Search Results

Impossible

Aviad Kleinberg

in The Sensual God: How the Senses Make the Almighty Senseless

Where theologians try to convince us why believing the unbelievable is actually good for us.

Theophany, Anthropomorphism, and the Imago Dei: Some Observations About the Incarnation in the Light of the Old Testament

J. Andrew Dearman

in The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God

Andrew Dearman examines two elements in the OT: the anthropomorphic presentation of God in theophany and the creation of humankind in the imago Dei. Anthropomorphism was a way that divine presence ... More

Andrew Dearman examines two elements in the OT: the anthropomorphic presentation of God in theophany and the creation of humankind in the imago Dei. Anthropomorphism was a way that divine presence could be apprehended by people, and theomorphism indicated both a basis on which humankind understood its divinely mandated tasks and one way in which the divine‐human relationship could be represented. In spite of anti‐anthropomorphic traditions elsewhere in the OT, these two elements influenced the presentation of Christ in the early church and both may contribute to a modern understanding of the incarnation.Less

Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods

Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine

in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations

The study examines the place of gods in Early Greek philosophy, with attention paid to breaks and continuity with the inherited beliefs from the Homeric age. Beyond the well-known rejection of ... More

The study examines the place of gods in Early Greek philosophy, with attention paid to breaks and continuity with the inherited beliefs from the Homeric age. Beyond the well-known rejection of anthropomorphism by Xenophanes, the author examines the growing tension between various conceptions of the gods as abstract powers and principles and the older notion of divine beings as persons of power. Against earlier work, the author sees little evidence of monotheism, but rather the first rise of the classical pagan theological scheme of world-governing cosmic God and plurality of lesser divine beings.Less

Christian Apologists and Greek Gods

Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine

in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations

Greek gods and polytheism as a distinctive feature of Graeco-Roman culture and religion was a favourite theme among the Christian Apologists of the second century AD. This chapter analyses both their ... More

Greek gods and polytheism as a distinctive feature of Graeco-Roman culture and religion was a favourite theme among the Christian Apologists of the second century AD. This chapter analyses both their approaches to Greek deities and the evolution of motifs, which oscillate between the rigid criticism of idolatry based on Jewish lore and a richer rational censure of anthropomorphism originating in Greek philosophy.Less

What is A Greek God?

Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine

in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations

The Greeks were polytheists who believed in a multitude of gods. In the modern discussion of Greek religion the gods take second place to ritual, and the study of individual gods is privileged over ... More

The Greeks were polytheists who believed in a multitude of gods. In the modern discussion of Greek religion the gods take second place to ritual, and the study of individual gods is privileged over attempts to define their general characteristics qua gods. While studies of the functions and personalities of gods like Apollo, Demeter, Dionysos or Herakles abound, no comprehensive treatment of the generic properties of the Greek gods exists. The question “What is Greek god?” is considered too ‘theological’ and therefore shunned. This chapter examines four divine qualities that are shared by all the Greek gods—their immortality, anthropomorphism, foreknowledge, and finally their power.Less

Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans

Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine

in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations

Richard Buxton discuss five examples of narratives which relate in some way to divine metamorphosis, whether as animals or humans, for the purpose of presenting themselves to mortals. The narratives ... More

Richard Buxton discuss five examples of narratives which relate in some way to divine metamorphosis, whether as animals or humans, for the purpose of presenting themselves to mortals. The narratives studied are the following: Athena’s encounter with Telemachos in the Odyssey, Apollo in the Hymn to Apollo, Thetis’ relationship with Achilles, Dionysos in the Bacchae and Zeus’ serial metamorphoses in pursuit of his erotic ambitions. After drawing conclusions about each of these metamorphoses and epiphanies, Buxton concludes by considering what light this material might shed on the old problem of how far Greek religion was essentially anthropomorphic.Less

Anthropomorphism and the ‘Ends of Man’ in the Anthropocene: ‘My chimp nature’

Danielle Sands

in Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy

Examining Donna Haraway’s critique of primatological practices and narratives, and Karen Joy Fowler’s fictional account of primate relations, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,alongside humanist ... More

Examining Donna Haraway’s critique of primatological practices and narratives, and Karen Joy Fowler’s fictional account of primate relations, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,alongside humanist figures of Man, this chapter explores the relationship between accounts of nonhuman primates and perceptions of human identity. Comparing Fowler’s ambivalence towards anthropomorphism to the recent resurgence of scientific interest in anthropomorphism, it develops a parallel between anthropomorphism and empathy. Contending that empathy, like anthropomorphism, is an inescapable component of cross-species relations, it argues that both should be cultivated only insofar as they stimulate new ethical and political responses to nonhuman life. The chapter concludes by outlining how different modes of primatological reading and writing might generate alternatives to the figure of Man which are better able to acknowledge and respond to our responsibilities to nonhuman life.Less

