bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Prophecy
Authors: Shatz David 
Published: September 2018

Most people associate prophecy with prognostication. However, an understanding of philosophical theories of prophecy requires that we recognize the full range of functions that a prophet may serve: oracle, cognizer of the divine, moral and social critic, teacher, political leader, legislator, miracle-worker.
A recurring and fundamental issue, dating to ancient times, is whether prophecy is to be explained naturally or supernaturally. The Muslim philosopher al-Farabi and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides exemplify the naturalist orientation. They understood prophecy as an imaginative ‘imitation’ or translation of scientific and philosophical truths. Their accounts emphasize not only the intellectual but also the political, legislative and educational functions of prophecy. The Muslim al-Ghazali and the Christian Thomas Aquinas illustrate the supernatural approach, albeit in greatly different ways.
The proposition that biblical prophetic experiences convey scientific and metaphysical knowledge was attacked in varied ways in the modern period. In religious traditions, prophets have been replaced as sources of religious knowledge by either mystics, or books and authoritative interpreters. However, theories of prophecy are linked to important issues about religious language, miracles, the nature of God, the ends of life, and the character of religion.
Religious language
Authors: Alston William P. 
Published: September 2018

The main philosophical interest in religious language is in the understanding of what purport to be statements about God. Can they really be what they seem to be – claims to say something true about a divine reality? There are several reasons for denying this. The most prominent of these stems from the verifiability criterion of meaning, according to which an utterance can be a statement that is objectively true or false only if it is possible to verify or falsify it empirically. It is claimed that this is not possible for talk about God. However, the verifiability criterion itself has been severely criticized. Moreover, many religious beliefs do have implications that are, in principle, empirically testable, though not conclusively.
If one is moved to reject the idea that statements about God are what they seem to be, they can be taken as expressions of feelings and attitudes, and/or as guides to a life orientation. To be sure, religious utterances can have these functions even if they are also genuine statements of fact.
If one believes there to be genuine true-or-false statements about God, there are still problems as to how to understand them. We can focus on the construal of the predicates of such statements – for example, ‘made the heavens and the earth’ and ‘commissioned Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt’. There is a serious problem here because of two basic features of the situation. First, the terms we apply to God got their meaning from their application to creatures, particularly human beings. Second, God is so radically different from us that it seems that these terms cannot have the same meaning in the two uses. One possibility here is that all these terms are used metaphorically when applied to God, which obviously often happens (‘The Lord is my shepherd’). But are there some terms that can be literally true of God? This may be the case if some abstract aspect of the creaturely meaning of a term can be literally applied to God. For example, if one aspect of the meaning of ‘makes’ when applied to one of us is ‘brings about some state of affairs by an act of will’, the term ‘makes’ with that particular meaning might be truly applied to God.
Religious pluralism
Authors: Quinn Philip L. 
Published: September 2018

Religion displays a luxuriant diversity of beliefs and practices. Crusades and colonialism, preaching and proselytizing, argument and apologetics have failed to produce worldwide agreement. In order to understand this situation, four possibilities are worth considering. The first is reductive naturalism. On this view, religious beliefs about a supernatural or transcendent dimension of existence are all false. They are to be explained as products of a merely human projection mechanism. The writings of such naturalistic philosophers and scientists as Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Durkheim suggest ways in which such projections might occur. A second possibility is exclusivism. Doctrinal exclusivism is the view that the doctrines of one religion are completely true; the doctrines of all others are false whenever there is conflict. Soteriological exclusivism is the view that only one religion offers an effective path to salvation or liberation. Though the two kinds of exclusivism are logically independent, they are usually held together. A third option, which has found increasing favour in the second half of the twentieth century, is inclusivism: one religion contains the final truth and others contain only approaches to or approximations of it; the privileged religion offers the most effective path to salvation, but those outside it can somehow be saved or liberated. The final option, pluralism, is a relative newcomer. According to pluralism, a single ultimate religious reality is being differently experienced and understood in all the major religious traditions; they all, as far as we can tell, offer equally effective paths to salvation or liberation.
These options raise interesting questions. What accounts for the growing popularity of inclusivism and pluralism? How are we to articulate pluralism? Does exclusivism remain a rational option in spite of what is known about the whole range of religious traditions? Is pluralism, once clearly stated, a rational option?
Reprobation
Authors: Feenstra Ronald J. 
Published: September 2018

