This essay offers a response to Pamela Sue Anderson’s book, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion. It focuses on three key aspects of Anderson’s work: first, her concern with the often imperceptible reality of gender exclusions; secondly, her discussion of ineffability in dialogue with Adrian Moore’s work and thirdly, her defence of realism in response to Grace Jantzen. These themes constitute a welcome articulation of rationality within a feminist framework, whilst opening up rationality to the validity of non-propositional truths. The (...) essay ends by suggesting that Anderson does more to work out new conceptualizations of the divine, arguing that her work and that of Jantzen are not so far apart on this point as might first appear. (shrink)

While reports of sensory encounters with the divine come from a variety of religious traditions, philosophers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Robert Oakes have argued that such experiences of incorporeal divine beings are impossible. Nevertheless, by clarifying various relations among acts of perception, perceptual detections of presence and kinds of perceptual recognition, the sensory perception of imperceptible things emerges as a coherent possibility. So, even if they are essentially unobservable, incorporeal divine beings still fall well within the range of (...) normal human sense perception. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Robert Boyle's strategies for making imperceptible entities accessible to the senses. It is well known that, in his natural philosophy, Boyle confronted the challenge of making imperceptible particles of matter into objects of sensory experience. It has never been noted, however, that Boyle confronted a strikingly similar challenge in his natural theology – he needed to make an equally imperceptible God accessible to the senses. Taking this symmetrical difficulty as my starting point, I propose a (...) new approach to thinking about the interconnections between Boyle's natural philosophy and natural theology. For the most part, studies of science and religion in the early modern period work by seeking out the influence of explicitly stated religious beliefs on scientific ideas. I argue, by contrast, that we need to focus on Boyle's representational practices, using his attempts to represent imperceptible entities as a means of uncovering metaphysical and theological presuppositions that he did not always articulate when stating his religious beliefs. With new interpretations of bothA Discourse of Things Above Reason(1681) andSome Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection(1675), I show that there were crucial similarities between Boyle's practices for representing both God and atoms. I go on to show, moreover, that Boyle used these practices to enact an ontological stance at odds with one of his most important professed beliefs. (shrink)

"The Philosophy of the Future" which has cost the author 'more than half a century of toil', is a stout defense of the principle of Causation both against the philosophical scientists who, following Hume, would reduce cause to customary sequence among our sense-impressions, and against the subordination by many writers on logic of the notion of cause to that of reason or ground. To cancel causality is to efface all distinction between truth and falsehood. Scientia est cognoscere causas. "The sole (...) essential function of all thinking is to discriminate between cause and effect." "There is no known form of thought which is not ultimately reducible into an assertion of cause and effect." From the vantage ground of this theorem, with its corollary that "a cause cannot be known except through its effects, or an effect apart from its cause", Mr. Hebberd trains his guns upon the systems of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill, and other logical writers. He reviews successively Space, Time, the Concept, Judgment, and finally Induction, defined as "the discovery of causal processes by means of physical and mental experiment", in the attempt to show that all categories are but species and derivative forms under the supreme and all-embracing category of causality. The logical discussion is followed by chapters on God, Freedom and the Soul, in which the metaphysical application of his principles is made. The causal concept is utilized to strengthen the ontological argument. "The conception of a sufficient cause, fully understood, is identical with the theistic conception of God." This conception of a sufficient cause involves unity, infinitude, freedom and love (if an infinite being acts at all, or causes any changes, it must be for the sake of others). The fact again that the causal nexus is "a reality imperceptible to the senses" discredits materialism and positivism, and is used in demonstration of the existence and immortality of the soul. Mr. Hebberd attempts no exact definition of cause, but this, as he says in the appendix, is because he regards it as incapable of ordinary definition, "there being no wider genus under which it can be ranged as a species" (p. 214). He omits also any discussion of the origin of the causal concept. While frequently inveighing against innate ideas and Kantian apriorities, and rejecting impartially "the Scottish philosophy of 'common sense', with its short and easy method of 'intuitions', the French and English empiricism, the Teutonic illusionism" (p. 95) he yet declares: "Man does come into the world equipped, not with intuitions, but with the means of attaining to an assured knowledge of the world as the workmanship of an infinite and benevolent Being. For he comes endowed with the prerogative of thought; but to think is to affirm causality" (p. 157). What is this but intuitionism? Mr. Hebberd's work, it will be seen, is a discussion at once ambitious and concise of the deepest problems of logic and metaphysics. His book, in our judgment, is well worth the attention of the philosophical reader, who cannot but enjoy its incisive style, its trenchant criticisms, its wide outlook upon philosophic thought, and its original insights into its problems. -The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 12 [1914]. (shrink)

