But the Roman Catholic Church needs to develop a new synthesis capable of overcoming the inadequate arguments of Roman Catholic natural-law moral theory, which leads to the ridiculous anti-abortion stance that Pope Francis and the other bishops endorse (see par. no. 120; also see par. no. 117).
A more adequate moral theory would be based on Kantian deontological moral theory.
In the book RENDER UNTO DARWIN: PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT'S CRUSADE AGAINST SCIENCE (2007), my former UMD colleague (we're both retired now), James H. Fetzer works out a reasonable position about legalized abortion in the first trimester, based on deontological moral theory (pages 95-148).
In the paragraph numbered 200, Pope Francis refers to "the treasures of wisdom" about "love, justice and peace" found in certain religious traditions.
But in my estimate, Pope Francis manifests no wisdom in his eco-encyclical, despite the fact that he sees himself as imparting what he mistakes as Roman Catholic wisdom.
Next in the same paragraph, Pope Francis says, "Cultural limitations in different eras often affected the perception of these ethical and spiritual treasures."
Now, from the early 1950s onward, Ong devoted himself to delineating how certain broad cultural orientations affected people's perception and conception.
With reference to Western cultural history, Ong centers his attention on the aural-to-visual shift in sensibilities in his book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE (1958), mentioned above. To this day, that book repays careful study.
In this densely packed book, Ong delineates the aural-to-visual shift in perception and conception. On page 338, note 54, Ong explicitly acknowledges that he has borrowed the aural-visual contrast from the French Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951), most notably from Lavelle's book LA PAROLE ET L'ECRITURE, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1942).
Andrea Wilson Nightingale's book SPECTACLES IN CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THEORIA IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT (2004) strengthens Ong's and Lavelle's claim about the visual tendency in ancient Greek philosophical thought.
But the import of Ong's post-modern philosophical thought about the aural-to-visual shift in perception and conception is not easy to grasp.
You see, Ong does not favor the aural sensibility, nor the visual sensibility. Instead, he favors critical awareness regarding both, over against the uncritical approach he cautions that the unwary might take (page 70). Thus Ong himself is wary against both the aural sensibility and the visual sensibility, both of which involve what he refers to as a corpuscular sense of mental activity (pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 196, 203, 210, and 286).
Ong's post-modern philosophical critique of visualist tendencies in Western philosophy is compatible with the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan's post-modern critique his philosophical masterpiece INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1957) of the tendency of Western philosophy to equate knowing with "taking a good look." (After Lonergan [1904-1984] completed his philosophical masterpiece, he taught theology at the Jesuit-sponsored Gregorian University in Rome for about a decade or so. At the present time, the University of Toronto Press is slowly but surely publishing the COLLECTED WORKS OF BERNARD LONERGAN.)
In his eco-encyclical, Pope Francis repeatedly refers to dialogue. Ong also repeatedly refers to dialogue in his 1958 book and in many of his subsequent publications.
In his eco-encyclical, Pope Francis says, "There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology" (par. no. 118). But he is not referring to the field of study known in academia as anthropology. In the church's parlance, the pope is referring to a theory of the human person.
No doubt Ong's philosophical thought about the aural-to-visual shift in perception and conception could be described as his anthropology.
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