During the early twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher May Sinclair published two book-length defenses of idealism. Although Sinclair is well known to literary scholars, she is little known to the history of philosophy. This paper provides the first substantial scholarship on Sinclair's philosophical views, focusing on her mature idealism. Although Sinclair is working within the larger British idealist tradition, her argument for Absolute idealism is unique, founded on Samuel Alexander's new realist beliefs about the reality of time. Her metaphysics (...) takes idealism and pantheism in new directions and provides fresh insight into 1920s debates between British idealisms and realisms. (shrink)

Pantheist thinking in Islamic East and its adequacy to western pantheism is complicated and controversy problem. To make the problem somewhat clearer, it needs first of all to emphasize that it is possible to divide the development of the theories of world outlook and trends relied on essence of Koran’s esoteric meaning and religion towards inner world in Islamic East, into two direction: pantheist and “vahdat al-vujud”. The trend, in organization and formation of which ismailism, hurufism, nogtavism played important (...) role and some sects of tasavvuf considered to be heretic may be referred to the first orientation. As far as the second one, only tasavvuf may be referred to it. Though some issues, categories of each of them (orientations) seem alike at first sight, however there are the important differences in their fundamental principles from both ontological and epistemological points of view, it stipulated that, first of all, by the factors and purposes of their formation. Each trends of the first direction, philosophy of which been significant part of thinking system in Islamic East, left its traces in history ofphilosophy and possessed a vast circle of influence. There were many prominent figures whose works ranked among the philosophical treatises of the period, need particular study to complete Islamic philosophical panorama. (shrink)

Through a close analysis of texts from the Second Objections and Replies to the Meditations, this article addresses the tension between the pursuit of certainty and the preservation of divine transcendence in Descartes’s philosophy. Via a hypothetical “atheist geometer,” the Objectors charge Descartes with pantheism. While the Objectors’ motivations are not clear, the objection raises provocative questions about the relation of the divine and the human mind and about the being of created or dependent entities inDescartes’s metaphysics. Descartes contends (...) that there are real, eternal essences present in the human intellect as innate ideas. I argue that this claim implicates him in pantheism, not merely univocity. In the course of the analysis, I consider recent interpretations by Wells, Marion, and Hatfield. (shrink)

Pantheism, Panpsychism, and secularism? To any historian of ideas still under the die-hard spell of the Enlightenment narrative, this would appear as an unlikely connection.1 If ever the theory of...

In reading the Tractatus, one gets the impression that Wittgenstein, having resolved to his satisfaction the problems about language, logic, science, and mathematics, sets these painstakingly articulated findings in a disproportionately skimpy setting. There is a perfunctory ontology at the beginning, which is highly original as well as austere and perplexing; and at the end he hurries even more than usual through ethics, aesthetics and religion—as if the silence was already coming upon him, prematurely. The Notebooks 1914–1916 help a good (...) deal in understanding this skimpy setting. They give little direct indication of the ontological overture, apart from their frequent reiteration that there must be simples of some sort if the sense of expressions is to be determinate, but they give a fuller treatment to the other topics. This is particularly true of the latter half of 1916, when this parcel of topics seems to have become uppermost in Wittgenstein’s mind. Though it is exceedingly difficult to know what to make of what are in effect discarded notes, some of the entries are just too interesting to ignore. I wish to consider what light they throw on his thought at roughly the Tractatus period, and in particular on the ontology that apparently springs up full grown at the beginning of the Tractatus. (shrink)

Il s’agit de repartir de la découverte et de l’acquisition, par John Toland, des principaux écrits de Giordano Bruno afin de déterminer l’impact de la philosophie nolaine sur la pensée du philosophe irlandais. Plus précisément, nous analyserons l’interprétation tolandienne de l’oeuvre de Bruno qui figure dans le mémoire qu’il adressa à ce sujet à son ami le baron Hohendorf. De là, nous dégagerons les grandes lignes de l’infinitisme panthéiste qui figurent dans les écrits ultérieurs de Toland pour tenter d’identifier, d’une (...) part, ses emprunts au philosophe italien et, de l’autre, sa façon d’intégrer ou d’incorporer à sa propre pensée ces divers philosophèmes bruniens, en versant ainsi du vin nouveau dans de vieilles outres. (shrink)

In this chapter we explore the importance of the Pantheism Controversy for the evolution of Kant’s so-called “Moral Argument” for the Highest Good and its postulates. After an initial discussion of the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, we move on to the relationship between faith and reason in the Pantheism Controversy, Kant’s response to the Controversy in his 1786 “Orientation” Essay, Thomas Wizenmann’s criticisms of that essay, and finally to the Critique of Practical Reason. We argue (...) that while Kant used the Pantheism Controversy to reset his account of the Highest Good, its treatment in the Orientation Essay was susceptible to the objections raised by Thomas Wizenmann, and thus in need of the further advances found in the Critique of Practical Reason. (shrink)

