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Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status
by James AndersonHow can Jesus be fully human and fully divine? How can God be Three-in-One? James Anderson develops and defends a model of understanding paradoxical Christian doctrines according to which the presence of such doctrines is unsurprising and adherence to paradoxical doctrines can be entirely reasonable. As such, the phenomenon of theological paradox cannot be considered as a serious intellectual obstacle to belief in Christianity. The case presented in this book has significant implications for the practice of systematic theology, biblical exegesis, Christian apologetics and philosophy.
Paradox Lost: Logical Solutions to Ten Puzzles of Philosophy
by Michael HuemerParadox Lost covers ten of philosophy’s most fascinating paradoxes, in which seemingly compelling reasoning leads to absurd conclusions. The following paradoxes are included: The Liar Paradox, in which a sentence says of itself that it is false. Is the sentence true or false?The Sorites Paradox, in which we imagine removing grains of sand one at a time from a heap of sand. Is there a particular grain whose removal converts the heap to a non-heap?The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer, in which a series of seemingly rational choices has us accepting a life of excruciating pain, in exchange for millions of dollars.Newcomb’s Problem, in which we seemingly maximize our expected profit by taking an unknown sum of money, rather than taking the same sum plus $1000.The Surprise Quiz Paradox, in which a professor finds that it is impossible to give a surprise quiz on any particular day of the week . . . but also that if this is so, then a surprise quiz can be given on any day.The Two Envelope Paradox, in which we are asked to choose between two indistinguishable envelopes, and it is seemingly shown that each envelope is preferable to the other.The Ravens Paradox, in which observing a purple shoe provides evidence that all ravens are black.The Shooting Room Paradox, in which a deadly game kills 90% of all who play, yet each individual’s survival turns on the flip of a fair coin. Each paradox is clearly described, common mistakes are explored, and a clear, logical solution offered. Paradox Lost will appeal to professional philosophers, students of philosophy, and all who love intellectual puzzles.
The Paradox Of Authenticity In A Globalized World
by Russell CobbAuthenticity in our globalized world is a paradox. This collection examines how authenticity relates to cultural products, looking closely at how a particular "ethnic" food, or genre of popular music, or indigenous religious belief attains its aura of originality, when all traditional cultural products are invented in a certain time and place.
The Paradox of Creativity in Art Education: Bourdieu and Socio-cultural Practice
by Kerry ThomasThis book examines the paradox of creativity in art education and proposes a possible resolution. Based on the findings of a longitudinal ethnographic study as a particular case of creative practice in art education, this book is underpinned by Bourdieu’s concepts of the habitus, symbolic capital and misrecognition. The author offers an insightful account of social reasoning within creative practice in the senior school art classroom, examining ongoing exchanges between students and their teacher. Ultimately, these exchanges culminate in actions, beliefs and desires about what is creatively conceivable in the making of art, while providing confirmation without corruption of the pedagogical role of the art teacher. Allowing the context of creative agency to emerge afresh, this book will be of interest and value to art educators and teachers committed to fostering the creative performances of students in any field.
The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience
by Clifford A. PickoverIn his most ambitious book yet, Clifford Pickover bridges the gulf between logic, spirit, science, and religion. While exploring the concept of omniscience, Pickover explains the kinds of relationships limited beings can have with an all-knowing God. Pickover's thought exercises, controversial experiments, and practical analogies help us transcend our ordinary lives while challenging us to better understand our place in the cosmos and our dreams of a supernatural God. Through an inventive blend of science, history, philosophy, science fiction, and mind-stretching brainteasers, Pickover unfolds the paradoxes of God like no other writer. He provides glimpses into the infinite, allowing us to think big, and to have daring, limitless dreams.
A Paradox of Honor: Hopes and Perspectives of Muslim-American Women (Researching Social Psychology)
by Tayeba Shaikh Jennifer M. Ossege Richard W. SearsBased on original interviews of 22 Muslim-American women of South Asian descent on the topics of honor and honor killings, this book examines honor and culture, and their intersections with power, tradition, gender, family, and religion. Additionally, it incorporates an autoethnographic approach describing the author’s journey to Pakistan to create a personal narrative throughout. This volume offers a unique perspective that allows for informed exploration and description of Muslim-American women’s attitudes and beliefs surrounding the practice of killing women and girls in order to regain family honor.