Reprobation is an eternal decision by God that results in everlasting death and punishment for some persons. The doctrine of reprobation typically takes one of three forms: (1) that God from eternity decreed to elect some without regard to faith or works and to reprobate others without regard to sin or unbelief, both to display his glory and for reasons we do not know (sometimes called double predestination); (2) that God from eternity decreed to elect some, despite their sin, and to abandon the rest, with the cause of their reprobation being sin and unbelief; or (3) that God from eternity elected those he foreknew would believe in Christ and reprobated those he foreknew would persist in sin and unbelief.
Reprobation doctrine was developed by Augustine and appears in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, who were deeply indebted to Augustine’s thought. Although some Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians have defended reprobation doctrine since the sixteenth century, Reformed theologians have stressed it and made it the occasion of controversy.
Simplicity, divine
Authors: Leftow Brian 
Published: September 2018

To be complex is to have many parts. To be simple is to have few. Theists of all religious traditions have asserted that God is completely simple – that is, has no parts of any sort. A contemporary statement of this doctrine of divine simplicity would add that God is identical with each of his intrinsic attributes. Thus if God is omnipotent and omniscient, for example, then he is identical with omnipotence and omniscience (and so these attributes are also identical). The doctrine’s popularity across traditions may rest on theists’ shared convictions that God is the ultimate reality, perfect, and creator of all that is not himself, and on the fact that many theists have thought that each of these claims entails the doctrine of divine simplicity. It may also rest on strands of mystical experience common to many traditions.
The doctrine has played an important part in ontological arguments for the existence of God because of its assertion of the identity of God with God’s nature (if the latter in some sense exists, so must the former). Indeed, divine simplicity is near the conceptual core of classical theism; it is one chief reason classical theists think God immutable, impassible, timeless and wholly distinct from the universe. Many who oppose divine simplicity do so because of these other doctrines it entails. Other recent critics have charged that divine simplicity makes God a mere abstract entity or requires him to have all his attributes necessarily or all contingently.
Theological virtues
Authors: Mann William E. 
Published: September 2018

The three theological virtues of faith, hope and love, referred to frequently by the apostle Paul in his letters, play an indispensable role in Christian theorizing about a person’s duties with respect to God. Thomas Aquinas is responsible for the most thorough and influential philosophical theory of the theological virtues. According to him, faith, hope and love are virtues because they are dispositions whose possession enables a person to act well to achieve a good thing – in this case, the ultimate good of salvation and beatitude. Without them, people would have neither the awareness of nor the will to strive for salvation. Despite the fact that they are infused in persons by God’s grace, one can wilfully and culpably fail to let them develop.
Faith for Aquinas is the voluntary assent to propositions about God that cannot be known by the evidence available to the natural capacities of humans. Other theologians, such as Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard, deny the assumption that faith is primarily cognitive or propositional in nature, insisting instead that it is trust in God. Kierkegaard even challenges the presupposition that faith is logically continuous with natural knowledge. There has been much debate in the second half of the twentieth century as to whether it is ever rationally permissible to believe something on the basis of insufficient evidence.
According to Aquinas, hope for one’s salvation requires that one already have faith. Hope requires that one remain steadfast in the face of despair on the one hand and presumption on the other. Aquinas models the virtue of love on one strand of Aristotle’s notion of friendship. Love of God entails desiring the good that God has to offer, seeking to advance God’s goals, and communicating one’s love to God. Love for others follows from the realization that they are also created with good natures by God.
Religion, critique of
Authors: Lutz-Bachmann Matthias 
Published: September 2018

During the Enlightenment a new philosophy of religion arose, one which was not connected with metaphysics or philosophical theology. It asked to what extent religion could be legitimated philosophically, to what extent it could be shown to be reasonable.
The reasonableness of religion was taken to be significant for the political as well as the confessional clash between Christian denominations in Europe, all of which tried to justify their conflicting religious doctrines by reference to a supernatural revelation. The philosophical debate that began in the Enlightenment with regard to the criteria and arguments for a religion connected either to human nature or to public reason can be called a ‘critique of religion’ (Religionskritik), although the expression is not common before the critical philosophy of Kant and his school. Hegel followed the programme of Kant’s philosophy, maintaining a philosophical concept of religion as falling ‘within the limits of reason alone’. The radical left-wing school of Hegelianism transformed Hegel’s approach, which was a critical legitimation of religion, into its destruction. Presupposing materialism in ontology and atheism, Feuerbach held that religion should be interpreted as a kind of anthropology. Marx claimed that religion is an expression of a certain sort of ideology and a necessary illusion within a class-structured society.
In twentieth-century philosophy, the critique of religion can be found in two positions. The first is a rational reconstruction of the practical intentions or semantic content of religious belief; the second is a continuation of the interpretation of religion as ideological or illusory. In addition, we can identify certain other varieties of the critique of religion, including the theological critique of religion (found, for example, in the work of Barth and Bonhoeffer) and the philosophical critique of particular religious traditions (found, for example, in the romantic and postmodern rejections of Christian monotheism by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Klages and Heidegger).
Hiddenness of God
Authors: Dougherty Trent , Parker Ross 
Published: September 2018

