bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
PREDICTABILITY AND THE EXPERIENCE OF FREEDOM
Authors: Persson Ingmar 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter explores two factors which account for experience of freedom. The first is that predictions of our decisions are in principle impossible. The second is that we do not experience any mental causation, i.e., we do not experience our mental episodes as being causally related to each other, or to the external world and our behaviour. The connections here are by way of the content of these mental episodes.
COMPATIBILIST FREEDOM OF ACTION
Authors: Persson Ingmar 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter begins by conceding Harry Frankfurt’s point that responsibility for an action does not require that we could have acted otherwise at the time in question. But it goes on to argue that it requires that, at the time of action, we believe that we can act otherwise if we decide to do so and, thus, unless we are victims of a grand illusion, that we can often act otherwise; otherwise, serious deliberation would be ruled out. This chapter also argues that this compatibilism is not defeated by the argument by Peter van Inwagen that in a world in which determinism is true, we cannot act otherwise because we can change neither the past nor the laws of nature.
COMPATIBILIST FREEDOM OF WILL
Authors: Persson Ingmar 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
If the fact that you could have acted otherwise is to be given a conditional analysis as that you could have acted otherwise if you had decided to do so, the ‘if’-clause must be understood as presupposing that you could have decided to act otherwise in some suitable sense. This chapter suggests that this sense is an epistemic one, supplied by the principled unpredictability of decisions defended in chapter 31. This epistemic possibility of deciding otherwise is incompatible with irresistible and compulsive desires whose strength is independent of the thrust of the agent’s reasons. An account of coercion is then added to the sketch of a direct responsibility. The chapter ends by pointing out that, even though compatibilism can account for direct responsibility, there is still the question whether we can have ultimate responsibility.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RATIONALISM AND SATISFACTIONALISM
Authors: Persson Ingmar 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter summarizes the three dilemmas between rationalism and satisfactionalism, as regards temporal neutrality, personal neutrality, and responsibility. To the extent that we are rationalists, we are forced into a retreat of reason far removed from our everyday frame of mind, while we must let reason retreat from the pretension to fully control our attitudes if we are satisfactionalists. This chapter also points to some factors in our mental constitution which are responsible for the fact that we encounter these sorts of dilemma: (1) we tend mentally represent much more vividly that which is present to our senses than that which is perceptually absent, and (2) our attitudes and concepts are shaped by how we perceive things in everyday life, but this everyday perception does not agree with what reality is like according to our best scientific theories.
Modality and Tense
Authors: Fine Kit 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This book is collection of the the author’s previously published papers on the philosophy of modality and tense and it also includes three unpublished papers. The author provides an exposition and defence of certain positions for which he is well-known: the intelligibility of modality de re; the primitiveness of the modal; and the primacy of the actual over the possible. He also argues for some less familiar positions: the existence of distinctive forms of natural and normative necessity, not reducible to any form of metaphysical necessity; the need to make a distinction between the worldly and unworldly, analogous to the distinction between the tensed and the tenseless; and the viability of a nonstandard form of realism about tense, which recognizes the tensed character of reality without conceding there is any privileged standpoint from which it is to be viewed.
Mystical Encounters with the Natural World
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThe present study is devoted to mystical experiences of the natural world and the disparate ways in which they have been explained. Typically, these so-called ‘extrovertive mystical experiences’ are characterized by some combination of unity, deepened knowledge, sense of contact with reality, self-transcendence, altered time-experience, light, bliss, and love. The experiences are well represented in modern collections of spiritual testimonies, but unlike some other extraordinary experiences, they have received little sustained investigation in recent years. In Part I of the book, the experiences themselves take centre stage, with attention given to definition, phenomenology, present-day incidence, historical occurrence, circumstances, and after-effects. The classic characterizations of extrovertive experience are found wanting, and a more nuanced survey of characteristics is attempted. In Part II, attention turns to the explanation of extrovertive experience, with a survey and critique of a hundred years of explanations that range from the spiritual and metaphysical to the psychoanalytic, contextual, deconstructive, and neuropsychological. Theorists covered include R. M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter on the evolutionary path to cosmic consciousness, liberal Christian thinkers on the divine presence in nature, W. T. Stace and Robert Forman on pure consciousness, Bruce Garside and Steven Katz on the contextual construction of mystical experience, H. N. Wieman and Arthur Deikman on deconstructed, nondual awareness, R. C. Zaehner and Erich Neumann on regression to the Jungian unconscious, Sigmund Freud on the oceanic feeling, neuropsychologists on the biological basis of mystical experience, Aldous Huxley on filtration of Mind at Large, and idealist thinkers on contact with universal consciousness. A recurrent theme is the lack of attention given by theorists to extrovertive phenomenology: many explanations fall down because they fail to address the full range of experiential characteristics. Although no firm conclusion can at present be reached on the essential nature of extrovertive mystical experience, the author favours a transpersonal form of explanation that is rooted in idealist metaphysics, but which is also attentive to the contributions of neuropsychological, collective, and contextual factors.
Introduction
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThis chapter sets the scene for the two major topics under investigation, extrovertive mystical experiences (Part I), and their explanation (Part II). The experiences are introduced by means of some examples and a preliminary attempt at definition: the experiences can be called ‘mystical’ because they bring a sense of unity, knowledge, and reality, and they are ‘extrovertive’ because they are orientated towards the natural world. The study of intense and unusual experiences is defended against critics. A historical survey previews the many ways in which extrovertive experience has been explained. Transpersonal, contextual, and intrapersonal contributions to mystical experience are distinguished, and various types of explanation are identified, reductionistic and non-reductionistic. A place for metaphysical enquiry in the study of mystical experience is affirmed, and the benefits and drawbacks of a scholar‘s insider familiarity with mystical experience are noted.
1 Extrovertive Mystical Experience
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

AbstractKey questions about mystical experiences of the natural world are addressed.What are the experiences like? Some detailed accounts of extrovertive experience, and a feature list of their common or notable characteristics are provided. Are extrovertive experiences necessarily sense-mediated? Unlike many theorists, the author does not assume that extrovertive contact with the world is always through sensory channels. How common are the experiences? The results of survey studies suggest that a small but significant proportion of the US and UK populations have some familiarity with extrovertive unity, at least in its milder forms. Are the experiences a recent development, inspired by Romantic thinkers, or do they have precedents in the world’ s religious traditions? Although not definitive, the evidence suggests that extrovertive experience long pre-dates its Romantic expressions.
3 Sex, Drugs, and Beethoven?
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

AbstractExtrovertive mystical experiences occur under a variety of circumstances. Beautiful nature scenery and psychological distress are common, whilst other circumstances, such as childbirth and sleep, are reported less often. More controversially, sex and drugs seem to be able to trigger genuine extrovertive experiences, and near-death experience can have extrovertive contents. The after-effects of extrovertive experience are often beneficial, but there can also be difficulties. Re-adjustment to ordinary life can be problematic. Communication issues are liable to arise: there can be a taboo on discussion of the experiences, and the ineffability of mystical experience, if only partial in the case of extrovertive experience, can make description difficult.
4 Divine Cosmos
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
The study of explanations in Part II commences with some notable transpersonal approaches to extrovertive mystical experience from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. R. M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter put forward evolutionary theories of cosmic consciousness, and Carpenter’s theory of race-consciousness and the Ideas anticipated C. G. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Liberal Christian thinkers balanced transcendent mysticism with the immanent path of nature mysticism, and thereby established an influential twofold typology of mystical experience. These thinkers looked outside a narrowly conceived Christianity for ideas that would enrich their explanatory frameworks: W. R. Inge drew on Plotinian philosophy, Evelyn Underhill on Henri Bergson’s vitalism, and Rudolf Otto on post-Kantian epistemology.
7 On the Couch, in the Lab
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
The focus here is naturalistic explanations that put great weight on the functioning or malfunctioning of the brain or mind. R. C. Zaehner turned against nature mysticism and put forward several unflattering explanations. He likened extrovertive experience to the mania of manic-depressive illness, but his most promising explanation calls upon an inner mental model of the world. Freud supposed that the extrovertive ‘oceanic feeling’ is a vestige of infantile ideation, and object-relations theorists have suggested that mystical experience aims to repair the psychological damage inflicted by childhood loss. There is good evidence that the brain plays some role in religious and mystical experiences, but the nature of the role is presently unclear. Neuropsychological theories due to V. S. Ramachandran, James Austin, and Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg are raised, but they do not deal convincingly with the full range of extrovertive phenomenology and are best regarded as provisional efforts that will be superseded by more sophisticated theories when neuroscientific understanding of brain function is better understood.
8 Mind Beyond the Brain
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

AbstractSpiritual approaches to mystical experience can be fleshed out with insights from the sciences and philosophy. Two overlapping ways of understanding the consciousness expansions of mystical experience are distinguished. Filtration theorists, such as Henri Bergson, William James, and Aldous Huxley, believe that access to previously subconscious material takes place when neurological or psychological valves open. Psychophysical theorists draw on mind-body metaphysics to explain how consciousness can reach into the world at large. Several metaphysical alternatives are considered, including dualism, dual-aspect theory, and neutral monism, but idealism emerges as best suited to the task. J. E. Mercer and Edward Carpenter proposed idealist explanations, and more recently, T. L. S. Sprigge has raised idealism in connection with nature mysticism. A panpsychic form of idealism that reworks Leibniz’s monadology is a particularly fertile option. It not only addresses the deeper unitive and noetic facets of extrovertive experience but may also shed light on the relativity and holism of modern physics.
9 Fashions, Failures, Prospects
Authors: Marshall Paul 
Published: February 2006

AbstractTwo general approaches to the explanation of extrovertive mystical experience have emerged as tenable, centred respectively on the intrapersonal psychological and biological factors of naturalistic science, and the transpersonal factors of religious and metaphysical thought. The contributions of religious and cultural context undoubtedly have a supporting role, but they do not appear to be fundamental. At present, it is not possible to decide between naturalistic or transpersonal explanation, but evidence from parapsychology, neuroscience, and physics may help to swing the matter one way or the other. The author favours explanation in which transpersonal factors are made fundamental, with intrapersonal, contextual, and collective factors given supporting roles.
Thinking about God in an Age of Technology
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This book argues that the contemporary crisis of radical theology, from John Robinson to deconstruction, is connected with theology’s failure to take the technological nature of modern society seriously. An overview of modern theologians who did take technology into account, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Ellul is presented, although their judgments were mostly negative. This is followed by an exposition of Heidegger’s critique of technology, with emphasis on his notion of ‘enframing’ as a central feature, and his view that technological models are in the process of colonizing traditional scholarly modes of thought. Chapters four, five, and six attempt to formulate a model of thinking about God that would be resistant to such colonization. The freedom and patience required of such thinking are emphasized, and it is argued that the language in which these are best articulated will be subjunctive and paratactic, a language of possibility and openness. However, language must have a vision. The vision that is called for is reversed vision, in which we see ourselves as if from the outside. The possibility of such a vision is kept open for believers in the action of liturgical remembrance. Chapters seven, eight, and nine look at the possible applications of this model in relation to ethical questions arising from genetic engineering, the life of the contemporary university, and the world of the arts ‘in an age of technical reproducibility’. The concluding chapter questions how far the model might relate to traditional Christian ideas of God. A postscript meditates on the experience of contemporary urbanity as a testing-ground for the approach that has been explored.
We are Free to Think about God
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter sketches possibilities for thinking about God as a counter-movement to technology, that nevertheless accepts the reality of the technological society. One still remains free to think about God, even if it is uncertain that one’s thinking answers to anything ‘real’. Such thinking is allowed by the power to think beyond any provisional world-picture that fails to do justice to the wholeness of one’s experience of the world. In mysticism, there is a perennial emphasis on allowing ourselves to be led by the mind’s longing for God. Yet, rather than self-assertion, thinking about God would have to wait upon the self-revealing gift of its object.
Putting it into Words
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Thinking about God involves more than the wordless longing of the heart. Thinking must also be put into language, even if the role of silence is admitted. Apophatic and mystical traditions have always acknowledged the limitations of language. An approach is developed that looks to kinds of language other than the propositions that have been the stuff of traditional philosophical theology. These might include a shift to the subjunctive mood and the acceptance of parataxis, as in Heidegger’s exposition of Parmenides. Examples are taken from George Herbert and Pascal; John Milbank’s account of pleonasm as the modality of religious language, and of the need to construe language as dialogical are discussed.
Cyberversity or University?
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Heidegger’s account of the impact of technologization on university life is borne out by recent developments. The background to Heidegger’s views in German debates about the nature of the university are explored, with reference to Schleiermacher’s contribution to the vision for Berlin University and Heidegger’s own involvement in the ‘co-ordination’ of Freiburg University with the Nazi state. The latter resembles the features of the contemporary management models being applied to universities, whilst the impact of inappropriate models of ‘science’ and research being imposed on the humanities, especially Religious Studies and Theology, is considered. Schleiermacher and Newman are used to sketch an alternative approach, emphasizing the complex space of university life with its multiple para-academic activities.
The Religion of Art in an Age of Technology
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Since early modern times, art has paralleled religion in its response to technology as illustrated by Ruskin’s thoughts on the colour purple. Heidegger also turned to art, especially the poetry of Hölderlin, as an alternative to technology. Against the background of Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’, the question is asked whether the thoroughly technicized art of film can become a focus for such creative counter-technological thinking. A positive answer is developed with reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia.