The proclamation of the death of God came at a pivotal time in the history of humankind. It far transcended the concerns of the religious faithful and dented the entire fabric of human existence. Left to its own devices, humans intended their consciousness to replace God's. This proved to be a terrible mistake that collapsed the entire modern project. One of the worldviews that emerged in the wake of this eruption was antinatalism, which refers to the conviction that human reproduction (...) should be brought to an absolute halt. This is the most modern outgrowth of the death of God and represents the most radical face of secular humanism. In spite of the admittedly dark fumes that leak out from the term ‘antinatalism’, this philosophical position emerges quite naturally when we consider the depletion of our traditional sources of philosophical enquiry. (shrink)

v. 1. A doctrine of divine illumination -- v. 2. God at the core of cognition.

"Every culture needs to appropriate the universal truth of human suffering," says Fernando Escalante, ". . . to give its own meaning to this suffering, so that human existence is bearable." Originally published in Spanish as La mirada de Dios: Estudios sobre la cultura del sufrimiento, this book is a remarkable study of the evolution of the culture of suffering and the different elements that constitute it, beginning with a reading of Rousseau and ending with the appearance of the Shoah (...) in the Western consciousness--"The memory endures, and this constitutes a fundamental transition for the Western conscience: we have witnessed." Drawing on writings from the Greeks to Cervantes, Voltaire to Nietzsche, and Freud to William James, Escalante combines his considerable knowledge of politics and political theory with a vast array of literary examples to arrive at an intellectual understanding of the history and meaning of suffering. His investigation encompasses the rise of popular politics, the role of messianism in modern nationalism, and the contemporary implications of the Shoah. This book will appeal to a wide audience: students of political theory, humanism, and philosophy, as well as the general reader interested in a glimpse into the mind of a highly original Latin American thinker. (shrink)

In the last 10 years scientists have made astounding discoveries about ourselves and the universe we live in. Most of these breakthroughs have remained beyond the reach of the non-expert, but this book aims to present them in an accessible fashion.

Geis' work addresses questions about gratuitous claims of empiricism in Hume, unfounded assumptions in Kant, presumptions of science, and improbabilities identified in Darwinism. Geis argues that evil, used as a means to betterment of oneself and the world, takes on the role commensurate with the doctrine of an omnibenevolent deity.

On Power (De Potentia) is one of Aquinas's ''Disputed Questions'' (a systematic series of discussions of specific theological topics). It is a text which anyone with a serious interest in Aquinas's thinking will need to read. There is, however, no English translation of the De Potentia currently in print. Fr. Richard Regan has produced this abridgement, which passes over some of the full text while retaining what seems most important when it comes to following the flow of Aquinas's thought.

This paper explores the philosophical perspectives of Nietzsche and Heidegger, tracing their analyses of the death of God and its aftermath. My aim is to clarify the diagnosis of this nihilism and its underlying causes, as well as evaluate the proposed remedies put forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Ultimately, I argue that the seemingly ambiguous consequences of the death of God are not only hopeful, but necessary, if human beings are to rise above and transmute a meaningless, resentment-laced existence, however, (...) not by jettisoning Judeo-Christianity and its values, but rather by reinterpreting them. (shrink)