bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nāgārjuna, Kant and Wittgenstein: The San–Lun Mādhyamika Exposition of Emptiness
Authors: Cheng Hsueh–Li
Published: October 2008

Among Western scholars there has been a growing interest in Buddhist philosophy, especially in the philosophical teachings of the Mādhyamika. Mādhyamika philosophy is considered to be ‘the most important outcome of Buddha's teaching’ and to represent ‘philosophical Buddhism par excellence’. The main message of Mādhyamika Buddhism is the doctrine of emptiness. Yet scholars, as well as students of Buddhism, have often been puzzled about this teaching and have misinterpreted it. The chief purpose of this paper is to expound the Mādhyamika philosophy of emptiness as presented in Chinese San–lun sources and to clarify misconceptions about this important philosophy of Buddhism.
Religious Experience, Sense-perception and God's Essential Unobservability
Authors: Oakes Robert
Published: October 2008

While many philosophical theists have maintained (correctly or not) that there are data accessible to sense-perception – e.g., the ‘orderly processes of nature’, loving and benevolent human actions – which constitute evidence for the existence of God, it seems unproblematic that there could not conceivably occur sense-perceptions of God. Rather, the properties being God and being sense-perceivable are incompatible, i.e., are such that it is inconceivable for there to exist something which coexemplifies them. This being so, it is nothing short of a necessary truth that if God exists, he is unobservable. In what follows, I shall often express this point in the language of necessity de re by noting that being unobservable is a property that God has essentially; for those at home with ‘possible-world’ semantics, this amounts to the claim that being unobservable is a property that God exemplifies at every possible-world at which he exists. One might reasonably account for this, of course, in terms of God's incorporeality; for it seems unproblemetic that being incorporeal is also a property that God has essentially, and that the function ‘X is incorporeal’ entails the function ‘X is unobservable’. Hence, since ‘If God exists, he is incorporeal’ expresses a necessary truth, it should be intuitively clear that the proposition expressed by ‘If God exists, he is unobservable’ is also a necessary truth.
Experience and the Justification of Religious Belief
Authors: Long Eugene Thomas
Published: October 2008

Perhaps you have heard the story of the philosopher who fell off the edge of a cliff and was hanging by the limb of a tree. After calling for help for some time he heard a voice from the heavens saying, ‘I am here’. The philosopher explained his dilemma and then asked, ‘Can you help me?’ The voice replied, ‘Do you believe in me?’, to which the philosopher without hesitation, given the circumstances, said, ‘Yes, of course’. The voice came back, ‘Then, let go.’ There was silence and some moments passed before the philosopher somewhat meekly replied, ‘Lord, I know that this is not the best time and place for a discussion but you know how philosophers are, and you do seem to be asking a good bit of me. I know that many of your followers in recent times would agree that I should let go, but I have this feeling that they may be confusing the doctrine of salvation by faith alone with an epistemological doctrine that faith is a commitment that requires no justification. Could we talk about this? And, in the meantime, I hope you will not be offended if I ask, Is there anyone else up there?’
Optimism and Pessimism
Authors: Sutherland Stewart R.
Published: October 2008

My argument will be that our understanding of human beings, which is what I take the Christian doctrine of man to be concerned with, will benefit considerably from an examination of two different but related clusters of human attitudes which can be found respectively under the headings ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’. There are many pitfalls in the way of such an enterprise, and occasionally some prejudices to be overcome. For example L. E. Loemker in the relevant articles in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes a fairly lengthy discussion with the rather terminal judgement:
In Defence of Attitudinal Christianity
Authors: Robbins J. Wesley
Published: October 2008

In 1968, R. M. Hare gave a series of lectures at the Yale Divinity School, two of which were published subsequently under the title ‘The Simple Believer’.1 In those published lectures Hare enlarged upon and defended the view, which he shares with R. B. Braithwaite, that Christian commitment is best understood as being what I will call a particular world-attitude. In brief, Hare described the Christian world-attitude as consisting, first, of the adoption of a set of practical-normative standards, prescriptions as to what we should do and be, for instance, in our various cognitive and moral endeavours. Central to this overall Christian picture of human flourishing, including cognitive flourishing, is the notion of love (agape). The Christian world-attitude, in addition, involves the belief that the efforts that we make to realize these standards are not pointless in the world as it is. This faith, this refusal to doubt in connection with both moral and cognitive endeavours, is naturally expressed in religious terms, perhaps most obviously in terms of trust in the providence of God.
In Defence of Orthodoxy: Interpreting Don Cupitt
Authors: Dunlop Francis
Published: October 2008

