bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Aesthetics, Chinese
Authors: Goldberg Stephen J. 
Published: September 2018

In China, poetry, painting and calligraphy are traditionally known as the ‘Three Perfections’ of the cultivated scholar. They are construed as ethico-aesthetic acts of self-signification and are evaluated as to their efficacy in fostering harmonious relations of social exchange within the concrete circumstances of particular social contexts. In contrast to Western notions of mimesis, the Chinese poetic tradition assumes the existence of fundamental, mutually implicating correlations between the patterns (wen) immanent in nature and those of human culture.
This gives rise to two traditions of Chinese poetics. First, there is the canonical tradition of Confucian exegesis, in which a poem was assumed to invoke a network of pre-established categorical correlations (lei) between poet and world, which enabled the imagery to be read as verbal indices of both personal feeling and the relative stability of the social and natural order. Second, there is the non-canonical tradition of neo-Daoist and Buddhist-inspired poetics which represented a shift from the didactic to the affective power of natural imagery to make reference to the poet’s state of mind.
Calligraphy and painting were adopted by the gentleman-scholar as ethico-aesthetic practices of xiushen (self-cultivation) and self-expression, and for promotion of social exchange. Early writings describing calligraphy and painting deploy metaphorical imagery that makes reference to both nature and the body. This imagery invoked the indigenous correlative rhetoric that sought consonance between the patterns immanent within the natural order and those of the human realm. The embodiment of tradition, through the practice of making artistic references to the past, was fundamental to the art of the scholar-painter, for it served to establish one’s artistic lineage and to sanction or authorize one’s own self-presentation within a particular historical situation.
Literature, Japanese philosophy in modern
Authors: Anderer Paul 
Published: September 2018

Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, virtually all major lines of Western thought and the works of both major and minor Western philosophers have been explored and used by Japanese writers in an effort to forge a modern Japanese literature. The history of translation alone reveals a concern to bring over synoptic summaries of Western philosophy, as well as the primary works of specific thinkers. Academic philosophy as a discipline of advanced study was established in the 1880s, the decade which corresponds to the beginnings of widespread literary reform and the often-cited creation of the first modern Japanese novel, Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating Cloud) in 1889.
However, Japanese novelists, dramatists, poets and critics did not assimilate philosophical influences naïvely or passively, nor was Japanese literature made over in the shape of specific Western ideas regarding the nature and function of the self, society or literary aesthetics. Indeed, the avid translation and discussion of Western ideas frequently provoked a nativist reaction or modification. The revival of traditional tropes, the language of Confucian ethics, Buddhist practice and Shintō legends), itself often reflects the pervasive presence of Western ideas on the modern literary scene.
Aesthetics in Islamic philosophy
Authors: Black Deborah L. 
Published: September 2018

The major Islamic philosophers produced no works dedicated to aesthetics, although their writings do address issues that contemporary philosophers might study under that heading. The nature of beauty was addressed by Islamic philosophers in the course of discussions about God and his attributes in relation to his creation, under the inspiration of Neoplatonic sources such as the pseudo-Aristotelian Theology of Aristotle, a compilation based upon the Enneads of Plotinus. Considerations of artistic beauty and creativity were also addressed in works inspired by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, and Islamic philosophers also adapted some of Plato’s views on literature and imitation, particularly those expressed in the Republic.
On the whole, Islamic philosophers did not view artistic and literary creativity as ends in themselves. Rather, their interest was in explaining the relations of these activities to purely intellectual ends. In the case of poetics and rhetoric in particular, the emphasis in Islamic philosophy was pragmatic and political: poetics and rhetoric were viewed as instruments for communicating the demonstrated truths of philosophy to the populace, whose intellectual abilities were presumed to be limited. The medium of such communication was usually, although not necessarily, that of religious discourse. Islamic philosophers also devoted considerable attention to explaining the psychological and cognitive foundations of aesthetic judgment and artistic production within the spectrum of human knowledge. They argued that rhetoric and poetics were in some important respects non-intellectual arts, and that poetics in particular was distinctive in so far as it addressed the imaginative faculties of its audience rather than their intellects.
Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad (c.940–1030)
Authors: Leaman Oliver 
Published: September 2018

Like so many of his contemporaries in the fourth and fifth centuries AH (tenth and eleventh centuries ad) Ibn Miskawayh was eclectic in philosophy, basing his approach upon the rich variety of Greek philosophy that had been translated into Arabic. Although he applied that philosophy to specifically Islamic problems, he rarely used religion to modify philosophy, and so came to be known as very much an Islamic humanist. He represents the tendency in Islamic philosophy to fit Islam into a wider system of rational practices common to all humanity.
Ibn Miskawayh’s Neoplatonism has both a practical and a theoretical side. He provides rules for the preservation of moral health based on a view of the cultivation of character. These describe the ways in which the various parts of the soul can be brought together into harmony, so achieving happiness. It is the role of the moral philosopher to prescribe rules for moral health, just as the doctor prescribes rules for physical health. Moral health is based upon a combination of intellectual development and practical action.
Shah Wali Allah (Qutb al-Din Ahmad al-Rahim) (1703–62)
Authors: Khan Hafiz A. Ghaffar 
Published: September 2018

Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, the greatest Muslim scholar of eighteenth-century India, made an immense contribution to the intellectual, economic, social, political and religious life of the Muslim community in India, the effects of which persist to the present day. He lived during a time when the Muslim empire was losing ground on the Indian subcontinent, with the Muslim community divided and at odds. Seeking to give theological and metaphysical issues a new rational interpretation and labouring to harmonize reason and revelation, he tried to reconcile the various factions of the Indian Muslims, thereby protecting the empire from collapse.
Shah Wali Allah contended that the root cause of the downfall of the Indian Muslims was their ignorance of the sacred scripture of Islam. He initiated a movement with the theme ‘Back to the Qur’an’, and translated the Qur’an into Persian to facilitate its understanding among all the Muslims of India. It is believed to be the first complete translation of the Qur’an from the Arabic by an Indian Muslim scholar.
Saadiah Gaon (fl. early 10th century)
Authors: Goodman L.E. 
Published: September 2018

Saadiah Gaon al-Fayyumi was the first systematic philosopher of Judaism and a pioneering exegete, grammarian, lexicographer, liturgist and chronologist. His Kitab al-mukhtar fi ’l-amanat wa-’l-’i‘tiqadat (Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions) uses reason, experience and tradition to elaborate a monotheistic theology and pluralistic ethics.
Organized in ten thematic treatises, the work, familiarly known by the title of its Hebrew translation, Sefer Emunot ve-De‘ot (The Book of Beliefs and Convictions), opens with a striking epistemological prelude laying out the sources of knowledge in sense experience, reason and (for the recipients of Scripture) tradition. Saadiah defends sense experience on the grounds that scepticism is self-undermining. He defends reason as the basis of critical and scientific knowledge; and he defends the Jewish sources of traditional learning on the grounds of the continuity and trustworthiness of their transmission. He treats tradition not as an independent source of knowledge but as a means of preserving primary knowledge acquired in the past.
The ten treatises of the work defend creation against alternative cosmological theories, argue for God’s unity and incorporeality, explain the human situation as a trial designed to test and reward human goodness, defend God’s justice and the substantiality and immortality of the soul, affirm the national restoration promised by the prophets of Israel, and lay out the constituents of the good life, which Saadiah argues is undermined by excessive attention to any one of the varied goods available to us. Committed to reason, science, free will and God’s ultimate justice, Saadiah champions the veracity of Scripture using his formidable philological skills and learning to find appropriable interpretations of biblical language whenever the apparent textual sense to be ruled out by reason, science, another text, or a sound tradition. In keeping with the Rabbinical and Biblical outlook, he upholds the value of this life on the grounds that only here are authentic choices possible. Saadiah’s philosophy profoundly influenced Maimonides and later Jewish thinkers; his biblical commentaries are still consulted for their philosophical and philological insights.
Halakhah
Authors: Zohar Noam J. 
Published: September 2018

The central ideal of rabbinic Judaism is that of living by the Torah, that is, God’s teachings. These teachings are mediated by a detailed normative system called halakhah, which might be translated as ‘the Way’. The term ‘rabbinic law’ captures the form of halakhic discourse, but not its range. Appropriate sections of halakhah have indeed served as the law of Jewish communities for two millennia. But other sections relate to individual conscience and religious observance and are enforceable only by a ‘heavenly court’.
Although grounded in Scripture, halakhah’s frame of reference is the ‘oral Torah’, a tradition of interpretation and argument culminating in the twenty volumes of the Talmud. God’s authority is the foundational norm, but it is only invoked occasionally as superseding human understanding. Indeed, the rabbis disallowed divine interference in their deliberations, asserting, in keeping with Scripture, that Torah is ‘not in heaven’ (Bava Metzia 59b, citing Deuteronomy 30: 12).
Given the lack of binding dogma in Judaism, halakhic practice has often been regarded as the common denominator that unites the Jewish community. The enterprise of furnishing ‘reasons of the commandments’ (ta’amei ha-mitzvot), central to many thinkers in Judaism, accordingly reveals a great diversity of orientations. These range, in medieval Judaism, from esoteric mystical doctrines to Maimonides’ rational and historical explanations; and among modern writers, from moral positivism to existentialism.
Eschatology
Authors: Davis Stephen T. 
Published: September 2018

