Engelbert KronthalerWissen und Glauben

About this book deutschenglishfrançais

Knowledge and Belief

A conflict

Previous discussions between knowledge and belief or between science and religion mostly stayed within the vicious circle of binarity and hierarchy - knowledge / belief -, which led from mutual subordination and rejection till negation or - in extreme cases - even until annihilation of its respective adepts. In contrast, the present book juxtaposes both trans-classically and polycontexturally in a chiastic heterarchy. Thus, it embraces differences and contradictions – adhering to aufheben in the Hegelian sense – to subsume them into the larger unity of knowledge X belief.

Much of the abyss that divides knowledge from belief, that yawns between science and the humanities, and that divorces numbers from notions, finds its origins in the straitened, brain-centric rationality (Verstand) of our technical civilisation, based on binarity and ratio, i.e. on the part, to which inevitably the whole escapes. Meanwhile, progressing specialisation in all areas, coupled with intensified mathematization along the line of physics, not only fails to bridge the gap, but actually enlarges and deepens it. Poly-contexturality, trans-classical logics and mathematics, however, as well as biblical Hebrew, are directed at the whole, hence are holistic and an expression of a broader dialectical and reason-centred rationality (Vernunft); therefore they can serve for bridging the abyss and so contribute to the necessary healing of our ill and earth destroying civilisation. The book tries corresponding suggestions for diverse areas.

Thereby a line is drawn from monotheism and its supposed affinity for violence to moneytheism - a neologism defining the predominant ’religion’ of our civilisation as the sole god Mammon -, from the biblical creation of the world to the BigBang, each with its corresponding notion of time, further from western philosophy and eastern philousia to quantum physics and so-called artificial intelligence (AI) and from the Thora to the so-called theory of everything TOE.

In particular on the side of Belief, a detailed section of the book deals with Jan Assmann’s Mosaic Distinction, refutes his thesis of the violence of monotheism, and appears both anti-Semitic or anti-Judaistic, mainly as a consequence of his narrow and biased understanding of the term monotheism.

On the side of Knowledge, the book holds that the incompatibility of Einstein’s macrocosmic theory of relativity with Planck’s microcosmic quantum theory can be understood as a fundamental dis-contextuality. As such, it cannot be precisely surmounted with a world formula or TOE, but can only be conserved (aufgehoben) in a new polycontextural physics.

Ihr Werk im Verlag Dr. Kovač

Möchten Sie Ihre wissenschaftliche Arbeit publizieren? Erfahren Sie mehr über unsere günstigen Konditionen und unseren Service für Autorinnen und Autoren.

Veröffentlichen wissenschaftlicher Arbeiten