The concept of orthodoxy is not prominent in the thinking of mid-twentiethcentury writers on religion. There are many reasons for this. It is, for instance, always more interesting to challenge accepted traditions than to defend them, and publishers know that radical questioning generally attracts more attention than defence of received ideas. But the task of defending orthodox beliefs is an absolute necessity for the adherents of a revealed religion. It may be unpalatable to have to examine a long succession of ‘reinterpretations’ of Christianity, but it is important, since the new thinkers may often get things badly wrong, and the faithful (often woefully ill-armed–considering their individual capacity–for the intellectual fight) may be seduced by superficial plausibility or flashy modernity.One can well imagine a person who has found Christianity attractive enough for him to pray and to attend church services occasionally, but whose world-view has been largely formed by the mass media, discovering one of the modern ‘reinterpreters’ of the Christian faith with an enormous feeling of relief.
An alterantive Free Will Defence
Authors: Ackermann Robert
Published: October 2008

Many philosophers have written in the past as though it were nearly obvious to rational reflection that the existence of evil in this world is incompatible with the presumed properties of the Christian God, and they have assumed a proof of incompatibility to be easy to construct. An informal underpinning for this line of thought is easy to develop. Surely God in his benevolence finds evil to be evil, and hence has both the desire and the means, provided by his omnipotence and omniscience, to eradicate it. But it remains a brute fact that evil exists. While this seems plausible enough at first glance, and seems damaging to the rationality of Christian belief, attempts to pin down a definite proof of incompatibility have encountered difficulties. The root difficulty is perhaps that the surface plausibility of incompatibility is ultimately mistaken. In what he calls a Free Will Defence against natural atheology, Alvin Plantinga has presented what seems a definitive proof, on rather modest assumptions, of the logical compatibility of God's nature and the existence of evil. Logic alone can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, since the defence rests on the empirical assumption that evil exists in this world. What Plantinga shows, put very simply, is that God may have created a world as good as any that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent being might have created given that human beings must exist in that world. Whether Christianity ought to court logical rationality may seem highly dubious, but on the supposition that it does, Plantinga's proof that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil seems to me to (provisionally) settle the issue of whether Christianity is a possible object of rational belief, at least insofar as the problem of evil is considered the major obstacle to rationality of belief. Perhaps it is now clear that I do not intend here to attack the validity or the significance of Plantinga's proof. At the same time, I think it possible to argue for Plantinga's conclusion on other grounds, grounds that seem to me philosophically more appealing, and grounds that are manifestly compatible with the Biblical record. After briefly summarizing Plantinga's argument, I shall propose an alternative free will defence that circumvents some of the presuppositions of his arguments, an alternative that may be attractive to philosophers who are not interested in an ontology involving Plantinga's conception of possible worlds.
The Intelligibility of Religious Language: Two Standpoints
Authors: Shihor Rachel
Published: October 2008

‘An honest religious thinker’, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it’.
Religion and the Threat of Relativism
Authors: Trigg Roger
Published: October 2008

Relativism has always proved tempting when people who had previously lived a settled and complacent life have suddenly been confronted with new and different ideas or practices. The obvious example is the ferment produced in ancient Athens when the contrast with Eastern ideas chronicled by Herodotus showed vividly that not everyone thought like the Athenians, or even the Greeks. The result was a far-reaching scepticism. Protagoras, according to Plato, maintained that man is the measure of all things and anything ‘is to me as it appears to me and is to you as it appears to you’.
Once more on the two truths: What does Chi–Tsang mean by the two truths as ‘Yüeh–Chiao’?
Authors: Lai Whalen W.
Published: October 2008

The teaching of the Buddha concerning Reality has recourse to Two Truths: the Mundane and the Highest Truth.

Without knowing the distinction between the two, one does not know the profound point of the teachings.

The Highest Truth cannot be taught apart from the Mundane, but without understanding the former, one does not apprehend nirvāna.
Religion, Experience and Privacy
Authors: Sutherland Stewart R.
Published: October 2008

It is of course true that the articulation of religious and theological views depends upon and often masks philosophical presuppositions. For example, those who quote with approval Anselm's ‘credo ut intelligam’, ‘I believe so that I may understand’, seldom follow the good example set by Anselm, and make explicit, as Anselm does in the following sentence, the fact that this principle rests upon a further principle: ‘For I believe this also, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand”’ (Proslogion, I). This paper is an attempt to track down and expose one very pervasive set of views about the nature of experience which is implicit in a wide range of religious and theological claims.
Some Aspects of the Treatment of Christianity by the British Idealists
Authors: Mackinnon D. M.
Published: October 2008