Explanation

Lasana T. Harris

in Invisible Mind: Flexible Social Cognition and Dehumanization

The fourth chapter argues that explanation may be the function of social cognition, aiding survival and driving human evolution. It explores the psychological literature on anthropomorphism—instances ... More

The fourth chapter argues that explanation may be the function of social cognition, aiding survival and driving human evolution. It explores the psychological literature on anthropomorphism—instances where people bring non-human agents and entities to life by engaging social cognition—and describes it as a type of ‘magical’ or imaginary thinking. It then contrasts this ability with dehumanizing people, describing the brain mechanisms enabling dehumanization, and the functions of withholding social cognition to people. It then considers extending social cognition to animals as a domain where the flexible nature of social cognition is revealed. Finally, it implicates explanation as a causal factor in intractable group conflict.Less

Imagining Divine Laughter in Homer and Lucian

Stephen Halliwell

in Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After

This chapter employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated in the same author’s Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity, in order to ... More

This chapter employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated in the same author’s Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity, in order to investigate some important but elusive aspects of the Greek mythico-religious imagination. Its central focus is on depictions of divine laughter at opposite ends of the spectrum of ancient Greek culture, in Homeric epic and Lucianic satire. What does it mean to imagine gods who can laugh at and/or with one another, as well as at and/or with humans? Is such laughter a marker of distance between divine and human conditions of existence, or does the idea of laughter serve to limit the gods by subjecting them to inescapably human evaluation? The chapter rejects models of explanation (both ancient and modern) which treat the laughter of the Olympians either as a contamination of an originally purer conception of the gods or as consistently expressing a serenely detached state of immortality. It argues, instead, that divine laughter reflects tensions between the literal and the symbolic which are intrinsic to anthropomorphising Greek religious sensibilities, and that far from conveying blissful detachment divine laughter characterises gods who are heavily invested in the conflicts of the human world.Less

“The World was Paradise Malformed”: Poetic Language, Anthropomorphism, and Secularism in Wallace Stevens

Matthew Mutter

in Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a ... More

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a dangerous bias toward transcendence. Stevens is mistrustful of the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview becomes a theological one, and the ways in which signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or “meanings.” In the face of this danger, he develops a poetics of tautology meant to divest language of such bias. Yet later in his career, this chapter contends, he returns to analogy as a mode of transcendence-in-immanence, and establishes a concept of “description without place” in which imagined goods, which have no immanent existence, correspond to details of a particular scene. Stevens is, in other words, working out a version of Nietzsche’s famous claim that we are not rid of God until we are rid of grammar while simultaneously harnessing the religious possibilities of language.Less

“Tangled in a Golden Mesh”: Virginia Woolf and the “Deceptiveness” of Beauty

Matthew Mutter

in Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

There has been a small movement among recent critics and philosophers to rehabilitate the reputation of beauty, which suffered under the modernist fascination with ugliness, Romantic and postmodern ... More

There has been a small movement among recent critics and philosophers to rehabilitate the reputation of beauty, which suffered under the modernist fascination with ugliness, Romantic and postmodern prejudice in favor of the sublime, and political criticism of beauty as elitist, inefficacious, and complicit with injustice. This chapter seeks to reframe these debates by examining the link between beauty and religious ontologies. Weber, following Nietzsche, insisted that secular modernity had broken sympathetic relations between beauty and goodness, but in Woolf’s novels the beautiful cannot shed its theological aura: its promise of reconciliation, peace, and divine benevolence. Woolf’s famous conception of “the world as a work of art”—which has, nevertheless, no “creator”—remains entangled in the aesthetic theodicies she repudiates. Her novels struggle to conceptualize secular, mundane models of beauty while simultaneously clinging to intimations of a metaphysical and moral order implicit in aesthetic experience. Beauty is, in her writing, the last and most intractable stronghold of mystical feeling.Less

Introduction: The Problem with Pets

Erin McKenna

in Pets, People, and Pragmatism

The views of a variety of animal organizations on issues such as ownership versus guardianship are critiqued. Pragmatism is used to argue that given long relationships between humans and ... More

The views of a variety of animal organizations on issues such as ownership versus guardianship are critiqued. Pragmatism is used to argue that given long relationships between humans and domesticated animal beings a certain amount of anthropomorphism makes sense when trying to understand the needs and interests of such animal beings. The use of the term pet is also discussed.Less