Eschatology is the study of or doctrine about the end of history or the last things. Eschatology is a branch of Christian theology, and the term still finds its primary home in that context, but it is also used broadly to cover any theory about the end of human life or of the world.
There are many types of eschatological theory. Some of the most important are those of Plato, Vedāntic Hinduism, Karl Marx and Christianity. The contemporary philosopher of religion who makes most use of eschatology in his thinking is doubtless John Hick. There are several issues that are of interest to philosophers in the area of eschatology. Among them are such questions as whether there is good reason to believe that human life and/or history are moving towards a final end; whether personal identity problems are solvable in the eschaton (the end-state); whether eschatological considerations can help philosophers address other philosophical problems (for example, the problem of evil); whether the very notion of disembodied survival of death is coherent; and how (in Christian theology especially) immortality of the soul and bodily resurrection are related.
Existentialist theology
Authors: Evans C. Stephen 
Published: September 2018

Existentialist theology is a term used to describe the work of a number of theologians, chiefly from the twentieth century, whose writings were strongly influenced by the literary and philosophical movement known as existentialism. Because of the diversity of the movement, it is difficult to say much that is illuminating about existentialist theology as a whole. In general, however, these theologians attempt to understand God in relation to the situation of the concretely existing human individual. Their analysis of human existence is one that emphasizes the freedom of individuals to shape their own identities through choices, and the paradoxical, ambiguous or even absurd character of the reality that humans encounter. Religious faith is seen as closely related to feelings of alienation and despair; faith may grow out of such emotions or it may provide the key to overcoming them, or both these relations may be present at once.
Though the designation of any particular theologian as ‘existentialist’ is a controversial matter, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich are among the more important thinkers whose work exhibits existentialist themes. The entire movement has been strongly influenced, directly or indirectly, by the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard, while the works of the Russian novelist Fëdor Dostoevskii and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, both from the late nineteenth century, have also been important.
Occasionalism
Authors: Hasker William 
Published: September 2018

Occasionalism is often thought of primarily as a rather desperate solution to the problem of mind–body interaction. Mind and body, it maintains, do not in fact causally affect each other at all; rather, it is God who causes bodily movements to occur ‘on the occasion of’ appropriate mental states (for example, volitions), and who causes mental states, such as sensations, on the occasion of the corresponding bodily states (for example, sensory stimulation).
This characterization, while correct so far as it goes, is seriously incomplete. Occasionalists have seen the lack of real causal influence between mind and body as merely a special case of the more general truth that no two created beings ever causally affect each other. The one and only ‘true cause’ is God, with created beings serving as the occasions for his causal and creative activity, but never as causes in their own right. (The one possible exception to this is that created agents may themselves bring about their own acts of will; this is necessary if they are to be in any sense free agents.) Occasionalism has always been held primarily for religious reasons, in order to give God the honour due to him as the Lord and ruler of the universe. It has never, however, been a majority view among philosophical theists.
Pantheism
Authors: Yandell Keith E. 
Published: September 2018

Pantheism contrasts with monotheism (there is one God), polytheism (there are many gods), deism (God created the world in such a way that it is capable of existing and operating on its own, which God then allows it to do) and panentheism (in God there is a primordial and unchanging nature, and a consequent nature that changes and develops). Etymologically, pantheism is the view that Deity and Cosmos are identical. Theologically, it embraces divine immanence while rejecting divine transcendence. If atheism is the denial that anything is divine, pantheism is not atheism; if atheism is the claim that there is no Creator, Providence, transcendent Deity, or personal God, pantheism is atheistic.
Spinoza, perhaps the paradigm figure for pantheism, was described by some as ‘a God-intoxicated man’ and by others as an atheist. On his account, only God or Nature exists, a single, necessarily existing substance whose modes and qualities exhaust reality. Conceivable equally properly as physical or as mental, God or Nature is no proper object of worship, creates nothing, grants freedom to none, hears no prayer, and does not act in history. Personal immortality, on Spinoza’s view, not only does not occur, but is logically impossible. It is one thing to value nature so highly that one calls it a divinity, another to believe in God in any monotheistic sense.
This much said, it must be admitted that ‘pantheism’ is not easy to define precisely. As conceived here, pantheism need not be a variety of materialism, and if it is materialistic it includes a high view of the worth of matter. Yet ‘pantheism’ has served as a term of abuse, and as another term for ‘atheism’ and ‘materialism’ and ‘deism’, terms bearing quite different senses.
Sacraments
Authors: Braine David 
Published: September 2018

