conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Book of Beginnings about Genesis, Commentaries, Perhaps with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles.. Start with the sentence 'Commentaries on Genesis today range from the fanciful to the technical'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Commentaries on Genesis today range from the fanciful to the technical. The story of beginnings has been debated for centuries by thologians, linguists, and scientists. Why should you take the trouble to read another story on Genesis? Perhaps the best reason is urgency. Over the past four generations, Christianity has precipitated from a large majority belief system among those who came of age during the first half of the 20th century to something less than 15 percent of young adults entering educational institutions and the workforce today. If you are considering this story, you are probably bothered by these conditions and are looking for ways to help those in your sphere of influence find their way out of the morass. In this new comprehensive edition of The Book of Beginnings: A Practical Guide to Understanding Genesis, the author addresses the difficult issues in the Genesis record. These in-depth answers will give you confidence in your study of the Scriptures and help you communicate the richness of Genesis to those around you. New Expanded Hardcover Edition Extensive Subjects & Scripture Indexes Foreword by Dr. Robert Jeffress A Beautifully Illustrated Classic Keepsake!
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Book of Beginnings
  Isn't it time to get started on this work—to write a "phenomenology of mind" that is no longer European?
  Is that where Western philosophy finds its limit, or maybe its blind spot? In any case, that is where philosophy, which claims to reflect all—"the all"—fails to be self-reflective.
  Let us set out on the better-marked path. With regard to India, the works of the last generation, of Georges Dumézil and Émile Benveniste in France, showed us what we, as Europeans, might share in terms of semantic elements as well as logical relationships, mental images as well as social functions. Because of proximity, we can also suspect that thinking was influenced on either side of the Indus in earlier periods: the influence of the gymnosophists on Plotinus, for example. With regard to Islam, whose language belongs to another family, we—still the European or, more specifically, the Christian "we"—share religions of the Book, the biblical filiation, the idea of a creator God; we share the absolute of a message delivered in a Revelation. Moreover, the histories of Europe and Islam have continually mingled. Aristotle returned to us through the Arabs; Thomas Aquinas was inspired by Averroës; Islamic monotheism can be added to the stack of precedents. Furthermore, the first outlines of the figure of the European intellectual trace back to Andalusia. But how have we thought beyond that horizon? And within that "elsewhere"—because it is elsewhere—could we have thought differently?
  Raised in the form of an alternative, this question suddenly becomes our question. Aren't the various cultures throughout the world only so many infinitely varied responses to the same questions that we ask ourselves—that we cannot help but ask ourselves? In which case, their inventory is no more than a range of nuances. Or is it only in those gaps we reveal between cultures that we can detect, identifying it patiently feature by feature, reflected as what is thus found in those various encounters, what is—or rather, what "goes as"—"human"? Let us retain the open, progressive character of this last formulation and go with the nondefinitive "going." Let us set down no preliminary definition, especially of "Man," which is always ideological and which thus affects, as we can see, the universality of the questions themselves.
  We can now better understand why anthropology, despite its display of generality, has remained confined to its sector, without philosophical stakes: because what remains a given is the idea that the cultures and the thinking of elsewhere, as complex and varied as they may be, cannot or can only marginally call into question European questioning. Hasn't European thought, that is, the questioning of science and truth, adequately proven its effectiveness through the mastery that it ensures? These ways of thought from elsewhere can certainly enrich it, and even divert us from it (as exoticism does), but not make us relinquish it. European thinking does not divest itself. Upon encountering ways of thought from elsewhere, it ought to forge new concepts, expand its categories, and, in doing so, better yield to perceiving its own locality, but instead it retains its perspective—it has that tool. The Quai Branly Museum of indigenous arts fascinates us by making us see what we could have not become, but it does not disturb us. I would even say that the more spectacular and showy the "elsewhere" is, the less disturbing it is. The problem with China is that its elsewhere is discreet. There are no myths to reconstruct there, no arcane oral traditions to probe, no strange customs to revisit (except foot binding?). Chinese culture developed in text and history just as our own European culture did. Thus its elsewhere subtly escapes the anthropologists' hold. Anthropology withdraws within its (minority) borders; or else its only other option is to put China and Greece in the same bag, or the same box, as Philippe Descola did, labeling it "analogism." But the consequences are still the same: the "naturalism" that follows after "analogism" arises in Europe alone.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From the perspective of Hesiod, in comparison, chaos is very much the initial stage, void, indeterminate, without possible qualification and purely negative, starting from which the world will come about and organize itself, and, in doing so, progressively determine itself as a function of the Greek postulate that determination alone makes "being." Since no plan is projected on the world, and no power directs it, the powers that engender one another can do nothing but enter into conflict among themselves, in order to win sovereignty and try to supplant one another. Eros, the god who couples, soon finds a rival in Eris, who compels separation, and it requires all the political acuity of Zeus, incorporating Metis, to impose a lasting order, by force or by ruse, neutralizing the oppositions as though holding them at bay, his children and his parents alike: not only by overthrowing the earlier gods, like the Titans, and taking them out of the game but also by blocking the expansion of the divinities born of him, who encroach upon his power and already threaten him.