The problem of divine hiddenness is that the hiddenness of God seems to supply a strong reason to think that there is no loving God, since a loving God would reveal himself to all. More specifically, the problem of divine hiddenness is a problem for traditional theists who believe God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly loving and, furthermore, that having a personal relationship with God is the best possible good for human beings. For, if there is such a God, it seems as though he would make sure that everyone who wanted that relationship would be in a position to have it. However, one thing which seems required for a personal relationship with God is that the individual in question believe that God exists in the first place. So it is natural to expect God to make evidence of his existence sufficiently clear to all. Yet there are some who claim not to have sufficient evidence. This divine hiddenness therefore seems to give positive support for nonbelief in the God of traditional theism.
If these people who claim to lack sufficient evidence were suppressing the evidence, then there would be no problem for the theist, but it is hard to argue that every such case of unbelief is a case of suppressed evidence. Yet this is what some theists argue is true, even though it may not seem plausible at first: after all, self-deception is not uncommon. More often, however, theists point out reasons why God has to allow people to persist in unbelief for a time. This may involve reference to various ways in which humans can more effectively develop virtue when they are not sure that there is a God. For example, if people are certain that God is ‘looking over their shoulder’, then their actions might not be properly motivated to count as the best kind of moral actions. Thus, conclude some theists, it is better, all things considered, for God to allow some people to pass through periods of doubt.
Analytic ethics
Authors: Railton Peter 
Published: September 2018

Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act. Meta-ethics, with which ’analytic ethics’ is typically identified, seeks to understand such judgments. Are they factual statements capable of being literally true or false (cognitivism)? Or are they commands or expressions of attitude, capable only of greater or lesser appropriateness or efficacy (noncognitivism)? Cognitivists focus on whether the facts to which they claim moral judgments correspond are discovered from experience, or whether they occupy a different realm, as do mathematical facts. Noncognitivists, in contrast, arguing that moral judgments are not fact-stating, ask if they signal our feelings or commitments, or are imperatives of conduct.
Other questions concerning moral judgments include whether they are subjective or objective, and how they are connected to motivation. Analytic ethics therefore not only concerns the meaning of moral terms, but ranges over such areas as epistemology, metaphysics and the theory of action. As a field it remains full of controversy. It has developed approaches that afford specific insights into morality, and contributed to our understanding of the functions of thought and language.
Autonomy, ethical
Authors: Reath Andrews 
Published: September 2018

The core idea of autonomy is that of sovereignty over oneself, self-governance or self-determination: an agent or political entity is autonomous if it is self-governing or self-determining. The ancient Greeks applied the term to city-states. In the modern period, the concept was extended to persons, in particular by Kant, who gave autonomy a central place in philosophical discourse. Kant argued for the autonomy of rational agents by arguing that moral principles, which authoritatively limit how we may act, originate in the exercise of reason. They are thus laws that we give to ourselves, and Kant thought that rational agents are bound only to self-given laws. Much contemporary discussion has focused on the somewhat different topic of personal autonomy, and autonomy continues to be an important value in contemporary liberalism and in ethical theory.
It is important to distinguish different senses of autonomy because of variation in how the concept is used. Self-governance or self-determination appears to require some control over the desires and values that move one to action, and some such control is provided by the capacity to subject them to rational scrutiny. Thus, autonomy is often understood as the capacity to critically assess one’s basic desires and values, and to act on those that one endorses on reflection. In other contexts, autonomy is understood as a right, for example as the right to act on one’s own judgment about matters affecting one’s life, without interference by others. The term is also sometimes used in connection with ethics itself, to refer to the thesis that ethical claims cannot be reduced to nonethical claims.
Consequentialism
Authors: McNaughton David 
Published: September 2018

