Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
12019-04-07T22:03:46-07:00Sam Henrickson5cd0ff97c337b26d01e84db58bdb9506b40fff7a335198Hubplain8569102019-04-16T01:02:55-07:00Sam Henrickson5cd0ff97c337b26d01e84db58bdb9506b40fff7aThe phrase "Maximal Greatness" is one used by religious philosophers in an ontological argument about the existence of God. The premise takes Anselm of Canterbury's argument that God is the greatest of all- there is no one-upping what we consider to be the most great, even in contemplation. Philosophers like Alvin Plantinga took this through an analytical process, separating the concepts of Maximal Greatness and Maximal Excellence, and came up with this concept:
1. Something is Maximally Excellent if it is omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect. 2. It is Maximally Great if it is Maximally Excellent in all possible strings of existence.
There is significantly more to this argument that I neither can nor wish to get into, but this line of thinking did give me pause: what does Maximal Greatness, or, more attainably, Maximal Excellence look like in humans? And then, another thought: what does it look like outside of humans?
Therefore, I propose for this project that all species have something they are looking to attain within and by the boundaries of their "religion."
what makes it important in a religious context is that there is a reason for the contact between species sought out on the initiative of at least one of the parties involved in order to further something that furthers their goal of Maximal Greatness.