  Let us remember, moreover, that the sacerdotal Document with which the Bible opens is not the first; that the Yahwist account of Creation, which appears after it, preceded it. Commentators have delighted in emphasizing how material and anthropomorphic the creative act of God seems in the Yahwist account, how unrefined: the creator is only dealing with a garden plot, a stream watering his land, a man who takes his place as farmer or tenant farmer. He makes water well up from that land like a well digger, he puts in plants like a gardener, he shapes the human body like a potter.... We are still far from a God conceived as external to the world and transcending it. Now, even if the sacerdotal Document subsequently takes care to erase those anecdotal and excessively imagined representations, it cannot make us forget that they preceded it, that it is nevertheless their heir, and that the Bible, in the end, was not averse to retaining them.
  With the exception of water, everything might have a beginning on the shore of the Nile. But how can we hope to set some limit to the possible variations as soon as we imagine this advent in terms of the "world"? Is it the sun that sets the genesis of the universe in motion (Re, but Atum before him, according to the syncretism of Heliopolis), its heat making vegetation germinate, its light making all the distinctions emerge? Or is it the first emerged land, the initial hillock, the island that finally appeared, that "earth that rises up" and provides life with its matter (Ptah, at Memphis)? Or again, is it the luminous atmosphere (Shu) that separates earth and sky, that puts the world's props in place and raises the vault of the heavens? Or is it Thoth, who is also the god of writing, or is it... ? Indeed, must that originary scene be imagined, even before the birth of the sun, as the emergence of a cow from the Nun to give birth to divinity, or as a hatched egg, or as a lotus that opens one morning on the surface of the waters, or as a snake winding through the marshes, or as... ? Once opened, the array of mythological representations can be closed again only arbitrarily. Nevertheless: let this god be born of no one, let him be called the Solitary or the Unique One, and he already moves closer to the other shore, in all its inexpressible mystery, the shore of the theological lode and inspiration.
  Thus in Egypt, on the one hand, we have physical representations fertilizing the mythological, whose richness and diversity we could endlessly inventory: those gods and all the beings are born of the demiurge's first masturbation, from its spittle, or from the tears of the sun. And as we find so commonly elsewhere, this demiurge shapes or works with clay on the wheel, he is modeler and potter (Khnum at Esna). But on the other hand, this divine creation is perfect, a unique god, as in the Bible, "ordering absolutely nothing defective"; it is only starting with man's revolt and the first mythological battles that death—physical or moral evil—is introduced into the cosmic order. Because as this god implements the plan for creation conceived in his heart, he has only to pronounce the word for the thing to exist. His creation is realized through the word and the mind; and as Bottero notes, this advent through speech might thus even be what is remembered in the Bible, the sacerdotal account of creation finding support in Egypt to promote its theological inspiration.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: His creation is realized through the word and the mind; and as Bottero notes, this advent through speech might thus even be what is remembered in the Bible, the sacerdotal account of creation finding support in Egypt to promote its theological inspiration.. Because as this god implements the plan for creation conceived in his heart, he has only to pronounce the word for the thing to exist. But on the other hand, this divine creation is perfect, a unique god, as in the Bible, "ordering absolutely nothing defective"; it is only starting with man's revolt and the first mythological battles that death—physical or moral evil—is introduced into the cosmic order. And as we find so commonly elsewhere, this demiurge shapes or works with clay on the wheel, he is modeler and potter (Khnum at Esna).
  Thus in Egypt, on the one hand, we have physical representations fertilizing the mythological, whose richness and diversity we could endlessly inventory: those gods and all the beings are born of the demiurge's first masturbation, from its spittle, or from the tears of the sun. Nevertheless: let this god be born of no one, let him be called the Solitary or the Unique One, and he already moves closer to the other shore, in all its inexpressible mystery, the shore of the theological lode and inspiration. ? Once opened, the array of mythological representations can be closed again only arbitrarily... ? Indeed, must that originary scene be imagined, even before the birth of the sun, as the emergence of a cow from the Nun to give birth to divinity, or as a hatched egg, or as a lotus that opens one morning on the surface of the waters, or as a snake winding through the marshes, or as... But how can we hope to set some limit to the possible variations as soon as we imagine this advent in terms of the "world"? Is it the sun that sets the genesis of the universe in motion (Re, but Atum before him, according to the syncretism of Heliopolis), its heat making vegetation germinate, its light making all the distinctions emerge? Or is it the first emerged land, the initial hillock, the island that finally appeared, that "earth that rises up" and provides life with its matter (Ptah, at Memphis)? Or again, is it the luminous atmosphere (Shu) that separates earth and sky, that puts the world's props in place and raises the vault of the heavens? Or is it Thoth, who is also the god of writing, or is it.
