Eastern Christian Approaches to Philosophy

335 Pages·2022·2.761 MB·English

by  James Siemens, Joshua Matthan Brown

Eastern Christian
Approaches to Philosophy
Edited by
James Siemens · Joshua Matthan Brown
Eastern Christian Approaches to Philosophy
James Siemens • Joshua Matthan Brown
Editors
Eastern Christian
Approaches to
Philosophy
Editors
James Siemens Joshua Matthan Brown
School of History, Archaeology, and Department of Philosophy
Religion Messiah University
Cardiff University Mechanicsburg, PA, USA
Cardiff, UK
ISBN 978-3-031-10761-0 ISBN 978-3-031-10762-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10762-7
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A
cknowledgements
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Amy Invernizzi at
Palgrave Macmillan for believing in this project, and for showing great
patience with us as we worked to overcome significant obstacles and set-
backs. Additionally, we deeply appreciate the helpful recommendations
and advice we received from our esteemed colleagues Yujin Nagasawa,
Augustine Cassidy, Elizabeth Theokritoff, and Brandon Gallaher, as well
as the insightful input we received from several anonymous reviewers.
Furthermore, we would like to express our gratitude to the exceptional
philosophers who laboured day and night to produce the contents of this
book. We are truly honoured to have partnered with such fantastic and
talented people. Sadly, due to the complications of a worldwide pandemic
(and, in one case, an intense battle with cancer) several of our original
contributors were unable to meet the submission deadline. It would be
remiss of us, therefore, if we did not offer a special thanks to Clemena
Antonova, Nathan Placencia, Tyler Dalton McNabb, and Michael DeVito
for swooping in at the last minute and producing superb contributions in
a very short amount of time. Last but not least, we would like to thank our
longsuffering and very large families (seriously, we have like fourteen chil-
dren between us!) for supporting us as we worked on this project. We love
you guys with all of our hearts.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Joshua Matthan Brown and James Siemens
Part I M etaphilosophy 13
2 St Ephrem and the Pursuit of Wisdom 15
Andrew Hayes
3 The Emergence of the Scholastic Attitude Towards
Philosophy in Greek Patristic Thought 39
Anna Zhyrkova
Part II Philosophical Theology and Metaphysics 65
4 What We Can and Cannot Say: An Apophatic Response to
Atheism 67
Joshua Matthan Brown
5 Divine Impassibility in Eastern Patristic Thought: Origen
of Alexandria and Gregory Thaumaturgus 95
James Loxley Compton
vii
viii CoNTENTS
6 Gregory of Nyssa on the Individuation of Actions and
Events 123
Beau Branson
Part III Epistemology and Philosophy of Language 149
7 Warranted Eastern Christian Belief: Extending Plantinga’s
Extended AC Model 151
Tyler Dalton McNabb and Michael DeVito
8 The Mystery of Words: Orthodox Theology and
Philosophy of Language 171
Christoph Schneider
Part IV Ecological Philosophy and Bioethics 197
9 Agency and Responsibility: Ecologically Inflected Insights
from the Syriac Tradition 199
Christina M. Gschwandtner
10 Eastern Roman Theology and Its Philosophical Insights
for Transhumanist and Transgender Understandings of
the Body 227
E. Brown Dewhurst
Part V Social and Political Philosophy 257
11 Christian Philosophy as a Philosophy of Crisis:
Re-reading Florensky in the Twenty-First Century 259
Clemena Antonova
CoNTENTS ix
12 Race in the Afterlife: An Eastern Christian Approach 281
Nathan Placencia
13 Theosis and Human Rights: Two Orthodox Approaches 303
Nathaniel Wood
Index 327
n c
otes on ontributors
Clemena Antonova read art history at the universities of Edinburgh and
oxford. She works on topics relating to the art of the icon, Russian cri-
tiques of the image with a focus on Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), and the
role of religion in modernity. She has published two books—Space, Time,
and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God (Ashgate,
2010) and Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky’s
Theory of the Icon (Routledge, 2020). Her articles have come out in
Sobornost, Cithara, Leonardo, etc. Recently, Clemena guest-curated the
exhibition ‘Icons for our Time: orthodox Art from around the World’ at
the Museum of Russian Icons, USA (14 october 2021-3 April 2022). At
present, she is the Research Director of the Eurasia in Global Dialogue
Programme at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria.
Beau Branson is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brescia
University in owensboro, Kentucky. He completed his PhD at the
University of Notre Dame under Richard Cross with a dissertation focus-
ing on the logic and metaphysics involved in St Gregory of Nyssa’s defence
of the doctrine of the Trinity. His research continues to be centred on the
philosophy of the early Church Fathers, lying at the intersection of ancient
philosophy, patristic theology, and contemporary metaphysics. By bring-
ing the rigor of contemporary logic and analytic metaphysics to bear on
philosophical issues in patristics scholarship, he hopes to show how both
analytic philosophy of religion and historical theology can benefit from a
deeper engagement with one another. For more information on his
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research, including links to papers and videos, visit his website at beau-
branson.com.
Joshua Matthan Brown recently obtained his doctorate in philosophy
from the University of Birmingham (UK). His research interests include
the eutaxiological argument for God’s existence, the coherence of apo-
phatic theism, the epistemology of brute facts, and bringing Eastern
Christian thinkers into conversation with contemporary philosophy.
Currently, he is an adjunct lecturer in philosophy at Messiah University.
Prior to this, he was an academic fellow at the Centre for Applied Theology
and a research assistant for the Pantheism & Panentheism Project. He has
published in such journals as the International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion, Religious Studies, and the International Journal of Philosophy
and Theology.
E. Brown Dewhurst is a post-doctoral researcher at Ludwig-M aximilians
Universität München, where they are working on a project entitled ‘The
Absence of Sex and Gender in Early Byzantine Theology’. The project sets
out to revisit the theology of agenderlessness and consider its impact on
expressions of gender in early Christian monasticism. It also considers the
importance of these findings as a contribution toward the study of
LGBTQA+ history. She completed her doctorate at Durham University
(UK) with the thesis Revolution in the Microcosm: Love and Virtue in the
Cosmological Ethics of St Maximus the Confessor. Their primary area of
interest is Greek Patristics and its relevance for contemporary eth-
ics. She specialises in Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa, with
ethical topics of interest being anarchism, environmentalism, and bioethics.
James Loxley Compton is a lecturer in the department of philosophy at
Auburn University. He is a graduate of St Vladimir's orthodox Theological
Seminary and received his PhD from the University of Birmingham (UK).
He works in philosophy of religion and specialises in concepts of God in
late antiquity and the Middle Ages. He has a particular interest in mediae-
val Muslim arguments for the existence of God. He co-chairs the Auburn
Philosophy and Religion Workshop and is an advisor for the philosophy
and religion minor at Auburn University.
Michael DeVito is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham
(UK) working under the supervision of professors Jussi Suikkanen and
Nikk Effingham. His dissertation focuses on the longstanding problem of
divine foreknowledge and human free will, exploring appeals to paradox