It was in December 1868, a little less than fifteen years before his death, that T. H. Green entered into correspondence with the young Henry Scott Holland and R. L. Nettleship (later to be his literary executor) on the occasion of the latter's visit to the young Gerard Manley Hopkins, then on the threshold of entering the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. Part of this correspondence is preserved in Stephen Paget's memoir of Scott Holland, and no student of the interpretation of Christianity in the writings and teachings of the British Idealists should neglect either this exchange of letters, or indeed the latter correspondence with Scott Holland in which the young Anglican, on the eve of his own ordination, sought to defend his commitment to his mentor.
How is the Concept of Sin related to the Concept of Moral Wrongdoing?
Authors: Mitchell Basil
Published: October 2008

The word ‘sin’ is unlikely to be found in the index of a book on moral philosophy. It belongs to the vocabulary of theology. But the serious student of both subjects is bound to wonder how the concept of sin is to be related to the topics that interest moral philosophers. The problem is complicated by the evident fact that ‘sin’ is what W. B. Gallie has called an ‘essentially contested concept’ and that unanimity is as rare among moral philosophers as it is among theologians. It is not a matter, therefore, of applying an agreed philosophical method to a clearly defined theological concept, but of looking for a way of thinking about sin which is theologically defensible and which can approve itself to a reasonably sympathetic moral philosopher.
How is the Concept of Sin related to the Concept of Moral Wrongdoing?
Authors: Dalferth Ingolf
Published: October 2008

Professor Mitchell's strategy for answering the question before us appears to be straightforward. Part, at least, of saying that the concepts of sin and moral wrongdoing belong to different vocabularies is that they are intensionally different. But this does not exclude their being related. Taken as concepts in extension there appear to be five possible relations between sin (S) and moral wrongdoing (M) not all of which Mitchell considers:
Svaraj, the Indian ideal of freedom: a political or religious concept?
Authors: Brown C. Mackenzie
Published: October 2008

To many Western students of India, svarāj and mokṣa have often seemed to represent two very different ideals of freedom, the former social, political, and modern; the latter individual, spiritual, and traditional. It is not surprising that the Hindu ideal of spiritual freedom is most commonly known by the term mokṣa (liberation), for it is this word that is usually listed as the fourth and supreme goal in the famous four ends of man (puruṣārtha). The first three ends, desire (kāma), success (artha), and morality (dharma), find their fulfillment within society, while mokṣa, it is generally said, takes one beyond society. It is pertinent to note, as Ingalls and others have pointed out, that mokṣa is a relatively late term, which came to be added to the older, first three goals of man. As a noun, mokṣa does not appear until the latest of the Upanisads, and then only three times, in Śvetāśvatara 6.16 and Maitrī 6.20 and 30. In addition, some orthodox schools did not accept the ideal of mokṣa for several more centuries, the Mīmāṁsā denying it until the eighth century A.D.
Luther's Word on Man's Will: A Case Study in Comparative Intellectual History
Authors: Migotti Mark
Published: October 2008

It is commonplace to observe that the history of thought reveals certain recurring patterns whose mode of expression changes according to context. It is equally apparent that to chart the salient characteristics of an influential way of thinking – to give concrete, clearly defined shape to the usually tangled fundamental impulses informing a cast of mind – is a complex, difficult task which calls for attention from (at least) the historian, the psychologist, the philosopher and, in the case of religious figures and movements, the theologian alike. With regard to the manner of thinking embodied in the theological doctrines of Martin Luther such a task is fraught with more than the usual number of pitfalls. In the first place, following recent Luther scholarship, we must be wary of assuming that the great Reformer held fast to a single set of theological opinions throughout his long career. We shall not, therefore, attempt to reach conclusions applicable to Luther's thought as a whole, but rather shall focus exclusively on a number of key early expositions of the Theologia Crucis. Here, between about 1514 and 1520, we find, according to our argument, enough thematic unity to warrant the search for underlying principles. A second, less easily disposed of difficulty is the lack of a working consensus as to how and with what aims in mind one should even begin an historical analysis of Luther's texts. For example, to the believer who regards Luther's basic tenets as in a straightforward sense divinely inspired, the attempt to extract from his writings the ingredients of a certain thoroughly human way of thinking will seem doomed to inadequacy from the start. Likewise, for different reasons, many of today's.
‘Can we speak literally of God?’
Authors: Levine Michael P.
Published: October 2008

I shall argue that the question ‘Can we speak literally of God?’ is fundamentally an epistemological question concerning whether we can know that God exists. If and only if we can know that God can exist can we know that we can speak literally of God.
Yung and the Tradition of the Shih: The Confucian Restructuring of Heroic Courage
Authors: Lai Whalen
Published: October 2008