Hume's Treatise of Human Nature was published in the form of three separate books. The first two, "Of the Understanding" and "Of the Pas- sions," were published in London in January 1739 by John Noon. The third, "Of Morals," was published independently in London by Thomas Longman in November 1740.2 The title and subtitles on all three books are the same: A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. On the (...) title page of the first two books Hume employs an epigram from Tacitus: Rara temporumfelicitas, ubi sentire, quae velis; & quae sentias, dicere licet. ["Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like and say what they think."] On the title page of the third book this epigram is replaced by an epigram taken from the ninth book of Lucan's Pharsalia: Durae semper virtutis amator, Quaere quid est virtus, et posce exemplar honesti. ["Thou that to virtue ever wer't inclined, learn what it is, how certainly defin'd, and leave some perfect Rule to guide Mankind."] Given the context and the prominence of these epigrams, it is a curious fact that they have attracted little or no attention or comment from Hume scholars. -/- In this paper I argue that Hume's use of the epigram from Lucan is directly relevant to his use of the epigram from Tacitus. The epigrams flag very clearly the anti-Christian nature of Hume's intentions in the Treatise and his affiliations with and allegiance to an anti-Christian tradition of thought that stretches from Hobbes and Spinoza in the late seventeenth century to a circle of anti-Newtonian radical freethinkers that appeared in Britain in the first part of the eighteenth century. In more general terms these epigrams are a notable and illuminating example of esoteric communication in this context, and they indicate that the Treatise has an important place in the literature of the radical enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a neglected part of Dilthey’s œuvre that consists of papers on 16th–17th century philosophical issues. These papers are closer to interpretive articles than to original works, and so they are neither considered Dilthey’s original contributions to his own philosophy nor studied as part of the secondary literature. One of the most characteristic features of Dilthey’s philosophic style is the historical-systematic method mostly repudiated as concealing the real statement of the author “between the lines,” i.e. behind historical (...) analyses. Therefore these papers are not reckoned among Dilthey’s great works of enduring significance. This paper aims to make the reader more sensitive to the world and claims of these papers by way of an intermediary approach to them that acknowledges their intermediary position between a historical description and a systematic analysis. This is to be accomplished by having a look at the “pantheism” of Georg Misch, Dilthey’s largely forgotten pupil and son-in-law. (shrink)

It is well known that Utpaladeva’s (c. 925–975) articulation of the Pratyabhijñā deviates in style and substance from that of his teacher, Somānanda (fl. c. 900–950), and that the former’s Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikās (along with two auto-commentaries) come to be regarded as the definitive formulation of the school’s philosophy almost from the moment they were first composed. In this essay, I argue that while the spirit and general philosophical contours of Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi serve as the basis for all subsequent writings in the (...) history of the Pratyabhijñā, Somānanda nevertheless articulates a philosophical monism that is both pantheistic and absent in its essentials from Utpaladeva’s oeuvre. This pantheism, I further suggest, stands in contrast to Utpaladeva’s panentheistic monism, which while compatible with Somānanda’s philosophical vision is nevertheless articulated in different terms: Somānanda emphasizes the functioning of Śiva’s power(s), while Utpaladeva articulates a monism based on the identification of paired opposites. In doing so, this essay identifies Somānanda’s unique contributions to the history of the Pratyabhijñā. (shrink)

The Opening Chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, called "Sense Certainty," is brief: 283 lines or about seven and a half pages in the critical edition of Hegel's works . Just over half the text is devoted to a series of thought experiments1 that focus on "the Here" and "the Now" as the two basic forms of immediate sensuous particularity Hegel calls "the This." The chapter's main goal is to demonstrate that, in truth, the object of sense certainty is precisely (...) the opposite of what it purports to be: "the This" is mediated abstract universality. However, not just the truth of Hegel's claim but its very meaning has been the subject of dispute from early on.2 A currently influential interpretive . (shrink)

(2008). On ‘The religion of the visible Universe’: Novalis and the pantheism controversy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 125-146.

This response to Eileen Hunt's The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (2024) addresses the question of whether there is such a thing as a general apocalypse, or whether when we speak of apocalypses we are always presupposing a certain community of humans or beings.