The Christian theory of ‘sacraments’ underlies ideas of a general ‘sacramentality’ in the universe whereby ordinary things have religious significance by their own nature or by virtue of some hidden power within them. The pre-Christian Latin word sacramentum meant a non-returnable gift marking the taking on of some binding obligation; more informally it meant an oath, and later a secret or mystery. Latin theology turned it to Christian use, initially in rough translation of the Greek mysterion, applied to the Church, to the Scriptures and to Old as well as New Testament rites. The word then became the predominant medieval and modern term specifically designating those rites in permanent use in the Church which human authority was conceived not to be free to abolish, add to or change in their essentials.
Each such rite presupposes that the creaturely things used have some aptitude which allows or invites the particular ritual use concerned, that is, which presupposes some more general sacramental potential in natural things. The conceptual tools developed in Catholic theology – ‘effective sign’, ‘matter and form’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘authority’, ‘power’ and ‘institution’ – sharpen enquiry into the phenomenology of rituals within many different religious traditions.
Sanctification
Authors: Allen Diogenes 
Published: September 2018

Sanctification, the process of becoming holy, is closely connected to justification, although Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians differ on how closely. According to the Roman Catholic Church, sanctification takes place in justification. In justification, sins are forgiven and there is an infusion of sanctifying grace, whereby one is made just and holy; this is what it is to be sanctified. In this state of grace, one merits heaven. Nonetheless, there is room for spiritual growth in the Christian life (though this is not called sanctification, as it would be in Protestantism) because concupiscence remains and appetites are still not fully under control. Justification is the beginning of a new life (the life of grace) in which we may grow towards integrity, the proper use of appetites; moreover, the gifts of faith, hope and charity, which enable one to perform meritorious works, can also increase. The state of grace, which is the result of justification, can be lost by mortal sin, but can be fully restored through the sacrament of penance.
Protestants teach that in justification one’s sins are forgiven and one is fully reconciled to God, but that one is not wholly sanctified (that is, renewed or made holy). Luther’s formula that we are simul iustus et peccator (both just and sinner) is widely accepted by Protestants. Justification is only the beginning of sanctification, which, most Protestants believe, is never completed in this life. The exceptions are Methodists and members of some holiness churches (groups that either broke away from Methodism or were influenced by it).
Trinity
Authors: Howard-Snyder Dan 
Published: September 2018

The doctrine of the Trinity is central to Christian theology. The part of the doctrine that concerns us here may be stated in these words: although the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are different persons, each is the same God as the other; they are not three Gods, but exactly one God.
These words arguably imply a contradiction. For example, if the Father is not the same person as the Son, then the Father is not identical with the Son; thus, if each is a God, there are at least two Gods, which contradicts the claim that there is exactly one God. Analytic theologians have responded to this line of argument and others related to it. Each response aims to model a consistent doctrine of the Trinity, one that provides the resources to reject such arguments while retaining Trinitarian orthodoxy. We can classify these attempts by distinguishing those according to which there is no numerical sameness without identity from those according to which there is numerical sameness without identity. Attempts in the first group tend to raise worries about consistency with orthodoxy. Attempts in the second group tend to raise worries about intelligibility.
Natural theology
Authors: MacDonald Scott 
Published: September 2018

Natural theology aims at establishing truths or acquiring knowledge about God (or divine matters generally) using only our natural cognitive resources. The phrase ‘our natural cognitive resources’ identifies both the methods and data for natural theology: it relies on standard techniques of reasoning and facts or truths in principle available to all human beings just in virtue of their possessing reason and sense perception. As traditionally conceived, natural theology begins by establishing the existence of God, and then proceeds by establishing truths about God’s nature (for example, that God is eternal, immutable and omniscient) and about God’s relation to the world.
A precise characterization of natural theology depends on further specification of its methods and data. One strict conception of natural theology – the traditional conception sometimes associated with Thomas Aquinas – allows only certain kinds of deductive argument, the starting points of which are propositions that are either self-evident or evident to sense perception. A broader conception might allow not just deductive but also inductive inference and admit as starting points propositions that fall short of being wholly evident.
Natural theology contrasts with investigations into divine matters that rely at least in part on data not naturally available to us as human beings. This sort of enterprise might be characterized as revelation-based theology, in so far as the supernatural element on which it relies is something supernaturally revealed to us by God. Revelation-based theology can make use of what is ascertainable by us only because of special divine aid. Dogmatic and biblical theology would be enterprises of this sort.
Critics of natural theology fall generally into three groups. The first group, the majority, argue that some or all of the particular arguments of natural theology are, as a matter of fact, unsuccessful. Critics in the second group argue that, in principle, natural theology cannot succeed, either because of essential limitations on human knowledge that make it impossible for us to attain knowledge of God or because religious language is such as to make an investigation into its truth inappropriate. The third group of critics holds that natural theology is in some way irrelevant or inimical to true religion. They argue in various ways that the objectifying, abstract and impersonal methods of natural theology cannot capture what is fundamentally important about the divine and our relation to it.