Universalism

Abstract: There is no accepted, unified, politico-economic theory of development. In critical development studies, there is a general agreement that two counter-posing theories of political economy, modernization and dependency, were most prominent in the three decades following World War II. Both of these schools of thought fell out of popularity in the mid-1970s, though some of their core temporal and spatial assumptions live on today. In Section One of this paper, I analytically reflect on the modernization/dependency debate to lay a foundation for a discussion in Section Two on the timing of development and of modernity. Timing is an area of debate that goes to the heart of modernization and dependency theories, development practice, and critical development studies. World-systems analysis (WSA) is one of the approaches involved in the space/time debate in critical development studies. In Section Three, the final analytic section, I explore WSA as a school of thought currently in vogue in critical development studies, though not without some controversy. I show that WSA's theory of the subject is Eurocentric.

Scholars have largely ignored Aaron Copland’s lengthy career as a cultural diplomat, although the documentation surrounding it sheds newlight on his political views. Through a consideration of his work with the U.S. government duringWorldWar II and the Cold War this article argues that a brand of universalist internationalism, rooted in his earliermusical experiences in Europe and in his leftist politics, motivated many of Copland’s political activities at home and overseas during this period. Copland remained committed to this perspective both before and after his McCarthy hearing in 1953, but the Cold War inevitably brought new challenges to a man with such an outlook. Copland’s work with the U.S. Information Agency during this period shows that although his beliefs and attitudes remained unchanged, he felt the need to participate in a reconstruction of his image that better matched the new climate. His music written during the Cold War, furthermore, provides an artistic realization of this interaction between pragmatism and idealism.

Modern philosophers tends to regard morality as intrinsically universalist, embracing universal norms that apply formally to each moral agent qua moral agent, independent of particularities such as familial relationships or membership in a specific community. At the same time, however, most of us think (and certainly act as if) those particularist properties play a significant and legitimate role in our moral lives. Accordingly, determining the proper relationship of these two spheres of the moral life is of great importance, but a fully successful resolution of this tension remains lacking. I believe Dietrich von Hildebrand’s work on love, and specifically his development of the idea of Eigenleben (Subjectivity) in The Nature of Love, offers a fruitful way forward. In this paper I begin by laying out some of the chief features of the universalist character of modern moral theory in both Kantianism and consequentialism. I then articulate some of the ways in which von Hildebrand’s understanding of Eigenleben offers us genuine insights towards articulating a substantive account of the proper relationship of the universal demands of morality and the particularist demands of my own life. Specifically, von Hildebrand’s critique of extreme altruism shows that moral agents cannot be properly understood according to merely formal properties like rationality, because each person’s particular Eigenleben is the only real grounds for moral agency. Von Hildebrand develops a critique of depersonalized universalism similar to Bernard Williams’ later criticisms of Kantian moral thought, while offering a positive account that is in many ways more compelling. Ultimately, von Hildebrand allows us to see that a genuine Subjectivity is the necessary grounds for the possibility of love, including and especially the love of God, which serves as the basis for a genuine morality based on objective values. Building on this insight we can begin to articulate an account of the moral life grounded in answering the call of God that can do justice to both our universalist and particularist intuitions.

Pourquoi, alors que rien ne semblait particulièrement l’y prédisposer, Brillat-Savarin est-il devenu de nos jours, et grâce à la seule Physiologie du goût, une référence majeure et un représentant incontournable du bon goût français en matière de gastronomie ? Une étude des modalités discursives et du dispositif énonciatif mis en place dans son texte permet de comprendre comment – et d’évaluer dans quelle mesure – l’œuvre a pu idéalement s’inscrire dans un discours de l’universalité française grâce au développement d’une fiction de complicité avec le lecteur et à l’instauration pragmatique d’une relation didactique fondée sur un rapport ambigu à la référence scientifique, entre scientificité et pseudo-science.

"Review: "In this beautifully written and richly researched work, Shelby Balik shows how the travels of early nineteenth century Methodists, Universalists and freewill Baptist itinerant missionaries and congregations recreated the geography of New England Protestantism, setting in motion (literally) a tension between religious rootedness and religious uprootedness, center and periphery, that endures to today. Early American religious history in Balik’s retelling of it is one of bodies in constant movement in and out and around the city on the hill. The delight Balik takes in maps and journeys is infectious. This is a wonderful addition to American religious historiography." —Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

Overview: Northern New England, a rugged landscape dotted with transient settlements, posed challenges to the traditional town church in the wake of the American Revolution. Using the methods of spatial geography, Shelby M. Balik examines how migrants adapted their understanding of religious community and spiritual space to survive in the harsh physical surroundings of the region. The notions of boundaries, place, and identity they developed became the basis for spreading New England's deeply rooted spiritual culture, even as it opened the way to a new evangelical age."