Throughout his early writings, Leibniz was concerned with developing an acceptable account of God's relationship to the created world. In some of these early writings, he endorsed the idea that this relationship was similar to the human soul's relationship to the body. Though he eventually came to reject this idea, theanima mundi thesis remained the topic of several essays and correspondences during his career, culminating in the correspondence with Clarke. At first glance,Leibniz's discussions of this thesis may seem less important (...) in comparison to others, since it might seem like a topic which is far removed from what are regarded as his most important philosophical doctrines. I hope to show in what follows that such a view is mistaken. The large amount of attention Leibniz paid to this thesis is a sure indication of its importance to him. Further, as we shall see, his discussions of this thesis tum on some of his most interesting metaphysical topics, including the development of his thinking about the actual infinite, the structure of organic wholes, and the relationship between God and the created universe. In what follows, I examine these discussions chronologically, from the De Summa Rerum (1675-6), to the correspondence with Clarke (1715-6). (shrink)

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss assumes central importance throughout Schelling’s oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810–11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here and (...) to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling’s best efforts to theorize it as ‘love’; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity’s foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling’s conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present, and the eschatological—as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity —not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the thought of two Jewish existentialists from the first half of the 20th century, showing how their critique of pantheistic and panentheistic thinking grounded novel ideas about politics, history and human thought. In place of a concept of history directed towards a teleological redemption of suffering in the future, Lev Shestov (1866–1938) and Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944) abandoned notions of philosophical rationality in order to avow a ‘reversal’ of history according to which historical suffering could be (...) expiated through the unforeseeable powers of the divine. From here, I look at the work of a contemporaneous philosopher – Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – for the way in which his own conception of history as ‘rescuing’ the past provides an alternative panentheism, one according to which political responsibility derives from a need to redeem God whose existence has been exiled throughout the mundane world. (shrink)

The ingenious thought of Anton Günther (1783–1863) is rarely mentioned in the annals of nineteenth-century philosophy. However, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Günther belonged to the key thinkers of his age on par with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Günther was an original writer yet he left many of his insights undeveloped or ambiguously formulated. As a flamboyant and popular debater, he attacked the most influential philosophers of his time. His attacks were aimed especially at what he termed the (...) unavoidable pantheism of these thinkers, a pantheism Günther often identified with monism. Monism, semi-monism, pantheism, and semi-pantheism are recurring charges of Günther against many influential thinkers, including even Descartes, whose thought Günther considered otherwise epoch-making. Based on a reformed Cartesianism, Günther elaborated his antidote he termed dualism. Yet Güntherian dualism turns out to be a synthesis properly termed organicism. On such a basis, Günther carried out a heroic attempt to transcend the horizon of traditional views and open the vista of an I-centered philosophy built on the universal notion of revelation. By re-reading this Bohemia-born thinker, one can have a better understanding of the scope and influence of what we term Austrian Philosophy. (shrink)

The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico’s Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan (...) philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico’s view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino’s philosophical theology. (shrink)

This paper places Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason within the historical context of the pantheism controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi. I argue that reading Religion with this context in mind shines new light upon passages connected with the need for a moral archetype and prototype in the form of Christ, as well as various comments upon the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Within this new viewpoint, we can also see Religion as ultimately concerned with promoting Christianity, (...) broadly understood, as the most appropriate historical vehicle for the promulgation of rational religion, and thus as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment project. (shrink)

Cet article traite de la sincérité de la foi chrétienne publique de John Toland (1670-1722) et la confronte à ses croyances privées peu orthodoxes : le public et le privé dans la pensée de Toland sont séparés depuis trop longtemps. L'une des conséquences de cette reconstruction des idées religieuses de Toland sera de suggérer que ses opinions religieuses (publiques ou privées) étaient intimement liées à un programme politique. La plupart des études historiques le concernant se sont penchées principalement sur les (...) aspects critiques de son attaque contre les intrigues sacerdotales du « papisme protestant » mais très peu de recherches ont été engagées sur l'idée de Toland comme « réformateur chrétien ». En explorant la définition précise que Toland donne du panthéisme et en la reliant à ses doctrines néostoïciennes sur la politique de la cité, le présent article propose une révision de la réflexion actuelle sur la signification de la vie publique de la foi chrétienne dans la polémique de la libre pensée. (shrink)