  With the exception of water, everything might have a beginning on the shore of the Nile. Now, even if the sacerdotal Document subsequently takes care to erase those anecdotal and excessively imagined representations, it cannot make us forget that they preceded it, that it is nevertheless their heir, and that the Bible, in the end, was not averse to retaining them. We are still far from a God conceived as external to the world and transcending it.... He makes water well up from that land like a well digger, he puts in plants like a gardener, he shapes the human body like a potter. Commentators have delighted in emphasizing how material and anthropomorphic the creative act of God seems in the Yahwist account, how unrefined: the creator is only dealing with a garden plot, a stream watering his land, a man who takes his place as farmer or tenant farmer.
  Let us remember, moreover, that the sacerdotal Document with which the Bible opens is not the first; that the Yahwist account of Creation, which appears after it, preceded it. Eros, the god who couples, soon finds a rival in Eris, who compels separation, and it requires all the political acuity of Zeus, incorporating Metis, to impose a lasting order, by force or by ruse, neutralizing the oppositions as though holding them at bay, his children and his parents alike: not only by overthrowing the earlier gods, like the Titans, and taking them out of the game but also by blocking the expansion of the divinities born of him, who encroach upon his power and already threaten him." Since no plan is projected on the world, and no power directs it, the powers that engender one another can do nothing but enter into conflict among themselves, in order to win sovereignty and try to supplant one another.From the perspective of Hesiod, in comparison, chaos is very much the initial stage, void, indeterminate, without possible qualification and purely negative, starting from which the world will come about and organize itself, and, in doing so, progressively determine itself as a function of the Greek postulate that determination alone makes "being
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I have not attached notes to this essay because if I did, it would be necessary to add one to almost every line.
  This essay, it will be clear by now, is a sinology Manifesto, at once philological and philosophical. Given such an explanation, I wonder whether we can return to the brief essay in philosophy, even when it touches on knowledge. It would be brief and not cursory. Can we revive the genre of the Letter and the Discourse that happily follows the thread of an idea, carried along by a desire to think and no longer seeking shelter behind a screen of erudition?
  Although this essay does not take that form, it is also a dialogue engaging contemporary French thinkers who seem the most important to me: a dialogue, notably with Marcel Gauchet, that this question of the possibilities of thought, among others, has prompted; with Philippe Descola, who has attempted a powerful anthropological charting of the modes of thought; with Bruno Latour, who raised the suggestion of an "internal heterotopia"; with Marcel Detienne, finally, who no longer believes in the "Greeks." Would there then be the "Chinese"?
  From the inside, this dialogue engages the sinologists as well: In addressing ourselves to Western readers, are we not all compelled by this obligation to "enter"?
  FRANÇOIS JULLIEN (b. 1951) is a French sinologist and philosopher. Jullien was president of the French Association for Chinese Studies (1988–1990), director of the East Asian Department of the University of Paris VII (1990–2000), and president of the Collège International de Philosophie (1995–1998). He is currently a professor at Paris Diderot University and director of both the Institute of Contemporary Thought and the Marcel Granet Center. He is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Jullien is well known in France and throughout the world for his writings that explore the distances between European and Chinese thought. He has published more than thirty volumes of philosophy, and his works have been translated into numerous languages.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He has published more than thirty volumes of philosophy, and his works have been translated into numerous languages.. Jullien is well known in France and throughout the world for his writings that explore the distances between European and Chinese thought. He is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is currently a professor at Paris Diderot University and director of both the Institute of Contemporary Thought and the Marcel Granet Center. Jullien was president of the French Association for Chinese Studies (1988–1990), director of the East Asian Department of the University of Paris VII (1990–2000), and president of the Collège International de Philosophie (1995–1998). 1951) is a French sinologist and philosopher." Would there then be the "Chinese"?
  From the inside, this dialogue engages the sinologists as well: In addressing ourselves to Western readers, are we not all compelled by this obligation to "enter"?
  FRANÇOIS JULLIEN (b. Can we revive the genre of the Letter and the Discourse that happily follows the thread of an idea, carried along by a desire to think and no longer seeking shelter behind a screen of erudition?
  Although this essay does not take that form, it is also a dialogue engaging contemporary French thinkers who seem the most important to me: a dialogue, notably with Marcel Gauchet, that this question of the possibilities of thought, among others, has prompted; with Philippe Descola, who has attempted a powerful anthropological charting of the modes of thought; with Bruno Latour, who raised the suggestion of an "internal heterotopia"; with Marcel Detienne, finally, who no longer believes in the "Greeks. It would be brief and not cursory. Given such an explanation, I wonder whether we can return to the brief essay in philosophy, even when it touches on knowledge.
  This essay, it will be clear by now, is a sinology Manifesto, at once philological and philosophical.I have not attached notes to this essay because if I did, it would be necessary to add one to almost every line