""This book takes on the political by developing a practice and a thought we call ‘polemicization’. We draw from the work of Jacques Rancière, for whom a polemic or disagreement does not refer to the case when one interlocutor says white and another black. Instead, it designates the conflict arising when, for example, both parties say white, yet each understands something different by whiteness. This situation forces the interlocutors to construe the scene of the validity of their claims, which is just another way of saying that the given or commonplace is never settled once and for all. We generalize the logic of this encounter and claim that disagreement is the very process through which objectivity is instituted. We develop the contours of polemicization and deepen its philosophical implications through a critical engagement with the work of contemporary theorists, such as Lefort, Schmitt, Laclau, Derrida and Žižek. In particular, we interrogate commonplace narratives of modernity, identity, difference, universality, antagonism and subjectivity. The result is a text that cuts across the boundaries between political thought, cultural studies and social theory.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Polemic and Polemicization
1.1 Polemic and the Commonplace
1.2 The Commonplace of Political Modernity
1.3 Polemicizing the Commonplace

2. Polemicization and Political Philosophy
2.1 Polemicization and Attitude
2.2 Polemicization and the Political
2.3 Polemicization and Critique
2.4 Polemicization and Metaphysics
2.5 Polemicization and Plurality

3. Polemicizing Subjectivity
3.1 The Modern Subject
3.2 The Basic Antagonism
3.3 Outing the Subject
3.4 Who Wants to be Popular?

4. Polemicizing Universals
4.1 The Persistence of Universals
4.2 The Pragmatics of the Referent
4.3 Deliberation and Confrontation
4.4 Commonality Through Polemics""

ABSTRACT The modern theory of the self-organization of complex systems, or synergetics, is considered in the context of historical traditions of natural philosophy. It is substantiated that it is unfairly to treat synergetics as a modern “speculative physics”, ie the natural philosophy of a new type. However, there is no doubt that on the basis of synergetics a certain worldview is built, and this worldview oversteps the boundaries of basic scientific disciplines and reaches a meta-scientific level of research.

This book deals with many subjects but mostly about finding a "universal" or "generic" God from religious experiences. This includes the search for God and the afterlife in the age of science through the study of near-death experiences and other transpersonal experiences which point to the existence and nature of God and ongoing personal consciousness following physical death. The history of these experiences are reviewed prior to 1850 and of their study during three periods of scientific research between 1850 and the present. Developmental revelation is also discussed. Ken Vincent also provides a guide to "Universals" in religion - the five "universals" common to all religions, the most important being the spiritually transformative experience - the basis for their founder's authority. Separating the "supernatural" from "natural" religious experiences are explained where modern researchers have applied the scientific method to such experiences and discovered they are not limited to the realm of a few ancient saints, prophets, and sages. The religious experiences of Jesus are shown to be compatible with modern research by the Jesus Seminar using modern scholarship to separate the mythology from the reality regarding Jesus and how Jesus' mystical experiences were no different from modern mystical experiences, except in degree, thereby showing a continuity of religious experience from Jesus' time to the present. The resurrection appearances of Jesus are explained as after-death communication and not an actual bodily resurrection. Other topics include: religious experience research reveals Universalist principles, mystical religious experiences and Christian Universalism, the NDE and Christian Universalism, an eighteenth-century NDE by George de Benneville, Zoroaster: the first Universalist, Omar Khayyam: a Sufi Universalist, universal salvation in Hinduism and its children, a scientific investigation of the "dark side", magic, deeds, and Universalism: the afterlife in the world’s religions, and what NDEs and other spiritually transformative experiences teach us about God and the afterlife.

This book examines the relationship between globalization and religion from a variety of perspectives. After establishing working definitions for both core concepts, it considers certain conceptual homologies between globalization and religion, but also several points of divergence. The universalist and universalizing dimensions of both notions are compared alongside some reflections on the differences between religion and ideology—two terms often used interchangeably. The central theme is globalization and religion in the contemporary era, beginning with the historical role of religion in the emergence of the global system of empires, markets, and eventually nation-states, examining how world political powers have at times articulated their claims within and through religious frameworks. As we enter the most immediate period of globalization following World War II, we consider religious responses to various dimensions of globalization as expressed through new social movements and new theologies. We also consider the views of those who have argued that contemporary globalization, representing as it does a relative decline in the importance of the nation-state as an actor on the world stage, paves the way for non-state forces—such as cultures and religions—to dominate global affairs.