Bonifac Badrov, a Neo-Scholastic philosopher, in his “History of Philosophy”, a textbook for students at Franciscan Theology in Sarajevo, defines the scholarly subject of the history of philosophy as a systematic representation of solving philosophical problems in various historic periods and a critical examination of their internal dynamics. Considering this clear and informative, well-structured, balanced and goaloriented text, we should not forget that his “History of Philosophy” was written for very specific type of students, with full awareness that some of (...) these students are encountering philosophy for the first time, and that, complementary to the educational system in theological universities, they are listening to it in parallel with scholastic philosophy. We should also bear in mind the author’s Neo-Scholastic philosophical orientation, and also mention that the religious aspect was not emphasised because the author was merely informing about some philosopher’s position on God and divine. This paper deals with Greek-Roman philosophy, and in accordance with Badrov’s structure it offers a review of the development of Greek-Roman philosophy in three periods with three distinctions: cosmological in Presocratics, emphasising monism, evolutionism, hylozoism, pantheism, anti-intellectualism and finally naturalism, metaphysical in classical antiquity, with an emphasis on subjectivism, relativism, agnosticism, ethics and monotheism, and dualism in all areas, that is metaphysics, and finally, ethical in Hellenistic period. The focus of the paper is Badrov’s critique of philosophers and philosophical systems, while historical data is put aside. For some philosophers, other places in Badrov’s other works are mentioned. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology by Demian WheelerNancy FrankenberryReligion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology. Demian Wheeler. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. ix+511pp. $95.00 hardcover.The history of Christian theology since the Enlightenment has been a series of unsuccessful attempts to evade a stark dilemma: either fundamentalism or atheism. Contemporary liberal theologians have argued (...) that this dilemma is [End Page 97] entirely too stark, too eliminative of the creative possibilities of revisionism. Liberal theology has wanted to revise and reinterpret Christian faith in conformity with history, reason, a scientific worldview, and a sophisticated grasp of the significance of symbol, analogy, and metaphor in the lives of religious practitioners. Eliminating both supernaturalism and anthropomorphism, liberal theology would make Christianity more intellectually tenable, rescuing it from the literalist hands of fundamentalists, without collapsing it into the equally literalist arms of atheism.The extreme difficulty of evading the either-or dilemma of choosing either fundamentalism or atheism landed liberal theology in a catch-22: either it rejected the intellectually untenable elements of belief, in which case it eliminated just those beliefs that constituted its appeal to popular piety, or it retained certain supernaturalistic and anthropomorphic beliefs, understood as “symbolic,” in which case it forfeited intellectual intelligibility and any appeal to sophisticated moderns. The first version is far too weakened for ordinary American Christians, and the second is still too religious for the masters of suspicion and their followers.It is for this reason that the history of American religious thought reveals a grave irony that complicates the hopes of pragmatic historicists, the protagonists of this superbly clear and rich, deep dive into authors that most readers of this journal will have read, but perhaps not have synthesized as thoroughly as has Demian Wheeler. That irony, as Wheeler knows, is that the more intellectual changes pragmatic historicists make to traditional Christian belief, the more they help to make unbelief viable. The question then arises as to whether pragmatic historicism is simply a half-way house on the road to an atheistic destination. Or, if the word “atheism” sounds too old-fashioned, like something that went out with steamships and girdles, then “agnosticism.” Or, if “agnosticism” still smacks too much of stale debates, why not “pantheism,” as recently revived by Mary-Jane Rubenstein?The detailed development, the verbal bravura, and the measured knowledge in this book are astonishingly impressive. Wheeler’s initial thesis is that liberal theology, particularly of the early Chicago School, and American pragmatism, particularly C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, provide important resources for meeting the challenges posed by the rise of historical consciousness. Sheila Davaney has designated this tradition “pragmatic historicism,” and Wheeler aims to show its compelling import for the future of theology itself. A good deal of the book is devoted to exposition and defense of the views of: Ernst Troeltsch, James, Dewey, George Burman Foster, Shirley Jackson Case, Shailer Matthews, and Gerald Birney Smith, down to Delwin Brown, Sheila Davaney, and William Dean (Wheeler’s teachers at Iliff), along with Gordon [End Page 98] Kaufman and Sallie McFague. In the last chapter, Wheeler draws expertly on the theological views of Bernard Loomer, Michael Hogue, Donald Crosby, and Wesley Wildman. Such an all-star cast deserves to receive all the attention they can get. Wheeler’s occasional emendations come as glittering nuggets of constructive engagement. He does not simply call for a pragmatic historicist approach to theology, but he executes one as well, showing in more detail than his predecessors what it means for such topics as religious diversity (chapters 3 and 4), the nature of authority (chapter 5), the meaning of critical realism, fallibilism, and an altered correspondence theory of truth (chapters 6 and 7), and the doctrine of God (chapter 8). With the same exhaustive treatment that his doktorvater Gary Dorrien has devoted to liberal theology’s history and contemporary expressions, Wheeler carefully saves pragmatic historicism from relativism, expertly critiques all the leading theologians of the “inclusivist,” “exclusivist,” and “pluralist” theologies of religions, while arguing the superiority of his own “particularist” corrective to pluralistic... (shrink)

De la philosophie de la nature de Schelling à l'intérêt de Mallarmé pour la psychophysique d'Eugène de Roberty, cet ouvrage tenté de mettre en lumière un infini immanent au fini, qui prend la forme d'un panthéisme organique. L'organisme permet de dépasser la substance fixe de Spinoza et d'élaborer une doctrine du Dieu vivant.

