bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Infallible Fallibilism
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

I believe that a thoroughgoing fallibilism, which is supposed to apply actually to the statements constitutive of fallibilism themselves, is self-destructive, and consequently absurd. I wish to propose a less radical, but I think perfectly self-consistent, kind of fallibilism, which I shall argue is not self-destructive. A first-order fallibilism — applying to the natural science, history, and hermeneutics — may issue in, and in my opinion ought to issue in, a second- order infallibilism — applying to epistemology and metaphysics. More concretely, fallibilism is in general an infallible way of getting at the truth about the real world; or perhaps rather, fallibilism is an absolutely infallible way of tending towards the truth.The issue is not merely a technical one within philosophy, but seems to be of some general cultural importance. Fallibilism is in effect an attempt to set out foundations for knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, to provide a way of distinguishing between knowledge which is adequately grounded, and so amounts to ‘knowledge’ properly so-called, and what merely makes some pretensions to be ‘knowledge’. As a result of the alleged failure of fallibilism and of other attempts to provide foundations for knowledge, the conviction has got about that knowledge neither has nor needs any such foundations. If this principle is once seriously accepted and consistently applied, the urgent question of how much of what anyone claims to be knowledge actually is so, and how much is not, can only be settled at the level of dogma and prejudice. If it is not, this can only be due to saving inconsistency; since to provide criteria in virtue of which any claimant to the title of knowledge can be rationally vindicated as such is nothing else than to provide foundations for knowledge.
Civil Religion and Original Sin
Authors: Fourez Gerry 
Published: July 2007

Original sin, nowadays is usually not welcomed by most Christians of Western culture. Religious traditions on original sin are felt to be uncomfortably strange in our society where people, by common consent, see themselves so unconnected to others that the actions of one person are supposed to leave other people untouched. Such cultural agreement is at the roots of a society that believes every person is free and able to achieve whatever he/she wants. Since original sin doctrines clearly deny such “unconnectedness”, no wonder they are often rejected and reduced to a teaching as simplistic as “a spot on a child’s soul!” This articles suggests that original sin traditions can speak to our contemporary culture, challenge some of its deepest presuppositions, and lead to new levels of awareness of what it means to be Christian in today’s world.To understand the meaning of doctrines which are expressed in what anthropologists call mythical tales or myths, it is relevant to recognize the different representations of the world which flow from different mythical tales, and the effects of those different representations. I submit that a doctrine as “religious” as Original Sin says a lot about how we envision the civil organization of society. Furthermore, the present disregard for this doctrine is related to social and political respresentations. I will thus compare the basic assumptions of the original sin myth with another set of assumptions, those underlying the individualistic world view which is sometimes summarized in-another myth: the civil religion of free enterprise.Various interpretations of original sin have attempted to articulate individual and collective dimensions of the sinful condition. These interpretations at the same time propose diverse understandings of the relationship between history and our present actions. Classical Catholicism seems to identify original sin with the tendency of each individual toward selfishness and personal aggrandizement.
In God's Image?
Authors: Morley Janet 
Published: July 2007

The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself, and, with the most tender courtesy, does it by means of the blessed Sacrament.’ (Julian of Norwich)‘It blurs the whole nature of the difference of the sexes if the woman does not play her proper part. She cannot be an icon of Christ, representing him at the altar’. (Graham Leonard)These two quotations are separated not only by several centuries, but also by opposing assumptions about how we may think about God, and about which analogies from human experience are appropriate. Interestingly, it is not the modern comment which is particularly surprising or disturbing. Whether we happen to agree with the bishop or not, the argument feels familiar. But the picture of a breast-feeding woman is by no means a traditional image of the Eucharist. Some might consider it shocking, or at least in rather poor taste, and these feelings are worth exploring.
What's The Big Idea?
Authors: Dummett Ann 
Published: July 2007

Suppose a fairy godmother were to appear and offer you three wishes — not, as in the folk tales, for yourself, but for the future of the world or even just for the future of the country. My guess is that the instant answers from almost everyone would start with No. No more hunger; no more wars;no terrorism-, no nuclear weapons; no more unemployment. But suppose the fairy godmother were to reply, rather acidly, that she was in the business of granting positive wishes, not negative ones, and that you must say what /ou actually wanted to happen, how easy would it be to formulate what you wanted in the few brief moments before, in exasperation, she vanished into the blue?There would be two kinds of difficulty in stating three wishes. The first kind would be the technical problem of finding positive answers to what is wrong: for example, unemployment is obviously appalling and should be replaced by full employment, but even if a wave of the wand would achieve this, what exactly would “full employment” be? Would it be a situation recognisably better than the present one, with far more people having jobs but with a considerable number still unwillingly out of work, or doing unpleasant and badly-paid jobs, or having to work through every weekend in order to make enough to keep the family going? A world in which nuclear weapons had, by magic, been made impossible to produce, would still be a world manufacturing cluster bombs, napalm, bacteriological weapons and expanding bullets. But the challenge of the fairy godmother would touch a deeper problem than these.
The Church in Chile
Authors: Kirby Peadar 
Published: July 2007