The Paradox of Intellectual Property in Capitalism
by João Romeiro HermetoThe Paradox of Intellectual Property in Capitalism is an innovative book that comprehensively discusses and analyses intellectual property under capitalistic social conditions and relations. It not only addresses some historical developments of intellectual property but also brings to the fore the very notion of what knowledge is, knowledge creation, and knowledge production and appropriation within a Marxist framework. Nonetheless, the adopted approach pays heed to multiple fields of knowledge, providing rich discussions that facilitate the understanding of actual social totality in which capitalism, knowledge production and appropriation, and the struggles of appropriation mutually reinforce each other, although not devoid of antagonisms and contradictions. In light of contemporary capitalism, the transformations that social property relations are undergoing must be scrutinised – such as those brought about by the development of digitalisation and the convergence between big pharma and tech giants. What are the conditions of intellectual property creation today? What theoretical assumptions does it make? Under what social relations is intellectual property produced? Throughout, the emphasis is not on individual cases or symptoms but on the overarching logic: the logic of capitalism as revealed in intellectual property.
The Paradox of Love
by Pascal BrucknerA provocative reflection on the dilemmas of modern loveThe sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought—birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. But as Pascal Bruckner, one of France's leading writers, argues in this lively and provocative reflection on the contradictions of modern love, our new freedoms have also brought new burdens and rules—without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desires, and arrangements: the couple, marriage, jealousy, the demand for fidelity, the war between constancy and inconstancy. It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical.Drawing on history, politics, psychology, literature, pop culture, and current events, this book—a best seller in France—exposes and dissects these paradoxes. With his customary brilliance and wit, Bruckner traces the roots of sexual liberation back to the Enlightenment in order to explain love's supreme paradox, epitomized by the 1960s oxymoron of "free love": the tension between freedom, which separates, and love, which attaches. Ashamed that our sex lives fail to live up to such liberated ideals, we have traded neuroses of repression for neuroses of inadequacy, and we overcompensate: "Our parents lied about their morality," Bruckner writes, but "we lie about our immorality.?Mixing irony and optimism, Bruckner argues that, when it comes to love, we should side neither with the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries. Rather, taking love and ourselves as we are, we should realize that love makes no progress and that its messiness, surprises, and paradoxes are not merely the sources of its pain—but also of its pleasure and glory.
The Paradox of Morality (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
by Vladimir JankelevitchThe last work by &“one of the most singular voices of twentieth-century French philosophy&” (Critical Inquiry) on the complexities of love in public and private life Vladimir Jankélévitch stands alongside Emmanuel Levinas as one of the most admired French ethicists of the twentieth century, known for his work on everything from the possibility of forgiveness after the Holocaust to the philosophy of music. In his final work, The Paradox of Morality (1981), Jankélévitch turns his attention to the fundamental questions of the moral life: the struggle between egoism and self-sacrifice, the question of whether pure or infinite love exists, and moral agency in the pursuit of human rights. In dialogue with philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche, Jankélévitch proposes that the moral life comprises an acrobatic act in which we must balance the demands of love and our responsibility to the other against our natural attachment to the self. Morality is the activity of realizing and combining, in each individual action, the maximum amount of love possible with the minimum of being. This oscillation between self and other—and between being and love—is never fixed or stable. In the end, morality is not something that exists in the world of contemplation; instead, it is the substance of what must be done here and now: created anew in each new moment.
The Paradox of the Good Bribe: A Discussion Defining and Protecting the Public Interest
by David J O'ReganWhat do Plato and the Bible tell us about bribery? Does it even matter? When it comes to ethical guidance on bribery should we look less to traditional wisdom and instead be seeking understanding and guidance primarily from modern sources? From economists
The Paradox of Tragedy: The Mahlon Powell Lectures, 1959 (classic Reprint) (Routledge Revivals)
by D.D. RaphaelFirst published in 1960, The Paradox of Tragedy raises the fundamental question, why do we enjoy tragic drama with its themes of death and disaster? Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is still widely accepted as a satisfactory explanation of this paradox. In the first of its two connected essays, D.D. Raphael argues that Aristotle’s account of tragic emotions is distorted by a faulty psychology and fails to solve the problem. Raphael offers instead a new theory of Tragedy, as a conflict between two forms of the sublime, in which the sublimity of human heroism is exalted above the sublimity of overwhelming power. The spirit of the Tragedy is liable to conflict with doctrines of Biblical theology, and the difficulties of fusing the two are explored with illustrations from Greek, Biblical, English, and French literature. The second essay discusses the wider topic of philosophical drama, considering in what sense tragic and other forms of serious drama may be called philosophical, and also pointing out the dramatic shape of much of Plato’s philosophy. In this discussion, the question of religious Tragedy reappears in a different perspective. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular.