This article considers the history of Soviet Spinoza studies after World War II. V.V. Sokolov, editor of the last Soviet publication of Spinoza’s works, regards him as a metaphysician, at times rising to dialectics, and a pantheist rising to materialism. E.V. Ilyenkov, Ya. A. Milner and B.G. Kuznetsov offer a radically different interpretation of Spinoza, as our advanced contemporary. The article provides a critical analysis of the concept of man as a “thinking body,” which Ilyenkov mistakenly ascribes to Spinoza and (...) then corrects on behalf of Marx. Kuznetsov, in his own words, performs a “neo-Spinozist analysis of science.” He is looking for equivalents of Spinoza’s concepts in modern physics, starting with the “physically meaningful” concept of being. Milner wrote a new Ethics, based on the concept of “free necessity” as a social duty consciously performed by the individual. (shrink)

Lessing's death in 1781 was a severe blow to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn wrote his last two works to commemorate Lessing and to carry on the work to which they had dedicated much of their lives.

Zarathustra initially describes churches as the stale caves of world-denying priests. However, following his encounter with the eternal return of the same, Zarathustra overcomes this resentful atheism. The pure sky that Zarathustra desires above all else, a sky emptied of the gods, is not visible again through the holes in ruined church roofs, but really thanks to these holes. The pure sky is an image of the world liberated from the teleological time of theistic providence, indeed even from the divine (...) necessity that pantheism attributes to the world. Yet for all that it is god-less, the pure sky is acknowledged to be a gift of the same metaphysical-Christian history of God that it only seems to negate: the sky’s pure eye peers through holes in church roofs. Zarathustra, though an “old atheist,” can now love “even churches.” I call this Zarathustra’s affirmative atheism. I also link affirmative atheism to the conception of eternal recurrence as a self-abolishing anti-teaching. In the eternal return, Zarathustra’s atheism is finally indistinguishable from a history of churches and therefore negates itself. But although it is not a new teaching, affirmative atheism points to something novel. This is an atheism that can no longer be taught in doctrines but must be lived as fate. (shrink)

_An ambitious new history of philosophy in English that broadens the canon to include many lesser-known figures__ “[This] lively chronicle of philosophy in English is a splendid accomplishment sufficient unto itself. Highly intelligent, always even-handed, quietly but consistently witty, _Witcraft _is an excellent guide along the twisted and tricky path of human thought.”—___Wall Street Journal__ Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “philosophy should be written like poetry.” But philosophy has often been presented more prosaically as a long trudge through canonical authors (...) and great works. But what, Jonathan Rée asks, if we instead saw the history of philosophy as a haphazard series of unmapped forest paths, a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience, and good humor? Here, Jonathan Rée brilliantly retells this history, covering such figures as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, James, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. But he also includes authors not usually associated with philosophy, such as William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, and W. H. Auden. Above all, he uncovers dozens of unremembered figures—puritans, revolutionaries, pantheists, feminists, nihilists, socialists, and scientists—who were passionate and active readers of philosophy, and often authors themselves. Breaking away from high-altitude narratives, he shows how philosophy finds its way into ordinary lives, enriching and transforming them in unexpected ways. (shrink)

Offering clear and reliable guidance to the ideas of philosophers from antiquity to the present day and to the major philosophical systems around the globe, he Oxford Companion to Philosophy is the definitive philosophical reference work for readers at all levels. For ten years the original volume has served as a stimulating introduction for general readers and as an indispensable guide for students and scholars. A distinguished international assembly of 249 philosophers contributed almost 2,000 entries, and many of these have (...) now been considerably revised and updated in this major new edition; to these are added over 300 brand-new pieces on a fascinating range of current topics such as animal consciousness, cloning, corporate responsibility, the family, globalization, terrorism . Here is, indeed, a world of thought, with entries on idealism and empiricism, epicureanism and stoicism, passion and emotion, deism and pantheism. The contributors represent a veritable who's who of modern philosophy, including such eminent figures as Isaiah Berlin, Sissela Bok, Ronald Dworkin, John Searle, Michael Walzer, and W. V. Quine. We meet the great thinkers--from Aristotle and Plato, to Augustine and Aquinas, to Descartes and Kant, to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, right up to contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Luce Iragaray, and Noam Chomsky. There are short entries on key concepts such as personal identity and the mind-body problem, major doctrines from utilitarianism to Marxism, schools of thought such as the Heidelberg School or the Vienna Circle, and contentious public issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and welfare. In addition, the book offers short explanations of philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Almost every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading, and the book includes both a chronological chart of the history of philosophy and a gallery of portraits of eighty eminent philosophers. An indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy will appeal to everyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding. (shrink)

