Download or read book Metamorphoses of the Absolute written by Otto Neumaier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is devoted to the diversity of the conceptual and terminological definitions of the notion of the “absolute”. Absolute comprises both the concepts of the Western world related to God and the verbal constructions flowing from these ideas in the spheres of law, philosophy, linguistics, politics, medicine, literature, and arts. Over time, absolute and its neologisms have undergone various modifications, assuming the associated characteristics of syntactic ambiguity and inflation. Absolute can imply an increase in the degree of a quality attached to some object or phenomenon and can be used as either an adverbial modifier or a proper noun. In its appearances as a procedural term, absolute mostly conveys a negative connotation when evaluating some action. The question posed in this book is not what absolute is, but what possibilities exist with regard to perceiving and conceptualizing it in human terms, both historically and in the present.