Courage is a basic virtue to any heroic society. It is the defining virtue of the aristocratic warrior in the Iliad. It came with a set of other related virtues, all functioning in a social setting unique to that heroic era. However, as society evolved beyond the heroics of war to the civility of settled city–states, courage would be reviewed and redefined. In fact the whole virtue complex would undergo fundamental changes. Still later, when from out of the cities philosophers rose, they would, in their commitment to a higher justice or righteousness than what the city had to offer to date, submit courage to a third critique and transformation. We see this in Greece; we may also see it in China.
God and Objective Moral Values
Authors: Gascoigne Robert
Published: October 2008

For some moral philosophers the question ‘Why be moral?’ is fundamentally inappropriate, since it seems to ask for non–moral reasons or motivations for moral action and thus to threaten the integrity and autonomy of morality. Yet the question ‘Why be moral?’ need not be oriented towards discovering non–moral reasons for moral action, but rather towards elucidating what general description of the human condition is most compatible with the fundamental character of morality. Rather than leaving the moral sense as an isolated category of human response, it is relevant to ask what other features of reality it may be associated with and in what general context it can most coherently be situated. The purpose of this paper is to examine the sense of moral obligation as an objective or categorical claim on individual action and to present the thesis that this moral sense is most intelligible within a theological context.
The Theological Significance of Hartshorne's Response to Positivism
Authors: Grant Colin
Published: October 2008

Charles Hartshorne is usually regarded as the developer of the theological approach initiated by Alfred North Whitehead. Justification for this view is to be found not only in the central focus of Hartshorne's voluminous writings, but also in his own references to Whitehead's accomplishments. He notes that Whitehead did not regard himself as a theologian, but rather saw his task as that of attempting to reconcile the professedly neutral burgeoning fields of science and the wider ideals necessary to civilized human life. It is in the context of this pursuit that Whitehead makes his extremely suggestive, but tantalizingly vague, comments which provide a foundation for theological reconstruction. According to this approach, two dimensions, or natures, must be distinguished in God, a conceptual primordial nature which structures the possibilities for life and a concrete consequential nature which receives the actualities which result from the possibilities that are realized.
The Devotional Experiment
Authors: Davis Caroline Franks
Published: October 2008

The notions of a ‘devotional experiment’ and an ‘experimental faith’ have been unduly neglected in the philosophy of religion. There seems to be a widespread assumption that experiments in spiritual matters are impossible in principle; the hypotheses in question simply do not lend themselves to empirical testing. This is unfortunate, since any discussion of these notions inevitably sheds light on such central issues as the nature of faith and belief, the rational evaluation of belief systems, and the evidential force of religious experiences.
Dualism and the Problem of Individuation
Authors: Taliaferro Charles
Published: October 2008

H. D. Lewis once remarked he did not think ‘any case for immortality can get off the ground if we fail to make a case for dualism’. Lewis vigorously defended both mind body dualism, the theory that minds (or persons) are nonphysical, spatially unextended things in causal interaction with physical, spatially extended things, as well as the conceivability of an after life. Lewis defended the intelligibility of supposing distinct, individual persons continue existing after bodily death, possibly even after all physical objects pass out of existence. Prominent philosophers such as Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Liebniz, and Reid have subscribed to both the truth of dualism and belief in continued personal existence after bodily death. Descartes' work might even be construed as reversing the order of Lewis' dictum. For Descartes, the case for dualism ‘gets off the ground’ because of the conceivability of an afterlife. Briefly put, Descartes sought to establish that a person (or mind) is distinct from physical objects on the basis of it being metaphysically possible for a person to exist without his or her body, indeed without there being any physical objects whatever. If A can exist without B, then A is not identical with B. Thus, if it is possible for God to bring it about that I exist and there be no physical objects, I am not a physical object. The purpose of this article is not to develop a case for dualism, nor to query whether the case for immortality can get off the ground assuming nondualist theories of the self. I hope instead to assess a popular objection to dualism, and consequently to a dualist conception of the afterlife, which could be termed the problem of individuation.
Mackie on Neoplatonism's ‘Replacement for God’
Authors: Leslie John
Published: October 2008

David Hume's greatness depends in large part on how his writings hint at beautiful and coherent theories which are recognizably Humean despite their divergences from the untidy originals. Now, perhaps the clearest vision of a contradiction–free Platonic Form of Hume was had by J. L. Mackie; he described it in such masterpieces as The Cement of the Universe, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and The Miracle of Theism. How successful is this last in its attack on theism? I shall discuss Mackie's case against theism of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type which replaces ‘God as a person or mind or spirit’ by a more abstract Creative Force or Principle. Mackie sees in it a ‘a formidable rival’ to any theism treating of a divine being; ‘if you demand an ultimate explanation, then this may well be a better one’ (MT, 234–5). But, his chapter thirteen contends, it fares badly in competition with an atheistic, naturalistic approach.
Miracles and Laws of Nature
Authors: Lowe E. J.
Published: October 2008