The articles analyzes the original concept of immortality, presented by F.M. Dostoevsky in a handwritten sketch written on April 16, 1864, the day after the death of the writer’s first wife. The authors argue that this concept was created under the influence of the ideas of German romantic natural philosophy, in particular G.T. Fechner’s work of The Book of Life After Death (1836). According to the pantheistic ideas of Dostoevsky and Fechner, every person after death continues to exist in the (...) earthly world. Having lost a limited biological body in death, a person can get a more extensive “cosmic” body, covering significant areas of the material universe. His personal spirit continues to exist in mankind, and the degree of his influence depends on what kind of spiritual success he achieved during his lifetime. In the concept of Fechner and Dostoevsky, posthumous life can be very different: great personalities (Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon, etc.) acquire an even more significant being than during life, and they continue to influence humankind, which, developing in history, strives for an absolute “synthesis” -the merger of all people into an organic whole and at the same time the merger with the universe. Individuals who, during their lifetime, confined themselves to their selfish interests can even disappear. In this concept, God is defined as “universal Synthesis,” i.e., the goal of the world process and the final merging of everything with everything. Jesus Christ is understood as an absolute, perfect man who, after death, does not resurrect in his previous bodily form, but completely dissolves in humankind and acts as a force guiding it toward unity and synthesis with the material world. (shrink)

In this paper I explore one issue in the history of German Idealism which has been widely neglected in the existing literature. I argue that Salomon Maimon was the first to suggest that Spinoza's pantheism was a radical religious (or 'acosmistic') view rather than atheism. Following a discussion of the historical context of Maimon's engagement with Spinoza, I point out the main Spinozistic element of Maimon 's philosophy: the view of God as the material cause of the world, or (...) as the subject in which all things inhere. I argue that this doctrine was the basis of Maimon's Law of Determinability. (shrink)

This examination considers the influence of the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonist Cudworth upon the thought of the late eighteenth century German thinker Herder. It focuses upon Herder's use of Cudworth's philosophy to create a revised version of Spinoza's metaphysics. Both Cudworth and Herder were concerned with the problem of determinism. Cudworth outlined a number of difficulties relating to this problem in the thought of Spinoza and proposed amendments, particularly the introduction of the middle principle of plastik, which would mediate between (...) the Ideas of transcendent reason and mechanical materialism. We find these amendments to Spinoza's philosophy also employed in Herder's contribution to the Pantheism Controversy, in which he too offers a revised Spinozism and introduces his own middle principle of Kraft. This demonstrates an important but under-explored English contribution to a key development in German intellectual history. The Pantheism Controversy was an epoch-making event, helping to bring an end to the German Enlightenment and to inaugurate the Romantic movement. Herder's version of Spinoza's thought revived the philosopher's fortunes, and Herder's notion of Kraft became central to Romantic aesthetics. Finally, Herder's use of Cudworth demonstrates the important but overlooked source of Platonic realism in German Romantic thought. (shrink)

The conceptual history of Bildung, the German term for self-formation, encapsulates the ethical revolution of modern German thought, associated with the Kantian moment and its aftermath. Reshaped in modernity to respond to a post-Kantian, critical sensibility, the modern term emphasizes the reflexive, active process of self-formation, in contrast with the medieval theological sensibility which emphasized the receptive imprint of the image of God. In this article, I unpack Moses Mendelsohn’s idiosyncratic notion of Bildung. I show that what is unique, indeed, (...) singular in Mendelssohn’s notion of Bildung is the way it merges the traditional, theological notion with the modern one. For Mendelssohn, to imitate God is to come to value one’s contingent being. The imitation of the ideal, the most perfect, is tantamount to embracing the perfectible, and the process of perfection or self-actualization. Jacobi, Mendelssohn, Bildung, Contingency, Pantheism affair, Moral Perfectionism. (shrink)

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the (...) Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. (shrink)