The large parish of San Jose Obrero on the outskirts of Santiago, the Chilean capital, contains a cross-section of the city’s poor. On one side of the Avenida San Pedro which runs down the middle of the parish are four storey blocks of flats, a memorial to a democratic Chile in which elected civilian governments built housing for the working class. These flats look across the avenue on the vast expanse of small, poorly constructed wooden huts which are the typical homes of Chile’s poor. This huge poblacion, as these areas are called, contains some 150,000 people who moved in to take this land and build their flimsy huts during the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.Living in one of these wooden huts among the people are four Chilean sisters. While teaching three mornings a week in a local primary school to make a living the sisters concentrate their time on supporting the network of Christian communities which have been growing in their area. In the immediate chapel which is the primary focus for their work (it is one of the eight such chapels in the parish) they now have four fully developed adult communities and one youth community, each of which has about 20 members. As well as that there are looser groups organised around the chapel: six groups of family catechetics in each of which some eight or nine couples attend weekly meetings for two years as part of the obligatory diocesan programme before First Communion; two groups of preparation for Confirmation in each of which about 20 teenagers attend a weekly meeting, again for two years as the only way in which they are permitted to receive Confirmation; two groups of parents who want their child baptised and who must attend a series of eight talks, and finally two groups involved in an experimental catechetics for which the catechists take their themes from the experience of the local people rather than using the diocesan course.
The Problem of Evil and the Activity of God
Authors: Walker Ian 
Published: July 2007

The Problem of evil, from Epicurus via Philo of Alexandria to today, has usually been presented in more or less the same way. We are generally offered three, sometimes more, propositions:
1God is omnipotent2God is good/loving3Evil/suffering exists
and the suggestion is that these three propositions, although all believed by many religious believers to be true, are mutually contradictory. These are held to be contradictory because, ‘if God exists, then being omniscient, he knows under what circumstances evil will occur, if he does not act; and being omnipotent he is able to prevent its occurrence. Hence, being perfectly good, he will prevent its occurrence and so evil will not exist’. Professor Plantinga sees the problem in much the same kind of way: .. five propositions . . . essential to traditional theism: a) that God exists, b) that God is omnipotent, c) that God is omniscient, d) that God is wholly good, and e) that evil exists . . . each of these propositions is indeed an essential feature of orthodox theism. And it is just these five propositions whose conjunction is said ... to be self-contradictory’. These writers are not unrepresentative of the vast numbers of philosophers who see, and try to solve, the problem in these terms.
“Who Do Men Say That I Am?”— Psalm 8 and the Humanity of Christ
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