Hume's famous discussion of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is curious both on account of the arguments he does deploy and on account of the arguments he does not deploy, but might have been expected to. The first and second parts of this paper will be devoted to examining, respectively, these two objects of curiosity. The second part I regard as the more important, because I shall there try to show that the fact that Hume does not deploy an argument that he might have been expected to deploy in fact reflects a weakness in the view of natural laws that has (rightly or wrongly) come to be associated with Hume's name. I shall argue, in fact, that it is a symptom of the defectiveness of the ‘Humean’ view of natural laws that on that view it is only too easy to rule out the possibility of a miracle ever occurring. In the third part of the paper, I shall show how another view of laws can overcome this problem.
The Impossibility of Miracles
Authors: Everitt Nicholas
Published: October 2008

Traditional discussions of miracles focus primarily on the issue of whether miracle reports are credible, either in fact or in principle, and whether they could be used as the foundation for theistic belief. Some commentators (such as Hume and Mackie decide that such reports are not credible; others decide that they are, or at least that they can be (Swinburne, Davies). All parties to this dispute presuppose that there is a coherent concept of miracle about whose application we might sensibly dispute. A good example of this assumption explicitly stated is found in a recent book by Davies. Davies implicitly takes over Hume's definition of a miracle as ‘a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity’, and, after making clear that he is using ‘impossible’ in the sense of ‘logically impossible’, he comments

…it is hard to see that miracles are impossible when considered as violations of the laws of nature…it is hard to see that there is any contradiction involved in saying that they [miracles] have happened. Where would the contradiction lie?
Subject and Object in Worship
Authors: Chryssides George D.
Published: October 2008

If God is not a person, what sense does it make to worship ‘it’? The problem of worship takes on a new aspect in the light of models of God which have recently been promulgated by certain philosophers and theologians – that God is ‘Being itself’, ‘the ground of our being’, ‘experienced non-objective reality’, an inspiring picture, a fictional entity in a religious story, a linguistic device for indicating the fundamentality of our perspective on life or ‘the self not yet become’.
Uchimura Kanzō and his ‘No Church Christianity’: Its Origin and Significance in Early Modern Japan
Authors: Kodera T. James
Published: October 2008

Debate over indigenization of Christianity continues in earnest even after the waning of the missionary zeal of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, set afire in no small measure by the wave of Great Awakening that swept New England and beyond. The context in which the Gospel of Christ is to be heard anew has ceased to be the God forsaken lands of heathens but is now one in which new challenges have emerged, ranging widely from Marxism and Islam, scientific scepticism and technological revolution, to urbanization and the rise of the ‘Third World’. In a country where since the early seventeenth century the Christians have scarcely numbered more than half of one percent of the population, the Gospel continues to intrigue the inquiring minds and the tired souls of the Japanese, particularly among the educated for many of whom the initial exposure to Christianity was through schooling or personal cultural enrichment. While many have regarded Christianity as a passage to Western culture and civilization when Japan still held the West in awe, worthy of emulation, others have taken upon themselves a more sobering, if troubling to some, task of inquiring whether the teaching of Christ could be the spiritual and social force to redeem and to transform the Japanese without relinquishing, if possible, but rather affirming the integrity of their own heritage. In no other country has a religious tradition exerted influence so far out of pro-portion to its membership as has Christianity in modern Japan.
‘Why the Academic Study of Religion?’ Motive and Method in the Study of Religion
Authors: Wiebe Donald
Published: October 2008

The methodological implications of the motives that underlie the study of religion and, more particularly, the academic study of religion have not, I think, received the attention they deserve. They are of the utmost importance, however, for the differences of motivation between the study of religion legitimated by the modern university and the scholarly study of religion that antedates it, sponsor radically different, if not mutually exclusive, approaches to its study. In asking why the study of religion is undertaken as an academic exercise – which is, after all, a comparatively recent development – I shall be attempting to delineate, to some extent, the relation of motive to method in what has come to be called Religious Studies. In clarifying that relation I hope also to show that Religious Studies – that is, the academic study of religion – must be a vocation in very much the same sense that Max Weber speaks of science as a vocation and, therefore, that such study must take as merely preliminary a ‘religious studies’ that is concerned only to ‘understand’ rather than to explain the phenomenon of Religion.
Could there be a Mystical Core of Religion?
Authors: Jantzen Grace M.
Published: October 2008

