Renovatio 1: What's Real and What Is Not

Journal of Zaytuna College

Spring 2017

9770025723574

What's Real and What Is Not: How Metaphysics Can Help Us Understand the Nature of Reality

Contents

Letter from the Editor: Hamza Yusuf

Can Our Science and Economics Honor Nature?

Waleed El-Ansary

Our insatiable desire to view nature as a material resource can only be repelled by acknowledging immaterial reality.

Do Reason and Revelation Guide Us to the Same Good?

Robert P. George

For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, confidence in what reason discloses as moral precepts is enriched by God’s act of revealing to us what He requires us.

Can Materialism Explain the Mind?

Faraz Khan

Some philosophers believe materialism has now reached an insurmountable quandary in the question of consciousness.

Beware of What Comes Within From Without

Mark Damien Delp

Does habitual exposure to digital images destroy the stillness of heart required for seeing God within our soul?

Orientalists, Militants, and the Meanings of Jihad

Asma Afsaruddin

How widespread misuse of the term “jihad” creates confusion and misunderstanding about a core concept in Islam.

The Great Chain of Consciousness

Mohammed Rustom

Why did many Muslim metaphysicians see the universe and all of its contents as alive?

Al-Ghazali on Cause and Effect

Eiyad al-Kutubi

In his discussion on causality, did Imam al-Ghazali succeed in safeguarding miracles as well as certainty about the world?

When A Metaphor Becomes Matter for a Christian

Scott F. Crider

Can we use poetics to understand scripture?

Is the Matter of Metaphysics Immaterial? Yes and No

Hamza Yusuf

During the “Golden Age of Islam”, philosophy was at the heart of the Muslim intellectual tradition. Its decline coincided with the decline of Islam. Is that a coincidence?

Hamlet’s Soliloquy

Charles Upton

Hamlet’s downfall did not arise out of a wrong answer to the question he posed, but out of the arrogation to himself of the right to determine his own existence or annihilation.