An analysis of cult religion & its cultural significance, illuminating social & religious life in late twentieth-century Western society, the meaning of the 1960s & 1970s in the US, the evolution of ...human need, & the creative & demonic nature of religion. Focus is on the worlds of total meaning that cults provide, & on how & why worlds of total meaning become worlds of total domination. Issue is taken with the notion that cults offer new creeds or dogmas -- beliefs -- to which persons are drawn; the understanding of religious cults must move beyond the myopic character of popular interpretations. The "new religions" are placed in historical, anthropological, & sociological context. Sociologically, the cult is a socially constructed world with ontological status, ie, a plausibility structure, legitimized by religion, to protect human beings against the precariousness of existence. It is a safe earthly place designed in accord with the dictates of heaven. The new religions create a subculture as a vessel to hold a religion. The religion functions as a glue for the culture, & the entirety is what holds people together. Modified AA.
Cantor thought of the principles of set theory or intuitive principles as universal forms that can apply to any actual or possible totality. This is something, however, which need not be accepted if ...there are totalities which have a fundamental ontological value and do not conform to these principles. The difficulties involved are not related to ontological problems but with certain peculiar sets, including the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, the set of all sets, and the ordinal of all ordinals. These problematic totalities for intuitive theory can be treated satisfactorily with the Zermelo and Fraenkel (ZF) axioms or the von Neumann, Bernays, and Gödel (NBG) axioms, and the iterative conceptions expressed in them.
The partibility of pigs and the circulation of their parts—from snout to tail, as the popular culinary phrase puts it—are routinely celebrated in communities committed to eating "local." In this ...article, I explore how different kinds of totalities are configured in the practices of such "locavore" actors with respect to pigs and pork. Approaches as varied as Sausseurean structuralism, functionalist sociology, and actor network theory characterize their objects of inquiry as totalities constituted by relationships among component parts. So too the totalities in relationships forged via pigs become (mis)aligned with the totality of pigs as embodied, complex organisms. Such wholes from parts reveal the overdetermination (or fetishization) of the "connections" (between farmers and consumers, chefs and diners, humans and animals) extolled by "local food" actors.
In this article, I depict the shared belief in resurrection as subversive vis-à-vis political totalities. More particularly, I argue that the idea of resurrection as insurrection emerges against the ...background of the political realities of the Roman Empire and its diverse tools for controlling people through public spectacles of terror that heighten fear, helplessness, and indifference, thwarting motivations for resistance and insurrection. From this context, resurrection reveals a present-future possibility of an embodied care, hope, and freedom in spite of and not subject to principalities that aim to subjugate bodies and minds. Given this idea of resurrection, I use an emended version of Winnicott’s (
1953
,
1967
,
1971
) concept of potential space and Arendt’s (
1958
) space of appearances to portray the interpersonal and psychosocial dynamics that make it possible for people to retain care, hope, and freedom in resisting and subverting the political totalities that undermine each.
Against the impression that Rousseau is an eclectic thinker, this paper is an attempt to reconstruct the systematic core of his anthropology. First, I discuss the methodological starting-point. ...Second, I develop the structural framework required to make the concept of nature operative as an ideal within social contexts. Finally, I interpret Rousseau’s genetic account in terms of this framework. Such a procedure allows me to solve two interpretative problems, the aporia of the origin of wickedness and the question of man’s natural isolation. A twofold notion of logic is introduced to integrate the demands of history and structure, which overlap with those of freedom and necessity in Rousseau’s thought. This organizes my argument in a mirror-like way. I call this undertaking an essay, for it is the endeavor to think what Rousseau must have thought in order to write what he wrote.
In his paper "Finitism" (1981), W.W. Tait maintains that the chief difficulty for everyone who wishes to understand Hilbert's conception of finitist mathematics is this: to specify the sense of the ...provability of general statements about the natural numbers without presupposing infinite totalities. Tait further argues that all finitist reasoning is essentially primitive recursive. In this paper, we attempt to show that his thesis "The finitist functions are precisely the primitive recursive functions" is disputable and that another, likewise defended by him, is untenable. The second thesis is that the finitist theorems are precisely the universal closures of the equations that can be proved in PRA. /// En su articulo "Finitism" (1981), W.W. Tait sostiene que la dificultad principal para quien quiere comprender la concepción hilbertiana de la matemática finitista es ésta: especificar el sentido de la demostrabilidad de enunciados generales sobre los números naturales sin presuponer totalidades infinitas. Además, Tait argumenta que todo razonamiento finitista es esencialmente primitivo recursivo. En este artículo tratamos de mostrar que su tesis "Las funciones finitistas son precisamente las funciones primitivas recursivas" es discutible y que otra, también defendida por él, resulta insostenible. La segunda tesis es que los teoremas finitistas son precisamente las clausuras universales de las ecuaciones que pueden demostrarse en PRA.
PDF
