Wolfhart Pannenberg

  Heidegger’s Confession, Ryan Coyne, 2015 This was a difficult read but also a rewarding one. It brought back some good memories of my early reading in philosophy. Glenn, your friend was right in identifying the book as a difficult read. I was not aware of the interest in either Paul or Augustine.    When I first read Heidegger, I thought of how much of his philosophy could be put into theological terms. What I now realize is that my thought would have been re-theologizing of Heidegger. If he is thinking of his version of existential philosophy as de-theologizing philosophy, I do not think he was successful. The notion of being thrown into existence contrasts with creation in the image of God and being-toward-death contrasts with the notion of eternity with God. His notion of the fallenness of Dasein through the temptation of inauthentic existence toward They, evidenced in everydayness, contrasts with the fallenness of humanity through the temptation to richer life in di...

  I want to offer a way of thinking about the systems in which human beings participate. The attempt here will be to explore a systems theory regarding culture that will be descriptive, in contrast to the attempt to ascribe moral superiority to any existing system. [1] The core element of Niklas Luhmann's theory pivots around the problem of the contingency of meaning, and thereby it becomes a theory of communication. Social systems are systems of communication, and society is the most encompassing social system. Being the social system that comprises all (and only) communication, today's society is a world society. A system is defined by a boundary between itself and its environment, dividing it from an infinitely complex, or (colloquially) chaotic, exterior. The interior of the system is thus a zone of reduced complexity: communication within a system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside. Such a zone is an event. Society consists in ...