Senses Of Tradition

This book articulates a theory of Catholic tradition that departs from previous understandings. Drawing on the medieval concept of the four-fold sense of scripture, John Thiel proposes four interpretive senses of tradition. He also offers a theory of doctrinal development that reconciles Catholic belief in apostolic authority and continuity of tradition with a critical approach to the evidence of history.

The book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in texts. The essays cover not only European art and textual sources, but also Franciscan influences in the Americas found in both texts and artifacts.

This volume is a collection of essays on a special theme in Aristotelian philosophy of mind: the internal senses. The first part of the volume is devoted to the central question of whether or not any internal senses exist in Aristotle’s philosophy of mind and, if so, how many and how they are individuated. The provocative claim of chapter one is that Aristotle recognizes no such internal sense. His medieval Latin interpreters, on the other hand, very much thought that Aristotle did introduce a number of internal senses as shown in the second chapter. The second part of the volume contains a number of case studies demonstrating the philosophical background of some of the most influential topics covered by the internal senses in the Aristotelian tradition and in contemporary philosophy of mind. The focus of the case studies is on memory, imagination and estimation. Chapters introduce the underlying mechanisms of memory and recollection taking its cue from Aristotle but reaching into early modern philosophy as well as studying composite imagination in Avicenna’s philosophy of mind. Further topics include the Latin reception of Avicenna’s estimative faculty and the development of the internal senses as well as offering an account of the logic of objects of imagination.

In this study, Mark McInroy argues that the 'spiritual senses' play a crucial yet previously unappreciated role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The doctrine of the spiritual senses typically claims that human beings can be made capable of perceiving non-corporeal, 'spiritual' realities. After a lengthy period of disuse, Balthasar recovers the doctrine in the mid-twentieth century and articulates it afresh in his theological aesthetics. At the heart of this project stands the task of perceiving the absolute beauty of the divine form through which God is revealed to human beings. Although extensive scholarly attention has focused on Balthasar's understanding of revelation, beauty, and form, what remains curiously under-studied is his model of the perceptual faculties through which one beholds the form that God reveals. McInroy claims that Balthasar draws upon the tradition of the spiritual senses in order to develop the means through which one perceives the 'splendour' of divine revelation. McInroy further argues that, in playing this role, the spiritual senses function as an indispensable component of Balthasar's unique, aesthetic resolution to the high-profile debates in modern Catholic theology between Neo-Scholastic theologians and their opponents. As a third option between Neo-Scholastic 'extrinsicism', which arguably insists on the authority of revelation to the point of disaffecting the human being, and 'immanentism', which reduces God's revelation to human categories in the name of relevance, McInroy proposes that Balthasar's model of spiritual perception allows one to be both delighted and astounded by the glory of God's revelation.

Is it possible to see, hear, touch, smell and taste God? How do we understand the biblical promise that the 'pure in heart' will 'see God'? Christian thinkers as diverse as Origen of Alexandria, Bonaventure, Jonathan Edwards and Hans Urs von Balthasar have all approached these questions in distinctive ways by appealing to the concept of the 'spiritual senses'. In focusing on the Christian tradition of the 'spiritual senses', this book discusses how these senses relate to the physical senses and the body, and analyzes their relationship to mind, heart, emotions, will, desire and judgement. The contributors illuminate the different ways in which classic Christian authors have treated this topic, and indicate the epistemological and spiritual import of these understandings. The concept of the 'spiritual senses' is thereby importantly recovered for contemporary theological anthropology and philosophy of religion.

This collection of essays by eminent traditionalists and contemporary thinkers throws into sharp relief many of the urgent problems of today.

Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.

We see the Protestant Reformation as the dawn of an austere, intellectual Christianity that uprooted a ritualized religion steeped in stimulating the senses--and by extension the faith--of its flock. Historians continue to use the idea as a potent framing device in presenting not just the history of Christianity but the origins of European modernity. Jacob M. Baum plumbs a wealth of primary source material from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to offer the first systematic study of the senses within the religious landscape of the German Reformation. Concentrating on urban Protestants, Baum details the engagement of Lutheran and Calvinist thought with traditional ritual practices. His surprising discovery: Reformation-era Germans echoed and even amplified medieval sensory practices. Yet Protestant intellectuals simultaneously cultivated the idea that the senses had no place in true religion. Exploring this paradox, Baum illuminates the sensory experience of religion and daily life at a crucial historical crossroads. Provocative and rich in new research, Reformation of the Senses reevaluates one of modern Christianity's most enduring myths.

We know the Renaissance as a key period in the history of Europe. It saw the development of court and urban cultures, witnessed the first global voyages of discovery and gave rise to the Reformation and Counter Reformation. It also started with the 'invention' of oil painting, linear perspective and moveable type, all visual technologies. Does that mean, as has been suggested, that the Renaissance stands for the 'ascendancy of the eye'? If so, then what happened to the sensory extremes which the famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga still perceived in the 15th century? Did they simply disappear? Or is there another history to be told, a history of a surprising continuity, not only of the sense of hearing but also of the 'lower' senses – those of taste, smell and touch? And was the Renaissance not first and foremost a time of deep sensory anxiety? This volume, assembling nine outstanding specialists, seeks to answer these questions while offering a lively and 'sensational' portrait of the period. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

By departing from traditional sinological approaches, this method uncovers a detailed picture of certain shared underlying views of sense perception in the Lun Yu, the Mozi (including the Neo Mohist Canons), the Xunzi, the Mencius, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi."--BOOK JACKET.