The Paradox Of Wealth And Poverty: Mapping The Ethical Dilemmas Of Global Development
by Daniel LittleWe live in a time of human paradoxes. Scientific knowledge has reached a level of sophistication that permits understanding of the most arcane phenomena and yet religious fundamentalism dominates in many parts of the world. We witness the emergence of a civil, liberal constitutionalism in many regions of the world and yet ethnic violence threatens the lives and dignity of millions. And we live in a time of rapid economic and technological advance and yet several billions of people live in persistent debilitating poverty. In this book, Daniel Little dissects these paradoxes offering the clearest perspective on how best to approach international development.Using both empirical and philosophical approaches, Little provides a schematic acquaintance with the most important facts about global development at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, he explores what appear to be the most relevant moral principles and insights that ought to be invoked as we consider these facts and then draws conclusions about what sorts of values and goals ought to guide economic development in the twenty-first century.
Paradoxes
by Marek Gensler Piotr ŁukowskiThis book, provides a critical approach to all major logical paradoxes: from ancient to contemporary ones. There are four key aims of the book: 1. Providing systematic and historical survey of different approaches - solutions of the most prominent paradoxes discussed in the logical and philosophical literature. 2. Introducing original solutions of major paradoxes like: Liar paradox, Protagoras paradox, an unexpected examination paradox, stone paradox, crocodile, Newcomb paradox. 3. Explaining the far-reaching significance of paradoxes of vagueness and change for philosophy and ontology. 4. Proposing a novel, well justified and, as it seems, natural classification of paradoxes.
Paradoxes and Inconsistent Mathematics
by Zach WeberLogical paradoxes – like the Liar, Russell's, and the Sorites – are notorious. But in Paradoxes and Inconsistent Mathematics, it is argued that they are only the noisiest of many. Contradictions arise in the everyday, from the smallest points to the widest boundaries. In this book, Zach Weber uses “dialetheic paraconsistency” – a formal framework where some contradictions can be true without absurdity – as the basis for developing this idea rigorously, from mathematical foundations up. In doing so, Weber directly addresses a longstanding open question: how much standard mathematics can paraconsistency capture? The guiding focus is on a more basic question, of why there are paradoxes. Details underscore a simple philosophical claim: that paradoxes are found in the ordinary, and that is what makes them so extraordinary.
Paradoxes Between Truth and Proof (Synthese Library #494)
by Mattia Petrolo Giorgio VenturiThis book is a collection of essays that offer original logical and philosophical investigations into the century-long endeavor to understand paradoxes. It bridges the gap between the two most prominent traditions in the analysis of paradoxes: the truth-theoretic and proof-theoretic approaches. The truth-theoretic tradition stems from Alfred Tarski's solution to the semantic paradoxes, while the proof-theoretic tradition dates back to Dag Prawitz's analysis of set-theoretic paradoxes in terms of structural proof theory. Rather than viewing these traditions as competing perspectives, this volume advocates for the idea that a deeper understanding of paradoxes requires insights from both truth-theoretic and proof-theoretic conceptions of language and meaning. Although the collection does not aim to be exhaustive, it seeks to highlight the vast scope of the subject and its deep connections to various fields of inquiry. The essays are organized into four sections: the first focuses on methodology, the second and third examine paradoxes through the conventional lenses of logical investigation—semantics and syntax—, and the fourth presents a selection of paradoxes that extend beyond the interplay between syntax and semantics, exploring other dimensions of human rationality.
Paradoxes from A to Z
by Michael ClarkParadoxes from A to Z, Third edition is the essential guide to paradoxes, and takes the reader on a lively tour of puzzles that have taxed thinkers from Zeno to Galileo, and Lewis Carroll to Bertrand Russell. Michael Clark uncovers an array of conundrums, such as Achilles and the Tortoise, Theseus’ Ship, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma, taking in subjects as diverse as knowledge, science, art and politics. Clark discusses each paradox in non-technical terms, considering its significance and looking at likely solutions. This third edition is revised throughout, and adds nine new paradoxes that have important bearings in areas such as law, logic, ethics and probability. Paradoxes from A to Z, Third edition is an ideal starting point for those interested not just in philosophical puzzles and conundrums, but anyone seeking to hone their thinking skills.
Paradoxes in Probability Theory
by William EckhardtParadoxes provide a vehicle for exposing misinterpretations and misapplications of accepted principles. This book discusses seven paradoxes surrounding probability theory. Some remain the focus of controversy; others have allegedly been solved, however the accepted solutions are demonstrably incorrect. Each paradox is shown to rest on one or more fallacies. Instead of the esoteric, idiosyncratic, and untested methods that have been brought to bear on these problems, the book invokes uncontroversial probability principles, acceptable both to frequentists and subjectivists. The philosophical disputation inspired by these paradoxes is shown to be misguided and unnecessary; for instance, startling claims concerning human destiny and the nature of reality are directly related to fallacious reasoning in a betting paradox, and a problem analyzed in philosophy journals is resolved by means of a computer program.
The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation
by Alan PaskowAlan Paskow first asks why fictional characters, such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina, matter to us and how they are able to emotionally affect us. He then applies these questions to pictorial art, demonstrating that paintings beckon us to view their contents as real. Emblematic of the fundamental concerns of our lives, what we visualize in paintings, he argues, is not simply in our heads but in our world. Paskow also situates the phenomenological approach to the experience of painting in relation to methodological assumptions and claims in analytic aesthetics as well as in contemporary schools of thought, particularly Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist.
Paradoxes of Conflicts
by Giovanni Scarafile Leah Gruenpeter GoldThis volume features more than 25 papers that were presented at the 2014 Conference of the International Association for the Study of Controversies, IASC, held at the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy. It looks at conflict and conflict resolution from diverse perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, law, and history. Coverage explores the paradox of conflict and examines how discord, whether large or small, international or internal, can be both a source of chaos as well as a foundation for unity, a limitation of potential as well as an entryway to a greater depth of living. Inside, readers will discover thought-provoking answers to such questions as: What are the conditions to ensure that a conflict can be converted into cooperation? If the conflict between interests can be solved by a compromise, what happens when a conflict involves non-negotiable values? In the management of a conflict, what role is played by argumentation? What are the latest perspectives in conflict management? How does the theory of controversies allows us to recognize and resolve conflicts? By the end of the book, readers will have a better understanding of how conflict can be transcended and how it's possible to redefine the conflicting situation so that what seemed incompatible and locked may, in fact, open a new perspective.
Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction (G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects)
by Robert J. YanalHow can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own.First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are irrational in emoting toward fiction, or that we do not emote toward fiction but rather toward factual counterparts, or that we do not have real but only quasi-emotion toward fiction, generated by our playing games of make-believe. All of these proposed solutions are critically reviewed.Finding these answers unsatisfactory, Yanal offers an alternative, providing a new version of what has been dubbed "thought theory." On this theory, mere thoughts not believed true are seen as the functional equivalent of belief at least insofar as stimulating emotion is concerned. The emoter's disbelief in the actuality of components of the thoughts must be rendered relatively inactive. Such emotion is real and typically has the character of being richly generated yet unconsummated.The book extends this theory also to resolving other paradoxes arising from emotional response to fiction: how we feel suspense over what comes next in a story even when we are re-reading it for a second or third time; and how we take pleasure in narratives, such as tragedy, that excite unpleasant emotions such as fear, pity, or horror.
The Paradoxes of Freedom
by Sidney HookThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.
The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France
by Sandrine ParageauIn the early modern period, ignorance was commonly perceived as a sin, a flaw, a defect, and even a threat to religion and the social order. Yet praises of ignorance were also expressed in the same context. Reclaiming the long-lasting legacy of medieval doctrines of ignorance and taking a comparative perspective, Sandrine Parageau tells the history of the apparently counter-intuitive moral, cognitive and epistemological virtues attributed to ignorance in the long seventeenth century (1580s-1700) in England and in France. With close textual analysis of hitherto neglected sources and a reassessment of canonical philosophical works by Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and others, Parageau specifically examines the role of ignorance in the production of knowledge, identifying three common virtues of ignorance as a mode of wisdom, a principle of knowledge, and an epistemological instrument, in philosophical and theological works. How could an essentially negative notion be turned into something profitable and even desirable? Taken in the context of Renaissance humanism, the Reformation and the "Scientific Revolution"—which all called for a redefinition and reaffirmation of knowledge—ignorance, Parageau finds, was not dismissed in the early modern quest for renewed ways of thinking and knowing. On the contrary, it was assimilated into the philosophical and scientific discourses of the time. The rehabilitation of ignorance emerged as a paradoxical cornerstone of the nascent modern science.