The article is devoted to present Polish research on the literary work and philosophical thought of Hryhorii Skovoroda. The scientific reflection on Skovoroda’s legacy was initially carried out on the historical and literary level. It was initiated by Adam Honory Kirkor in 1874. In the context of the history of Ukrainian literature, Józef Tretiak, Ivan Franko and Bohdan Lepkyi presented the general characteristics of Skovoroda’s work, seeing in it only the original style and compilation character of thoughts. Ivan Mirtchuk started (...) his research on Skovoroda’s thoughts from the history of national philosophy, seeing in Skovoroda’s philosophy the features charac- teristic of Ukrainian philosophy, differing it fundamentally from Russian philosophy. As part of the research, it was possible to find an extensive article by Jarosław Ulwański, Philosophy of G.S. Skovoroda, published in 1930, in which the author presented arguments for a pantheistic interpretation of the Ukrainian philosopher’s thoughts. A breakthrough event was the publication of a monograph by Dmytro Tschižewskij, who formulated a view on the mystical philosophy of Skovoroda similar to the Western European mysticism of the 17th and 18th centuries. The interwar period ends with the work of Czesław Jastrzębiec-Kozłowski, in which the work of Skovoroda was analyzed against the background of Józef Hoene-Wronski’s messianic philosophy. After World War II and the 1990s, research on Skovoroda’s legacy was conducted primarily by philologists. Ryszard Łużny and Włodzimierz Mokry treated Skovoroda’s work as a Christian philosopher. In the 21st century, Polish research increasingly refers to philosophical interpretation. Denys Pilipowicz researched the ancient and patristic sources of Skovoroda’s mystical thought and compared it with the teachings of Paisij Velyczkovskyi. Iryna Betko analyzed his poetry from the perspective of Jung’s theory of archetypes. Michał Handzel conducted an in-depth historical and philosophical analysis of Skovoroda’s philosophy, seeing Skovoroda as a representative of the panentheistic trend, and Pavlo Snopkov examined the concept of Skovoroda’s self-knowledge from the perspective of Jung’s and Maslow’s psychological theories. (shrink)

Schelling’s “Bruno” provides a provocative illustration of his conviction that early modern science has adopted a radically flawed and impoverished concept of matter, and therefore of nature. The “Bruno” has been read as a settling of scores with Fichte, with whom Schelling had recently quarreled, and as a critique of Kant’s idealism. I propose to look at how the dialogue reveals Schelling’s developing understanding of pantheism, as reflected in the arguments he borrows from Giordano Bruno and then transforms. “Bruno” (...) is a dialogue with four interlocutors, and ranges widely. I will discuss two central sections, in which the two main roles are played by Bruno (Schelling) and Lucian (Fichte). Lucian begins by restating their agreement in an earlier section of the dialogue that when it is considered in the light of the supreme idea, the distinction of knowledge and being is untrue, a tantalizing claim. He then goes on to pose the question of how it can be possible to understand the departure of the finite from the eternal. (shrink)

A cursory review of studies of Spinoza’s thought discloses that diverse and often opposed religious, philosophical, historical, even literary traditions have claimed and disclaimed his debt to them as well as theirs to him. A Jewish, Christian, pantheist, and atheist Spinoza vies with a rationalist and a mystic, a realist and a nominalist, an analytic and a continental, an historicist and an a-historical one. And this list is far from exhaustive of the dazzling array of further, nuanced debates and interpretations (...) within each tradition. The irony exhibited by the history of Spinoza scholarship is especially poignant insofar as the debates and controversies surrounding his thought are rather heated or affective, this in relation to a thinker who strove to control, circumscribe, and transform the passions by the intellect. Following Spinoza’s motto caute, I shall attempt to evade the fray by disclaiming the possibility of a definitive interpretation not only because it is premature, but also and especially because I believe that Spinoza’s writings deliberately resist direct appropriation and translation into philosophically “respectable” language. In addition, while it is possible to identify Spinoza’s very few, explicit successors, e.g., Schelling, Lessing, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche, it is exceedingly difficult to limit the list of his predecessors for two main reasons: he is both reticent to name and misleading in naming his predecessors—the latter only in the sense that he is sooner ready to identify an adversarial position than to acknowledge debt to the same thinker in other respects; and Spinoza’s debt to his varied predecessors is neither consistent nor systematic, for his diverse discussions are informed by different considerations, positions, and thinkers, at times only in a negative way. In fact, one of the common problems characterizing contemporary Spinoza scholarship is the resolve to ignore or dismiss the significance of such “negative” influences. For these reasons alone, we should be wary of attempts to systematize Spinoza’s thought or to regard him as a system builder, despite such attempts by his late-eighteenth and nineteenth century disciples, especially Schelling and Hegel. But, in addition, in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Spinoza cautions the reader to refrain from judgments concerning the truth or falsity of philosophical discussions on the basis of some paradoxical statements. (shrink)