Computer-Animated Films and Anthropomorphic Subjectivity

Christopher Holliday

in The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre

Chapter Four presents new research into animated anthropomorphism, and argues that computer-animated films more readily exploit the non-human element of its characters rather than recourse to the ... More

Chapter Four presents new research into animated anthropomorphism, and argues that computer-animated films more readily exploit the non-human element of its characters rather than recourse to the humanlike to manipulate virtual space through anthropomorphic subjectivity. Drawing from Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of “plasmaticness” (1986) and Gilles Deleuze’s writing on “gaseous perception” (1986), this chapter explores the molecular, sporadic contact that the digital anthropomorph has with the surrounding virtual cartography and the manner in which they constantly reframe and deform the action through a highly inventive cinematic eye. These new qualities of the computer-animated film anthropormorph permits a Luxo world to be defined as aesthetically and stylistically anecdotal. In comparison to other forms of animated worlds, computer-animated films present a virtual reality that is visually channelled through the anthropomorph’s individual activities, movements and viewpoints within, through and across digital space.Less

Aesthetic Value and Wild Animals

Emily Brady

in Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground

Emily Brady discusses a question long neglected in environmental aesthetics: on what grounds do we ascribe aesthetic value to wild animals? Recently Glenn Parsons has argued that this value is ... More

Emily Brady discusses a question long neglected in environmental aesthetics: on what grounds do we ascribe aesthetic value to wild animals? Recently Glenn Parsons has argued that this value is grounded in the “fitness” of animals in relation to their form, behavior, and traits. Brady contends that Parsons’ “functional beauty” approach overlooks the important role played by expressive qualities in our aesthetic experience of animals. Drawing on expressive theories of music and discussions of expressive qualities in nature, Brady examines the distinctive character and basis of these qualities in sentient non-human creatures. She then address potential moral problems and objections, in particular, how aesthetic appreciation of expressive qualities is related to or distinct from sentimental, trivial, and anthropomorphic responses to wild animals.Less

Odd Beasts

James Williams

in Edward Lear

This chapter is concerned with the animals in Lear’s work. It considers the relevance of his background as a zoological illustrator, the relationship between human and animal protagonists in his ... More

This chapter is concerned with the animals in Lear’s work. It considers the relevance of his background as a zoological illustrator, the relationship between human and animal protagonists in his limericks and drawings, and the attempt in the later poems to imagine entirely animal-populated worlds without human agents. It is concerned with how Lear explores the philosophical problem of imagining forms of social life for non-human creatures without straightforward anthropomorphism. It concludes with an extended close reading of “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”.Less

Anthropomorphism and Apophaticism

Wesley J. Wildman

in In Our Own Image: Anthropomorphism, Apophaticism, and Ultimacy

To appreciate the risks and benefits of anthropomorphism, it is important (1) to appreciate the genius and limitations of human cognition, (2) to compare ultimacy models to see what difference ... More

To appreciate the risks and benefits of anthropomorphism, it is important (1) to appreciate the genius and limitations of human cognition, (2) to compare ultimacy models to see what difference anthropomorphic modeling techniques make, and (3) to entertain the possibility of an apophatic approach to ultimate reality that relativizes and relates ultimacy models. An apophatic approach to ultimate reality relativizes ultimacy models but also implies a disintegrating metric that serves to relate ultimacy models to one another. Degree of anthropomorphism is an important component of this disintegrating metric. Comparative analysis helps manifest internal complexity in the idea of anthropomorphism by distinguishing three relatively independent dimensions: Intentionality Attribution, Rational Practicality, and Narrative Comprehensibility. Educational efforts stabilized in cultural traditions can confer on people the desire and ability to resist one or more dimensions of the anthropomorphic default modes of cognition to some degree.Less

Agential-Being Models of Ultimate Reality

Wesley J. Wildman

in In Our Own Image: Anthropomorphism, Apophaticism, and Ultimacy

Agential-being models of ultimate reality affirm that ultimate reality is an aware, agential being. The Central Result of the scientific study of religion—that human beings will spontaneously create ... More

Agential-being models of ultimate reality affirm that ultimate reality is an aware, agential being. The Central Result of the scientific study of religion—that human beings will spontaneously create anthropomorphic supernatural agents to believe in, and to make religious use of, whether or not those agents actually exist—erodes the plausibility of any belief in supernatural agents, without proving such beliefs false, so it imposes a heavy burden on proponents of agential-being theism to show that the agential-being God hypothesis is plausible in light of all relevant information, and convincingly superior to competitor views. Agential-being ultimacy models resist the Rational Practicality and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Intentionality Attribution dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the agential-being class of ultimacy models are discussed.Less