Speech Genres And Other Late Essays

The Self and Its Brain.

Inevitably, reading is one of the requirements to be undergone. To improve the performance and quality, someone needs to have something new every day. It will suggest you to have more inspirations, then. However, the needs of inspirations will make you searching for some sources. Even from the other people experience, internet, and many books. Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

The phenomenon of man.

The name ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ is given to the Babylonian poem that tells the deeds of Gilgamesh, the greatest king and mightiest hero of ancient Mesopotamian legend. The poem falls into the category ‘epic’ because it is a long narrative poem of heroic content and has the seriousness and pathos that have sometimes been identified as markers of epic. Some early Assyriologists, when nationalism was a potent political force, characterized it as the ‘national epic’ of Babylonia, but this notion has deservedly lapsed. The poem’s subject is not the establishment of a Babylonian nation nor an episode in that nation’s history, but the vain quest of a man to escape his mortality. In its final and best-preserved version it is a sombre meditation on the human condition. The glorious exploits it tells are motivated by individual human predicaments, especially desire for fame and horror of death. The emotional struggles related in the story of Gilgamesh are those of no collective group but of the individual. Among its timeless themes are the friction between nature and civilization, friendship between men, the place in the universe of gods, kings and mortals, and the misuse of power. The poem speaks to the anxieties and life-experience of a human being, and that is why modern readers find it both profound and enduringly relevant.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing

Starting points for this thesis were personal observations about how paintings may be responses to unplanned experiences, how they may take on a life of their own, and how meanings may emerge rather than be imposed. Questions arose about possible links with Christian concepts of revelation, and these were investigated with particular reference to the French Catholic philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion. His concepts of saturated phenomena and their ‘excess’ of pure givenness were found to resonate with the actual experiences of painters but also to be critiqued by them. The core chapters discuss examples of paintings drawn from the three worlds of nature, ‘culture’, and persons, using an essentially threefold format: 1) presentation of selected paintings together with artists’ autobiographical material; 2) phenomenological analysis; and 3) theological interpretation. Underlying this approach is Marion’s approach to revelation by way of saturated phenomena, for whilst phenomenology alone cannot determine if actual revelation has taken place, it can investigate conditions for the possibility of revelation.

Original features include the following:

• Development of a ten-part typology of painting trajectories, reflecting diverse interactions between givenness and intentionality.
• Identification of ‘nature’ as a saturated phenomenon from the evidence of painting processes; this is new evidence supporting an existing critique of Marion.
• Discernment of saturated phenomena as ‘nested’, that is manifesting at different scales from the cosmic to the microscopic.
• Application of the ‘visual-verbal chronotope’ to the complexities of painterly hermeneutics, with respect to biblical images.
• Use of collaborative painting processes to enter the worlds of primary school children.
• Identification of painting processes as saturated phenomena in their own right.
• Realisation that Marion’s ‘givenness through saturated phenomena’ approach is complementary to the ‘imagination’ approach to revelation pursued by several British and North American theologians. It is suggested that the two approaches need each other.

It is concluded that, phenomenologically, painters’ imaginative responses to givenness are common to both secular and theistic interpretations of revelation, and that through this commonality painting processes can contribute to addressing tensions between natural and revealed theology contribute to addressing tensions between natural and revealed theology.

Jenifer Baker

Papers

A theological enquiry into the processes of painting, with reference to the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion