During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man , Tylor's research on the early history of mankind , Renan's Vie de Jésus , Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia , and Swinburne's notorious (...) Atalanta in Calydon ; it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath , the first meeting of the X-Club , and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Russell and others have argued that the real nature of colour is transparentto us in colour vision. It's nature is fully revealed to us and no further knowledgeis theoretically possible. This is the doctrine of revelation. Two-dimensionalFourier analyses of coloured checkerboards have shown that apparently simple,monadic, colours can be based on quite different physical mechanisms. Experimentswith the McCollough effect on different types of checkerboards have shown thatidentical colours can have energy at the quite different orientations of Fourierharmonic components but no (...) energy at the edges of the checkerboards, thusrefuting revelation. It is concluded that this effect is not explained by a superveniencedispositional account of colour as proposed by McGinn . It was argued that theMcCollough effect in checkerboards was an example of a local mind/body reduction, by which the different characteristics of identical colours falsifies revelation. This reduction being based on both physical and neurological mechanisms led to a clear explanation of the perceive phenomenal effects and thus laid a small bridge over the explanatory gap. (shrink)

En su inicio, el empirismo ha querido ser, en una época de profundas dudas y cambio:como ha sido la Época Moderna, una honesta crítica a los argumentos presentados por el racionalismo, según el cual se debía poner el fundamento del conocimiento en algunas verdade: innatas. La propuesta del empirismo hizo descansair esta esperanza en los datos fidedignos de la impresiones o experiencias sensofiales. En este artículo se analiza la concepción de idea que empleaba John Locke y sus argumentos para desautorizar, (...) una tras otra, las razones del innatismo. No obstante, en el ámbito moral, sigue manteniendo una luz de la naturaleza, ínsita em los hombres, que es recta norma para la razón., para quienes buscan conocetrla. De todos modos, que da establecido, con el empirismo de Locke, que explicar el conocimiento de una cosa implica explicar el origen que el hombre tiene de esse conocimiento, revalidando el valor de la investigación humana y de la historicidad del conocimiento. (shrink)

The subject which has been chosen for me is sufficiently comprehensive. Several years ago I wrote the last of a series of essays in a book called Science, Religion, and Reality , in which, as requested, I tried to sum up the contributions of the other writers, with reflections of my own. I have also given a short statement of my opinions in the first volume of that interesting book, Contemporary British Philosophy . Lastly, I have tried, in a book (...) published in the autumn of 1933, to consider the religious and philosophical implications of recent scientific theories and discoveries, and particularly of the conviction held by our leading astronomers and mathematicians that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is unassailable, so that the ultimate extinction of the universe as we know it is certain. I showed that the acceptance of this verdict raises important questions for the philosopher and theologian. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Hilbert-style version of an implicational logic can be represented by a set of axiom schemes and modus ponens or by the corresponding axioms, modus ponens and substitution. Certain logics, for example the intuitionistic implicational logic, can also be represented by axioms and the rule of condensed detachment, which combines modus ponens with a minimal form of substitution. Such logics, for example intuitionistic implicational logic, are said to be D-complete. For certain weaker logics, the version based on condensed detachment and (...) axioms (the condensed version of the logic) is weaker than the original. In this paper we prove that the relevant logic T→, and any logic of which this is a sublogic, is D-complete. (shrink)