The evangelists obviously assume that Jesus was a human being. What is less clear is what would be entailed by that assumption. There is very little in the New Testament that we would immediately recognise as an explicit exploration of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. It is often assumed that this is because the authors of the New Testament were philosophically naive and so did not have a developed conception of what it meant to be a human being, but maybe it is because we pose the question in the context of a discipline called Christology which predisposes us to accept as valid only certain ways of thinking.Cornelius Ernst O P, in a provocative article called “Thinking about Jesus”, said, “the ‘ology termination (of Christology) does presuppose a certain kind of abstraction, a certain kind of theoretical approach, a certain conception of what constitutes reasonableness, and in fact what is meaning at all, what constitutes thinking. I think one of the problems we have to face today is just what does constitute rationality, what is thinking, what are the appropriate categories, not only for thinking about Jesus Christ, but about anything else”. The assumption within Christology has generally been that to claim that Jesus is a human being is to say what he is, to identify him as belonging to a particular class of beings, a species. And one’s membership of this species is defined by the possession of a mind, a certain sort of inferiority. To be properly human is having certain sorts of things going on in one’s head. That’s what it means to have a human soul. To be a human being is to have a mind that has thoughts which are then communicated to others, who are assumed to have similar minds, by means of language.
On the Road to Solipsism
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The first task, in the philosophical therapy that opens the way to constructive appropriation of the theological tradition, must be to examine one’s notions of the soul. The very idea of the mind, let alone of the soul, has been eliminated by one powerful philosophical school — exemplified here by Quine. We are far more likely, however, to endorse, or unwittingly host, a certain incipient Solipsism. John Stuart Mill’s argument from analogy for our knowledge of other minds may be classical, but it is not free from objections. On the contrary, it only confirms the myth of the Little Man inside the shell of the body which it is intended to refute. The problem is not intra-theological. The difficulty of the relationship between mind and body, and between myself and others, may be illustrated by some quotations from Proust. This brings us to the threshold of a re-examination of the work of Wittgenstein on the philosophy of psychology — but his work is best read in the context of further work by John Wisdom and Stanley Cavell, two of his finest interpreters, in this matter at any rate.One line is to eliminate talk of the soul altogether. This could not satisfy Catholics, or any other Christians who regard themselves as obliged to make sense of the tradition which they have inherited. We may well feel strongly tempted by a Platonizing dualism that longs to release the soul from the barnacles and cirripeds with which it is encrusted in this present life (Republic, 612). But out and out behaviourism can have little attraction for people who find themselves at home, or even simply searching, within any Christian tradition. It is hard even for us to imagine what the allurements might be of any such strict materialist theory of consciousness. Quine’s eliminative physicalism will do as an example.
The Cosmological Argument
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

I wish to defend a version of the Cosmological Argument. But the phrase ‘the Cosmological Argument’ has been used to refer to various arguments, some of them very different from each other. Let me, then, say at the outset that with some of these I am either out of sympathy, or I am just plain unsure.Take, for example, the argument for God’s existence offered by Locke in Book IV, Chapter X of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ‘Man knows’, says Locke, ‘by an intuitive certainty that bare nothing can no more produce any real being than it can be equal to two right angles’. So for Locke, if anything exists it is caused to exist by something else. And Locke thinks that what belongs to anything that exists, its nature, must be derived from something else, and that God therefore exists. For if something exists, says Locke, it must have been caused to exist. This means that ‘from eternity there has been something, since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’. But this argument is invalid. According to Locke, if something has existed from eternity, there is an eternal being. ‘If, therefore’, says Locke, ‘we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something’. But all Locke’s argument shows is that there has always been something, which is quite compatible with there having been a whole host of different things. In other words, Locke thinks he has proved the equivalent of:
There is an X, such that, for every time t,X occurs at t.
Wisdom as Touchstone in The Merchant of Venice
Authors: McCombie Frank 
Published: July 2007

In distinguishing between character and role in Shakespeare’s plays, Peter Ure once wrote:
It is often because we are made aware of the gap, not the consonance, between the man and the office that the situation becomes profound and exciting, and permits rich inferences about what the hero’s inward self is like.Few critics spoke with greater conviction about the “inward self’ of the Shakespearean protagonist, but it is with the outward selves of the protagonists of The Merchant of Venice that we shall be concerned in what follows. It is at least arguable that the somewhat confused state of debate about this play is owing to the resolute concentration of attention upon the “inward selves” of Portia, Antonio, and Shylock, and to the too-easy assumptions that are made about the nature and importance of their roles. To suggest that the fabric of meaning in The Merchant of Venice depends absolutely upon the identification of roles in the terms in which Shakespeare conceived them is not to underestimate the interest and importance of the ways in which character regularly pulls against role, for what Peter Ure said is perhaps more true of this play than of many. This, nevertheless, is a truth which can be apprehended only if the conception of role is properly appreciated; if it is not appreciated, neither is the nature or purpose of the tension Peter Ure was attempting to define.
Personalism in Christian Social Thought and The Denial of Politics
Authors: Pepper Mary 
Published: July 2007

‘The name (Personalism) was bom of a response to the expansion of the totalitarian drive, against this drive, in order to stress the defence of the person against the tyranny of apparatus.’‘Just as, fundamentally, it is recollection and interiority, Personalism is at the other end of the scale from narcissism, individualism and egocentricity. It brings the whole of its weight to bear in the direction of the most obvious aspiration of modem man, whether this be called collectivist or communal.’(E. Mounier What is Personalism? 1946. p 113 and p 176)‘Insofar as man by his very nature stands completely in need of life in society, he is, and he ought to be, the beginning, the subject and the object of every social organisation ... There is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of the human person, who stands above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable.’(Vatican II. Decree on the Church in the Modem World.Gaudium et Spes).Thanks to the Gospel, the Church has the truth about man. This truth is found in an anthropology that the Church never ceases to fathom more thoroughly and to communicate to others. The primordial affirmation of this anthropology is that man is in God’s image and cannot be reduced to a mere portion of nature or a nameless element in the human city.... This complete truth about the human being constitutes the foundation of the Church’s social teaching and the basis also of true liberation. In the light of this truth, man is not a being subjected to economic or political processes.
Sacrament and Ideology
Authors: Turner Denys 
Published: July 2007