Rethinking Augustine's Early Theology
Authors: Harrison Carol 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
Having been at the centre of a century long debate which cast doubt on the nature of Augustine’s conversion, one might assume that Augustine’s early works (386-96) have now been rescued and given their rightful place. This book suggests that these are now threatened by an equally destructive trend in Augustine scholarship, which, over the last fifty years, has become an almost unquestioned norm of interpretation. This is the idea, fatefully and poignantly depicted by Peter Brown in the chapter of his seminal biography entitled The Lost Future, that the early optimistic and philosophical Augustine was dramatically transformed into the mature, pessimistic theologian of the Fall, original sin, and grace by his reading of Paul in the mid-390s. This interpretation of the first decade of Augustine’s life has since become such an idée fixe in scholarly as well as popular accounts, leaving two very different Augustines: one, the young convert, fired to pursue Wisdom by an optimistic confidence in the rational disciplines of the liberal arts, human free will, and a glorious ideal of perfection; the other, the older and wiser bishop of Hippo, convinced of human fallen ness and of the need for grace to will or to do any good work. This book argues that in order to do justice to Augustine’s conversion, to his early theology and understanding of the Christian life, and to the early works themselves, such caricatures must be resisted. It seeks to demonstrate that there is a fundamental continuity in Augustine’s thought, which does not undergo any dramatic change when he re-reads Paul in the 390s; that there is only one Augustine, for whom human weakness and divine grace were the central axes of his Christian faith and life from the very beginning.
The Context
Authors: Harrison Carol 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter considers the biographical, historical, and theological context of Augustine’s early works (386-96). It outlines the way in which these works have been read in scholarly debates over the last hundred years, demonstrating that they have generally been marginalised as the rather obsolete philosophical investigatons of a new, somewhat naïve, over-optimistic convert, still entrenched in the classical tradition of belief in human free will and perfectibility. These have generally been contrasted with the later, mature works of Augustine — the pessimistic theologian of the Fall, original sin, and human dependence upon divine grace. It considers Peter Brown’s analysis of the revolutionary transformation of the early into the later Augustine following his reading of Paul in the 390s, and sets out the argument of the book: that there is no discontinuity or revolutionary transformation of the early into the later Augustine, but rather a fundamental continuity between the two.
The Revolution of 386
Authors: Harrison Carol 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter argues that Augustine’s conversion in 386 is not a radically different conversion from the one he recounts in Confessiones 8: that if one is to speak of a ‘revolution’ in his thought, it is not to be found in his reading of Paul in the 390s, but in his reading of the ‘books of the Platonists’ in 386, and his discovery in them of a doctrine of God’s transcendence which freed him from the materialistic philosophies that had hitherto made it impossible for him to embrace the Christian faith to which he had always sought to be reconciled.
Paul
Authors: Harrison Carol 
Published: February 2006

Abstract
This chapter argues that Augustine’s attempts at interpreting Paul in the mid 390s, culminating in the Ad Simplicianum, must not be read as representing a dramatic break with earlier ideas of human autonomy and the ability of the will to freely choose the good without divine help, but as affirming what he had always held: fallen humanity’s complete and utter dependence upon God’s grace to know, will, and do the good. It demonstrates that his suggestion in the Propositiones — that the free choice of faith is to be counted as a merit which is rewarded by grace — is uncharacteristic of either his earlier or later thought. By considering other works written at the same time (such as the Enarrationes in Psalmos), it is shown that there is a fundamental continuity in his approach to these difficult questions from the very beginning.
Contexts
Authors: Predelli Stefano 
Published: February 2006

AbstractThis book discusses the views of meaning and truth implicit in the traditionalapproach to natural-language semantics. Its main thesis is that the philosophical presuppositions entailed by that approach have often been misunderstood even by its foremost defenders, and that such a misunderstanding has fuelled an unjustified but increasingly popular sceptical attitude. This conclusion is defended by focusing on the distinction between the essential philosophical traits of traditional natural-language semantics, and certain accidental features allegedly characteristic of some of its typical applications to the study of particular utterances. As a result, the book puts forth claims about the logical profile of indexical expressions, about the semantic behaviour of attitude reports, and about phenomena such as discourse about fiction, approximation, and contextual dependence. In its central chapters, it challenges the adequacy of a token-reflexive approach to indexicality, and questions the urgency of the so-called contextualist view of communication.