An identical consciousness of close communion with God is obtained by the non-sacramental Quaker in his silence and by the sacramental Catholic in the Eucharist. The Christian contemplative's sense of personal intercourse with the divine as manifest in the incarnate Christ is hard to distinguish from that of the Hindu Vaishnavite, when we have allowed for the different constituents of his apperceiving mass.
Neutrality in Religious Studies
Authors: Donovan Peter
Published: October 2008

‘Open-minded’, ‘detached’, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’, ‘impartial’, ‘non-partisan’ and ‘independent’ are terms typically used when Religious Studies seeks to present itself as an academic discipline. Phrases like ‘methodological agnosticism’, ‘suspension of judgement’, and ‘procedural neutrality’ are also found, in attempts to formulate an appropriate methodology. Seldom are those terms and phrases precisely defined, or the differences between them examined. Yet a moment's reflection reveals that they are far from clear or unambiguous, and that if they are to be used at all effectively in this context, more work must be done by way of preliminary analysis and clarification.
The Hiddenness of God
Authors: McKim Robert
Published: October 2008

Neither the existence of God nor the nature of God is apparent or obvious. If God exists, why is it not entirely clear to everyone that this is so? How can theists explain God's hiddenness, and how plausible are their explanations? God, if God exists, is an omnipotent, morally good, omnipresent being, than whom none greater can be conceived. Surely it is well within the abilities of God to let God's existence and nature be known to us. Why isn't the existence and nature of our Heavenly Father as apparent as, say, the existence of our various earthly fathers?
Divine Knowledge and Divine Control: A Response to Gordon and Sadowsky
Authors: Basinger David
Published: October 2008

To say that God is omniscient is normally to say that God knows all true propositions and none that are false. But what exactly is knowable? Some believe that God possesses only ‘present knowledge’ (PK). All that is know-able is that which is (or has been) actual and that which follows deterministically from it. Others believe that God possesses ‘simple foreknowledge’ (SFK). God can also know what will actually happen, including what humans will freely do. And still others believe that God possesses ‘middle knowledge’ (MK). God is able to know not only what will happen in the actual world or what could happen in all worlds but also what would in fact happen in every possible situation, including what every possible free creature would in fact do in every possible situation in which that creature could find itself.
Freud's Religious Scepticism Resurrected
Authors: Gordon Jeffrey
Published: October 2008

In a century dominated by the exacting methods and dramatic successes of science, it is difficult to imagine an informed contemporary religious believer never shaken by the doubt that his or her most sacred ideas are atavisms to a benighted age, vain and empty fantasies. To such a believer, Freud's late monograph, The Future of an Illusion, with its warm, solicitous tone, but relentless scepticism, must seem the patient knell of his or her worst fears. For here Freud uses his dialectical skill and his psychoanalysis to augment motives for self-doubt at least as old as Abraham: Perhaps the most cherished of my beliefs are a kind of madness, a condition I do not recognize because it is so widely shared. Perhaps like the madman bewitched by the tapestry of his delusions, I hold fast to my faith only because I could not endure the threadbare fabric of a life without it. But it is not as though the religionist is utterly without defence against this source of doubt, nor that the familiar defence is without considerable prima facie force against Freud. For when sceptics such as Freud turn their account of the origin of religious faith into a case against the truth of religious claims, the believer can attack this line with an unassailable axiom: No examination of the motives for a belief is relevant to an assessment of its truth. To assume otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy. The question I want to deal with here is whether the religious believer should rest content with this rejoinder to Freud.
A Theory of Religion
Authors: Stone Jim
Published: October 2008

What is a religion? As Socrates might have asked: What feature do all and only religions share in virtue of which they are religions? This question may seem misguided. Confronted with the diversity of behaviour called ‘religious’, we may easily doubt the existence of a single feature that explains the religiosity of every religion. To use Wittgenstein's term, there may only be a `family resemblance’ between religions, a network of features generally shared, most of which belong to each religion, no one of which belongs to every religion. Efforts to produce the single defining feature tend to streng-then the doubt that one exists. Is a religion an attempt to approach God or appropriate the sacred? Then Theravada Buddhism is not a religion, for God and the sacred are irrelevancies in this tradition. Is a religion a practice that expresses and advances the ultimate concern of a large number of people? Then the stockmarket is a religion and so is the drug trade. Such accounts are typically too narrow or too general, unless they are circular. Perhaps religion has no essence.
Philosophy, Theology And The Reading Of Texts
Authors: Brümmer Vincent
Published: October 2008