The Vedas, the Hindu scripture, make it clear that God is one, not only everywhere but also everything, has no name or form and prescribes a monistic and pantheistic perspective. Still devotees of different preferences and inclinations have the option to choose different names and forms for worshipping God. Thus, Hindus worship a very large number of gods and goddesses as aspects or powers of God promoting a distinctive monotheism. The most prominent goddesses are Durga and Kali both of whom (...) are demon-slayers with unlimited power, Parvati a great wife and mother who is highly learned, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and Sarasvati, the goddess of learning. The most prominent gods are Brahma, the creator who supervises the beginning of each creative cycle, Vishnu, the god of preservation and Siva, the god of destruction. Vishnu has the largest following followed by Siva, a close second and Brahma, a distant third in following. Vishnu has many incarnations who come to the world to restore righteousness and order when there is great trouble. The two most popular reincarnations are Rama and Krishna, the lead characters respectively of the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Was Hume An Atheist? Shane Andre Hume's philosophy of religion, as expressed in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the Natural History of Religion, and sections 10 and 11 ofthe Enquiry ConcerningHuman Understanding,1 invites a number of diverse interpretations. At one extreme are those who see Hume as an "atheist"2 or "anti-theist."3 At the other extreme are those who see Hume as some kind of theist, though not a classical (...) or orthodox one.4 In between are others for whom Hume is an "agnostic* or "ironic skeptic."6 Still a fourth interpretation can be found, according to which Hume "seems to vacillate hopelessly" in his view ofreligion;7 in other words, no coherent philosophy ofreligion can be found in his work and so it is futile to look for one. Ofthe four alternatives, it seems to me that the fourth, being less interesting philosophically and less to Hume's credit as a major philosopher, should be rejected unless by default no coherent case can be made for one of the other three. Since I believe that Hume's views about the nature and existence of God are complex, somewhat unconventional, but still coherent, I will concentrate on the title question. Before tackling that question directly, however, we need to clarify the meaning of the term "atheist" and its cognates. While an atheist is popularly defined as one who does not believe in God, this definition is inadequate for two reasons. First, while the absence of belief is sometimes treated as a synonym for disbelief, it is clear that the two are not the same. An infant does not believe in God, but that does not make him an atheist,8 for, as yet, he does not have the linguistic competence to reflect on the question, Does God exist? Neither is the agnostic an atheist, for, though he has reflected on the question, he has not found reason to answer it affirmatively, Uke the theist, or negatively, like the atheist. For this reason, the atheist must be characterized more strongly, as one who disbelieves that God exists. But even this stronger characterization is insufficient, for, as is well-known but perhaps less widely takeninto account, there are many different conceptions ofGod, ranging from monotheism to polytheism, from beUef in a perfect being to belief in a being who shares some human limitations, from deism to pantheism, and so on. Accordingly, it has become commonplace in philosophy to recognize at least two senses ofthe term "God": a narrow sense, signifying "a supremely good being, creator of but separate from and independent of the world, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and self-existent";9 and a wide sense, Volume XLX Number 1 141 SHANE ANDRE signifying one or more divine beings, personal or otherwise, manifesting extraordinarybut perhaps not superlative properties. For short, we could call the narrow sense the standard concept ofGod, and beliefin the existence ofsuch a being standard theism.10 And we could call the broad sense, applicable to any concept of the divine, the extended concept of God, and belief in the existence of such a being(s) extendedtheism. On this account, standard theists will alsobe extended theists, but of course someone could be an extended theist without being a standard theist. Let us call such a person (for example, Epicurus, who denied, not that the Gods exist, but that they intervene in human affairs) a limited theist. It is important to note that the limited theist rejects standard theism but is not an atheist simpliciter. How does recognition of these different forms oftheism affect our understanding of atheism? There seem to be two major possibilities. One is to characterize atheism in the narrow sense as disbeUef in standard theism; the other is to characterize it in the broad sense as disbeliefin any form of theism, including limited theism. While either option is open, it seems to me that the latter is preferable. For ifwe say that anyone who rejects standard theism is an atheist, we will end up with the paradoxical result that many distinguished theists will turn out to be atheists. For example, while Charles Hartshorne is not a standard theist, insofar as he rejects the... (shrink)

From the first words of this book we are informed that if we want to understand Hegel’s philosophy we should study his lecture notes, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and that if we desire to understand Hegel’s view of Christianity, we should make the effort to comprehend the intellectual and social history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Williamson then tells us that he has divided his work into three parts. In Part I we are given the (...) necessary background material that allows us to deal intelligently with Hegel’s early religious thought. In Part II the problem of religion is integrated into the broader philosophical problems that were developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the dialectical process in and through which the mind evolves from consciousness to self-consciousness and, finally, to reason. Anchored in this section is the assumption that Christianity was the truth of philosophy and “that without the Christian religion, philosophy would be without true content and direction”. Part III is the speculative section where Hegel’s position is discussed from the different perspectives of atheism, pantheism, and what our author considers the more substantial position, panentheism. Williamson defines this position as “the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe”. The use of this term to describe Hegel’s position seemed appropriate because it mediated between the dualism of theism and the static identity of pantheism. (shrink)