Blindness: physical or spiritual? An attempt at an interdisciplinary analysis

Verbum et Ecclesia

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Blindness: physical or spiritual? An attempt at an interdisciplinary analysis
 
Creator Rybicki, Adam Jastrzębski, Andrzej McNeill, Monika
 
Subject Theology; Psychology; Philosophy Emmaus; blindness; perception; distortion; interdisciplinary analysis
Description This article focuses on the issue of the weakness of human perception, which raises questions about the reasons for not recognising certain people and the mistakes related to such, at the level of both the physical and spiritual senses. The main issue here is why we do not recognise the face and figure of another person. One of the classic examples of this phenomenon is the meeting of Jesus with his disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13–35), where first Jesus is inexplicably unnoticed by the disciples, and then unrecognised. We attempt an interdisciplinary analysis of this event. Theological interpretations of the causes of this disability (e.g. as the effects of original sin) are insufficient, which is why they are supplemented with philosophical and anthropological interpretations, as well as contemporary empirical research on facial recognition conducted in the area of psychology. The article arrives at the conclusion that the results of the research on the defects in the mechanisms of perception found by psychologists, and a philosophical, as well as theological, analysis of human nature and theology do not contradict each other, but rather create a more complex (exhaustive) answer to the question posed.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: A strictly theological interpretation of human behaviour stems from original sin in that it has damaged human nature by constricting its cognitive abilities. This article goes beyond such a restrictive approach in exploring this absence of vision by including both the philosophical and empirical approaches used in psychology.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor The project is funded by the Minister of Science and Higher Education within the program under the name ‘Regional Initiative of Excellence’ in 2019-2022, project number: 028/RID/2018/19, the amount of funding: 11 742 500 PLN
Date 2020-07-27
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/ve.v41i1.2084
 
Source Verbum et Ecclesia; Vol 41, No 1 (2020); 8 pages 2074-7705 1609-9982
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2084/4164 https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2084/4163 https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2084/4165 https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2084/4162
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2020 Adam Rybicki, Andrzej Jastrzębski, Monika McNeill https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ADVERTISEMENT