If it’s magic to believe that merely saying something can make it so, then J. L. Austin’s account of the so-called ‘performative utterance’ is an account of a magical belief. For that, though not quite true without qualification, is what Austin maintains is the nature of a performative utterance. On the other hand Austin is not the first person one would think of as a believer in magic. And his undoubted credentials for unsuperstitiousness have given authority to the notion of the performative utterance which some theologians have thought to exploit for their own purposes. And some sociologists too. For these reasons respectively.Theologians do not have a reputation so clear of superstition as Austin has. In particular, Roman Catholic theologians don’t and even more, among Roman Catholic theologians, those who concern themselves with rituals and sacraments don’t. And some of these have wanted to go along with the likes of Aquinas and the Tridentine formulae about sacraments and wish to legitimate propositions, such as that of Aquinas, that a sacrament is a sign which “effects what it signifies”. As this appears to mean that merely saying a thing, such as “This is my body” uttered over what is prima facie bread, or “I baptise you ...” said while pouring what is on any account water, is to make what it says so, and as such theologians are sensitive to the charge that this is mere magic-making, there is an evident temptation to exploit Austin on performatives in the prospect of de-mystifying such claims.
The Liberating Eucharist
Authors: Paxton Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

In his 1977 book The Eucharist and Human Liberation, Tissa Balasuriya reminds us that “the Eucharist has an extraordinary potential for being an agent of personal and global transformation. Every week about two hundred million persons meet all over the world in Christian communities”. Yet, while the worldwide eucharistic congregations every Sunday probably make up the largest global assembly for any shared purpose, the influence of the Eucharist on the creation of a more just, more loving and (in fine) more Christian world is almost minimal. The paradox, in Balasuriya’s words, “is that while the example of Jesus should make the eucharistic community a champion of social justice and a contestant of social evil, this happens very seldom” (op. cit. pp 85-6). Gustavo Gutiérrez has tried to emphasize this matter by directing a hard hit at the quality of the Eucharist as celebrated in some gatherings:“without a real commitment against exploitation and alienation and for a society of solidarity and justice, the eucharistic celebration is an empty action, lacking any genuine endorsement by those who participate in it”.But Gutiérrez oversimplifies here. The search to help resolve the paradox has to take into account not only attitudes of indifference but also the theological schizophrenia — the great divorce between faith and life, or religion and everything else — which underlies and has helped to form them. This has led, on the one hand, to the ‘idealist’ and ‘spiritualist’ attitudes which (as Gutiérrez maintains) avoid the sharp realities; and, on the other hand, to the huge loss of credibility sustained by the Church in the present century and hence by the Eucharist which lies, or should lie, at the heart of the Church’s work.
A Timeless God?
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

The doctrine of God’s timelessness is now very unpopular. Several major objections have been levelled against it, and these can be summarised thus:
1If God is timeless, he cannot be a person.2If God is timeless, his knowledge entails absurd consequences or is restricted.3If God is timeless, he cannot act.4If God is timeless, he cannot command our admiration or love.5There is Biblical precedent for rejecting the view that God is timeless.6There is no good reason for supposing that if there is a God, then he is timeless.I think these objections are answerable, and here I propose briefly to say why.What might be meant by the assertion ‘God is timeless’? The most detailed discussion of this question known to me is Nelson Pike’s God and Timelessness (London, 1970). And, as Pike suggests, it seems reasonable to argue as follows:First, if God is timeless, He has no duration, i.e. He lacks temporal extension ... It is not just that the life of God lacks temporal limits: the point is that it has no temporal spread at all. Secondly, if God is timeless, God also lacks temporal location. God did not exist before Columbus discovered America nor will he exist after the turn of the century ... The point seems to be that God is not to be qualified by temporal predicates (such as, e.g. ‘six years old’) nor time-location predicates (such as, e.g. ‘before Columbus’). (pp 7 f.)As Pike indicates, these views can be found in writers like Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Aquinas.