Consequentialism assesses the rightness or wrongness of actions in terms of the value of their consequences. The most popular version is act-consequentialism, which states that, of all the actions open to the agent, the right one is that which produces the most good.
Act-consequentialism is at odds with ordinary moral thinking in three respects. First, it seems excessively onerous, because the requirement to make the world a better place would demand all our time and effort; second, it leaves no room for the special duties which we take ourselves to have to those close to us: family, friends and fellow citizens; and third, it might require us, on occasion, to do dreadful things in order to bring about a good result.
Consequentialists standardly try to bring their theory more into line with common thinking by amending the theory in one of two ways. Indirect act-consequentialism holds that we should not necessarily aim to do what is right. We may get closer to making the world the best possible place by behaviour which accords more with ordinary moral thought. Rule-consequentialism holds that an action is right if it is in accordance with a set of rules whose general acceptance would best promote the good. Such rules will bear a fairly close resemblance to the moral rules with which we now operate.
Consequentialism
Authors: McNaughton David , Rawling Piers 
Published: September 2018

Consequentialism is sometimes taken to be a moral view according to which acts are to be assessed solely by the value of their consequences, in contrast to deontological ethical theories, which hold that certain kinds of action are wrong, and others right, independently of the goodness or badness of their outcomes
This account, however, oversimplifies matters. Contemporary consequentialism is a family of moral theories united by their fundamental concern with value. They need not assess acts in these terms; and those that do need not be concerned only with consequences. Act-consequentialism, for instance, although it does assess acts – the right act maximizes the good – need not measure the value of an act only by the value of its consequences: acts themselves may have their own intrinsic worth, for example. Rule-consequentialism assesses rules rather than acts: right acts are those that accord with a set of rules whose general acceptance would best promote the good.
Act-consequentialism builds on what seems to be the merest truism, namely that morality is concerned with making the world a better place for all. Certainly, consequentialist considerations figure importantly in issues of public policy – penal, economic or educational programmes are standardly judged by the goodness or badness of their results. Nevertheless, act-consequentialism is at odds with ordinary moral thinking in (at least) three respects.
First, it seems excessively onerous, because the requirement to make the world as good as possible would demand all our time and effort. Second, it leaves no room for the special duties that we take ourselves to have to those close to us: family, friends and fellow citizens. Third, it might require us, on occasion, to do dreadful things in order to bring about a good result.
Consequentialists standardly try to bring their theory closer to common thinking by amending it in one of two ways: either by tinkering with how we should decide on what to do (the decision procedure), or by assessing something other than our actions. Rule-consequentialism exemplifies the latter strategy: its rules may bear a fairly close resemblance to the moral rules with which we now operate. Indirect act-consequentialism (note that nomenclature varies among authors, so these doctrines may appear in other places under different names) adopts the former approach. Since it is a form of act-consequentialism, it claims that the right act maximizes the good. But, unlike direct act-consequentialism, indirect act-consequentialism denies that we should focus on the maximization of value in deciding what to do. Rather, we should follow ordinary moral thought – we may get closer to making the world as good as possible by caring for our friends and relatives, pursuing our personal projects, and steering clear of radical acts, even when they hold the promise of a better world.
Duty
Authors: Frazier Robert L. 
Published: September 2018

To have a duty is, above all, to be subject to a binding, normative requirement. This means that unless there are exculpating reasons someone who has a duty is required to satisfy it, and can be justifiably criticized for not doing so. Having a duty to do something is like having been given a command by someone who has a right to be obeyed: it must be done.
Sometimes we speak as if we have duties to individuals (such as persons and institutions). So, for example, if Jones makes a promise to Smith, then Jones has a duty to Smith to keep the promise. We also talk as if we have duties to perform, or to refrain from performing, types of actions, for instance, a duty to help those in need. Even if the performance of such a duty involves treating an individual in a certain way, the duty may not be to that individual. For example, a duty to be charitable might not be a duty to anyone, not even the recipient of the charity.
An important feature of duties is that they provide some justifying reason for action. If we explain why we did something by saying that it was our duty, we are offering a justification for the action. Such a justifying reason does not depend on the entire nature of the action. For example, if we make a promise, we have some justifying reason for keeping it, regardless of what was promised, or to whom the promise was made. Again it is like a command. If we are given a command by someone with a right to be obeyed, we have some justification for obeying it, no matter what we are commanded to do. On some views, however, the justifying reason we have for doing something because it is required by duty may not be decisive: we may have an even better reason for doing something else. None the less, that something is required by duty provides some justifying reason for doing it.
Talk about duties is found in many areas; we speak, for example, of legal duties, moral duties, professional duties, the duties of a scholar and, even, matrimonial duties. This discussion will focus on moral duty, but may have wider application.