical context. This is, of course, necessary to a complete understanding of any literature, including the Bible. A strong form of historicism would insist that the validity of truths found in any literature depends on the historical context within which it is interpreted (i.e. it changes over time).
For a view of “New Historicism” (and “Cultural Materialism”) see http://www.cultmatnewhist.blogspot.com/
“Immanence is the quality of any action that begins and ends within the agent.” (Quote from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07682a.htm.) To the degree that any action is not transcendent, it is immanent.
If actions have no quality of transcendence, they are said to be absolutely immanent. Absolute immanence is a quality of all closed systems.
Most scientific theories posit that the universe is closed. However, theories that suppose that there was some activity prior to the creation of the universe (e.g. colliding branes) are, therefore, not absolute immanentist in the sense that they attempt to deal with realities outside the universe. These are called relative immanentist theories.
The Church rejects absolute immanence and embraces relative immanence since it (the Church) believes that God acted to bring the universe into existence and continues to act within the universe – particularly in the hearts of people.
The idea of immanence is very abstract, but understanding it is useful to categorizing and understanding many, perhaps most, philosophies.
Those interested in the mathematical or cosmological aspects may want to read Mathematics, Cosmology and the Contingent Universe, THE REV. BRUCE A. HEDMAN, Ph.D.
This term has acquired so many connotations that we must be very careful with its usage. We accept the definition given in CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Metaphysics: the science of being as being. This includes the sciences of the laws of mind (abstractions and absolutes), the material, and the immaterial. Current usage of the term, particularly within the Church, is more likely associated with the immaterial - God and the soul.
Modernism is a difficult word to define as it may include many tendencies and cultural currents of thought. Modernism seems to have arisen in the early twentieth century from the humanism of the preceding two centuries. According to one Definition of Modernism, the primary, almost distinguishing, characteristic of modernist thought is opposition to Church dogma. This finds expression in the notion that religious truth is in man alone and, therefore, man can know truth through unaided self examination.
According to the “CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Modernism” “in the Encyclical ‘Pascendi’, Pius X says that modernism embraces every heresy.”
Much of modernist thought has come from liberal Protestantism.
Nihilism is an extreme form of skepticism regarding moral and political values. As such, it is said to have begun with the Skeptics. The political form is believed to have begun with Bakunin in the nineteenth century and, in its Russian incarnation, merged with Marxism after the Russian revolution.
Current references to nihilism more commonly mean the philosophical form, though there are undertones of revolution and political activism.
The modern philosophical version is often associated with Nietzsche and is thought to have motivated the socialist and fascist movements of the twentieth century.
See http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htm and http://www.counterorder.com/nihilism.html.
Positivism is the assertion that all knowledge derives from experience. It asserts that all metaphysical statements are meaningless. As such it looks like scientism without the scientific method.
This is an extremely difficult term to nail down. It is perhaps best described as a proposed way of enjoying chaos. See nihilism.
This is the method of judging the truth of an idea by its tested usefulness. That is, if an idea “works” then it is judged to be true. The scientific method was a prime motivation for the development of this philosophy. However, whereas the scientific method attempts to establish the universality of truth by insisting on the replication of experimental results, pragmatism does not insist on universality.
Pragmatism is identical to humanism since individual judgments of truth are made on the basis of individual experience and all such judgments are held to be equally valid and true.
To quote CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Pragmatism: “Pragmatism, Schiller thinks, ‘is in reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of knowledge’ (Humanism, p. xxi), and Humanism is the doctrine that there is no absolute truth, but only truths, which are constantly being made true by the mind working on the data of experience.”
Rationalism (CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Rationalism) began as the view that human reason is the necessary and sufficient arbiter of truth. It did not reject Revelation but argued that our understanding of it must be governed by reason. This meant that it argued in favor of determinism and had much in common with English Deism and French Materialism.
In current usage, rationalism is thought to be characteristic of all systems that accept reason as the only arbiter of truth and therefore reject faith altogether. In popular usage, it is falsely assumed that science is on the side of rationalism and necessarily opposed to faith.
There are two modes of relativism: relativism of reality (ontological relativism) and relativism of knowing (epistemological relativism). The former posits that there is no absolute truth, the latter that it is not possible to know any absolute truths.
The idea of relativism started with the Greek Sophists – particularly Protagoras who believed that “man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras’ relativism was of the epistemological form.
Relativists believe that reality (or our knowledge) is entirely dependent on our frame of reference.
The two forms of relativism have been applied to many fields including morality, ethics, sociology, and anthropology to name a few.
See http://www.answers.com/topic/relativism.
Scientism is the view that truth should be sought and validated by reason but that ideas should only be accepted when verified by empirical testing. In the strong sense, this would be applied not only to scientific truth, but to all truth. John Paul II does not object to the scientific method but rather to scientism in the strong sense because it denies the meaningful existence of metaphysical or transcendent truth.
See http://www.ssd.org/Education/jae/articles/jae200264050904.pdf for an excellent (and short) discussion about the evolution of the scientific method. This article will also add material for discussing the interaction of religion and science.
For a portrayal of scientistic ideals (if such can be said to exist), see the article in Scientific American Magazine - June, 2002 – “The Shamans of Scientism.” (Or you could just watch any of Carl Sagan’s series “Cosmos.”)
For an opposing view see http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/scientism_este.html.
Transcendence is the quality of any truth which is known by means other than experience. We would say that the object of a priori knowledge is transcendent. An example of a priori (and therefore transcendent) knowledge would be the natural law, which is “imprinted on the human heart.”
Transcendence is opposed to immanence.