The Paradoxes of Interculturality: A Toolbox of Out-of-the-box Ideas for Intercultural Communication Education (New Perspectives on Teaching Interculturality)
by Fred DervinOffering a unique reading experience, this book examines the epistemologies of interculturality and explores potential routes to review and revisit the notion anew.Grounded in different sociocultural, economic and political perspectives around the world, interculturality in education and research bears a paradoxical attribute of 'contradictions' and 'inconsistencies', making it a polysemous and flexible notion that has no definitive diagnosis and requires constant unthinking and rethinking. The author provides a toolbox of 'out-of-box ideas' in the form of fragmental yet standalone writings and follow-up questions concerning stereotypes about the very notion of interculturality and conceptual and methodological flaws in the way it is used. Readers are encouraged to critically reflect about interculturality as it stands today in global research and education. In identifying the paradoxes of interculturality and proposing alternative directions, the book stimulates a diversity of thoughts about the notion that goes beyond the 'West'. The book will be an essential reading for scholars, students and educators interested in education philosophy, applied linguistics and the broad field of intercultural communication education.
The Paradoxes of Modernity: Creating Belief through Art, Community, and Ritual
by Zachary SimpsonA paradox lies at the heart of modernity: the simultaneous demand to create ideas to make us better humans and communities, along with the contrary imperative that we criticize all ideals, especially the ones we have created. In philosophy we see this paradox most acutely in figures like Immanuel Kant, who states that we cannot know the essence of things and yet we must retain old ideas – God, freedom, and the soul – in order to become better and more ethical humans. Or in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal recurrence, a self-created myth whose sole purpose is to get us to see the value in the everyday. This basic scheme – belief and un-belief – is one of the fundamental elements of modernity, manifesting itself in the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, along with the theologies of Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, William James, Sallie McFague, and Philip Clayton.How do we live out the values we know to be constructions? This question holds captive our ability to solve public goods problems and make our lives more meaningful. Instead of seeing this paradox of modernity as self-deception or bad faith, Zachary Simpson employs cognitive and social scientific research to explain how best to realize values that we know to be false: through art, community, and ritual. In Simpson's account, the values we construct must conform to narrative, be reinforced through community, and habituated through ritual. And yet modernity has also undermined collectivity and ritual. Thus arises the second paradox of modernity: the best tools we have for realizing values are those which devalue the individual modern subject.The last part of the book attempts to make three normative points regarding modernity. First, the modern, individualist subject is insufficient to realize the very values and aspirations of modernity. We must recognize that humans are collective and communal. Second, we cannot simply create values – they must arise in communities and be realized through narrative and ritual. And, third, if we are to live meaningful lives as contemporary meta-ethicists and positive psychologists argue, then such lives must include art, community, and ritual as a way to affirm and reinforce one’s values.Let’s Pretend is a statement about one of the dilemmas of the contemporary western world and how that dilemma is, and might be, resolved. How do we believe in the values that we know will make a better world, even if they are of our own making? We must do so, in part, by becoming less modern, by engaging with one another and imagining more.The book should serve as both an essay in the history of Western thought as well as a constructive argument about the nature of the modern epoch and what resources we have to realize the central aspirations of modernity. It aims to fill a critical lacuna in theoretical and philosophical approaches to modernity. While most texts focus on either the need for created values or the need to remedy modern subjectivity, few, if any, link the two problems together. Moreover, they do not ground their analyses in the social sciences and contemporary findings regarding the efficacy of narrative, communal action, and rituals.The book is unique, then, because it asks a central question – how do we believe in what we know to be false? – and because it answers this question using interdisciplinary methods that allow us to see the faultlines and paradoxes of our age.
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender and Possibilities for Justice (Social Justice)
by Janet Jakobsen and Elizabeth BernsteinFrom the rise of far-right regimes to the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have brought global upheaval as well as the sedimentation of longstanding social inequalities. Analyzing the complexities of the current political moment in different geographic regions, this book addresses the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal policies and practices, in order to ground the pursuit of a more just world. Engaging theories of decoloniality, racial capitalism, queer materialism, and social reproduction, this book demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberalism, including both social relations and statecraft. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the authors show that gender and sexuality may be the site for policies like those pertaining to sex trafficking, which bundle together economics and changes to the structure of the state. In other instances, sexual politics are crucial components of policies on issues ranging from the growth of financial services to migration. Tracing the role of sexual politics across different localities and through different political domains, this book delineates the paradoxical assemblage that makes up contemporary neoliberal hegemony. In addition to exploring contemporary social relations of neoliberal governance, exploitation, domination, and exclusion, the authors also consider gender and sexuality as forces that have shaped myriad forms of community-based activism and resistance, including local efforts to pursue new forms of social change. By tracing neoliberal paradoxes across global sites, the book delineates the multiple dimensions of economic and cultural restructuring that have characterized neoliberal regimes and emergent activist responses to them. This innovative analysis of the relationship between gender justice and political economy will appeal to: interdisciplinary scholars in social and cultural studies; legal and political theorists; and the wide range of readers who are concerned with contemporary questions of social justice.