The French composer, Hector Berlioz, reacted as follows to the critics of his opera La Damnation de Faust: ‘I have already recounted how I … wrote the march on the Hungarian theme of Rákóczy in the course of one night. The passionate reception that this march received in Pest made me decide to include it in my Faust, and in doing so I took the liberty to use Hungary as the setting for the opening of the action, and had my hero, deep in reflection, see a Hungarian army passing across the plain. A German critic considered it most remarkable that I should portray Faust in such a manner. I do not see why I should not have done that, and I would, without hesitation, have let him travel to any place whatsoever if it had been to the benefit of the music I was writing. I had not set myself the task of blindly following Goethe's framework, and a character like Faust can be portrayed as making the most outlandish journeys without doing harm in anyway to the credibility of his person. When other German critics … attacked me even more strongly for the departures that my libretto made from the text and the structure of Goethe's Faust, … I wondered why these critics had not reproached me in any way for the libretto of my symphony, Roméo et Juliette, which only shows a slight resemblance to Shakespeare's immortal tragedy! Obviously because Shakespeare was not a German. Chauvinists! Fetishists! Imbeciles!
Is the Problem of Evil Misconceived?
Authors: McGrath P. J.
Published: October 2008

Theism, according to David O'Connor, has in recent centuries been on trial for its life, the charge being that the existence of so much evil in the world is incompatible with belief in a benevolent creator. But this trial, he claims is incapable of producing a reasoned verdict.
The Doctrine of Hell and Moral Philosophy
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: October 2008

The doctrine of hell, stated with a little care, entails that some persons never achieve their greatest good, fail to really flourish and never reach the end for which they were created. If that doctrine is true, and it is tragic that persons never achieve their greatest good, then there are tragic states of affairs whose tragedy is never overcome.
Survival of Bodily Death: a Question of Values
Authors: Martin Raymond
Published: October 2008

Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘demonstrated’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’.
Is God a Utilitarian?
Authors: Holley D. M.
Published: October 2008

In a well-known passage Mill defends his utilitarian theory against the objection that it is a godless doctrine. He argues,

If it be a true belief that God desires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and that this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not a godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other. If it be meant that utilitarianism does not recognize the revealed will of God as the supreme law of morals, I answer that a utilitarian who believes in the perfect goodness and wisdom of God necessarily believes that whatever God has thought fit to reveal on the subject of morals must fulfil the requirements of utility in a supreme degree.
Infinity in Theology and Mathematics
Authors: Blanc Jill Le
Published: October 2008

Can we apply the same concepts to both the finite and the infinite? Is there something distinctive about the infinite that prevents attribution to it of concepts that we can attribute to the finite? If so, then this could be a reason for our difficulties in talking about God – God is infinite, and our concepts, applying, as they do, to the finite objects of our experience, cannot be ‘extended’ to the infinite. God's infinity is sometimes used as an explanation of theological difficulties like the problem of evil or the paradoxes of omnipotence: we do not really know what we mean when we attribute infinite goodness or power to God.
Reconciling Berkeley's Microscopes in God's Infinite Mind
Authors: Jacquette Dale
Published: October 2008

God knows or hath ideas; but His ideas are not convey'd to Him by sense, as ours are. Your not distinguishing where there is so manifest a difference, makes you fancy you see an absurdity where there is none.
Classical Theism and the Doctrine of the Trinity
Authors: Kelly Charles J.
Published: October 2008

It is well known that Augustine, Boethius, Anselm and Aquinas participated in a tradition of philosophical theology which determined God to be simple, perfect, immutable and timelessly eternal. Within the parameters of such an Hellenic understanding of the divine nature, they sought a clarification of one of the fundamental teachings of their Christian faith, the doctrine of the Trinity. These classical theists were not dogmatists, naively unreflective about the very possibility of their project. Aquinas, for instance, explicitly worried about and fought to dispel the seeming contradiction between the philosophical requirement of divine simplicity and the creedal insistence on a threefold personhood in God.1 Nevertheless, doubts abound. Philosophers otherwise friendly to Classical Theism (CT) still remain unsure about the coherence of affirming a God that is at once absolutely simple and triune.2 A less friendly critic has even suggested that the theory of divine simplicity pressured Augustine and his medieval followers away from recognizing that real complexity within the life of God which Trinitarianism expresses.3
Hermeneutics and Post-Modernism: Can We Have a Radical Reader-Response Theory? Part I
Authors: Noble Paul R.
Published: October 2008

This paper argues that if Stanley Fish's postmodernist hermeneutics is correct then it has far-reaching consequences for Biblical Studies, because it licences radical reinterpretations that traditional approaches would consider inadmissible. The theory is then tested out by examining Fish's own attempts at radical reinterpretation. Following a methodological discussion of the criteria by which his exegesis should be assessed, a wide-ranging survey of Fish's examples shows that they consistently fail to support his claims, and that the nature of their failure suggests that his hermeneutical theory is seriously flawed. This is further proved by showing that Fish's theory entails an extreme form of solipsism.
Foundation of Religious Beliefs after Foundationalism: Wittgenstein between Nielsen and Phillips
Authors: Huang Yong
Published: October 2008

Religious beliefs have often been taken either as absolutely foundational to all others or as ultimately founded on something else. This essay starts with an endorsement of the contemporary critique of foundationalism but sets its task as to search for the foundation(s) of religious belief after foundationalism. In its third and main part, it argues for a Wittgensteinian reflective equilibrium (within a belief system, between believing and acting and among people with different ways of believing and acting) as such a foundation. In this reflective equilibrium, religious beliefs are no more and no less foundational to, or founded by, other beliefs and practices. To appreciate this perspective better, I argue,in the first part, that Kai Neilsen's charge of Wittgenstein as a fideist is not accurate, and, in the second part, that D. Z. Phillips's fideistic contentions are unWittgensteinian.
Religious Pluralism and the Divine: a Response to Paul Eddy
Authors: Hick John
Published: October 2008

In ‘Religious Pluralism and the Divine: Another Look at John Hick's Neo-Kantian Proposal’ [Religious Studies, xxx, 1994) Paul Eddy argues against the ultimate ineffability of the Real, and claims that a neo-Kantian epistemology leads to a Feuerbachian non-realism. In response I stress (a) the impossibility of attributing to the Real the range of incompatible characteristics of its phenomenal (i.e. experienceable) manifestations, so that it must lie beyond the range of our human religious categories, and (b) the distinction, which Eddy fails to observe, between grounds for believing in the Divine, and reasons for thinking that the Divine can be differently conceived and experienced.
A Leibnizian Account of why Belief in the Christian Mysteries is Justified
Authors: Cave Eric
Published: October 2008

The Christian mysteries, which consist of such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Trinity, pose a problem for anyone who seeks to reconcile the tenets of Christianity with reason. As Leibniz puts it, the mysteries are incomprehensible, improbable, and against appearances. Why should a reasonable individual believe in such mysteries? By answering this question, one responds to the objection that Christianity requires individuals to embrace patent nonsense. Leibniz maintains that the mysteries, although incomprehensible, can be explained sufficiently to justify belief in them. But how can the mysteries be both incomprehensible and explicable? In this paper, I will develop a Leibnizian account of why belief in the mysteries is justified.
Internal and External Questions about God
Authors: Poidevin Robin Le
Published: October 2008

Characteristic of metaphysics are general questions of existence, such as ‘Are there numbers?’ This kind of question is the target of Carnap's argument for deflationism, to the effect that general existential questions, if taken at face value, are meaningless. This paper considers deflationism in a theological context, and argues that the question ‘Does God exist?’ can appropriately be grouped with the ‘metaphysical’ questions attacked by Carnap. Deflationism thus has the surprising consequence that the correct approach to theism is that of radical theology. The paper attempts to show why Carnap's argument fails, and why, nevertheless, enough remains of it for us to conclude that God cannot be outside time and space.
The Locations of the Soul
Authors: McGhee Michael
Published: October 2008

Belief in life after death is implicated, for the typical ‘Wittgensteinian’, with Cartesian dualism, and the latter seen to entail a private inner subject that cannot survive the anti-private language argument. But Descartes does not really suffer from this defect and belief in life after death is not merely a product of ‘confused’ Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes is presented as an intellectual analogue of the formation of the concept of ‘soul’ in spiritual contexts. Just as metaphysical reflection forces us to conclude, for Descartes, that we are only contingently flesh and blood beings, so it is only under the condition of recalcitrant experience that exemplary practitioners seem forced to forge a distinction between body and soul, thus revising influentially their view of themselves as single beings both conscious and extended.
RHAPSODY FOR THE THEATRE: A SHORT PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE
Authors: Badiou Alain
Published: October 2008

It is as good a division of the world as any other to observe that there are and have been societies with theatre and others without theatre. And that in societies that know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event, this has always met with reticence, anathema, major or minor excommunications, as well as enthusiasm. More specifically, next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day!
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE TWO PLAYWRIGHTS: SOCRATES, AGATHON, AND ARISTOPHANES IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM
Authors: Rokem Freddie
Published: October 2008

This article reflects my current research, exploring the complex interactions between the discursive practices of theatre and performance on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Instead of beginning by trying to formulate the general principles for such an interaction, I examine actual encounters: direct face-to-face meetings and actual dialogues between philosophers and representatives of the Thespian professions. The earliest recorded encounter of this kind is in Plato's Symposium depicting the banquet in Agathon's house, celebrating his victory at the Lenaean theatre festival in 416 b.c., during which the celebrants spent the whole night eulogizing Eros. On this occasion Socrates and the two playwrights, Agathon and Aristophanes, interacted directly on several occasions.