In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World's Spiritual TraditionsRonnie LittlejohnRationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World's Spiritual Traditions. By Henry Rosemont, Jr.Chicago: Open Court, 2001. Pp. vii + 106.In April 2000, Henry Rosemont delivered the first Hsuan Hua Memorial Lecture at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley. The following year, this lecture—originally titled "Whither the World's Religions?"—was published by (...) Open Court in this small book, Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World's Spiritual Traditions. The volume is divided into four sections: (1) the lecture itself, which has the new title "Rationality and Religious Experience"; (2) a commentary by Huston Smith; (3) response and discussion, in which Rosemont replies to Smith and takes questions from the audience; and (4) an epilogue, in which Rosemont makes revisions and expansions on the lecture based on the comments and discussion.In section 1, Rosemont makes a bold claim: "By urging everyone to approach their own text tradition afresh, and alongside others, I am assuming what many of you might find implausible, namely, that in many basic respects all sacred texts are saying the same things, and contain the same truths we can all come to believe without in any way surrendering our rationality" (p. 11). Having said this, he nonetheless does not mean that we can accept the statements of religious texts as stating factual truths, much less that they are putting forward identical descriptions of the world.Rosemont faces the epistemological difficulties of religion directly, saying that we cannot accept the statements of religious texts as factual accounts of the world. He reminds us that it is not merely the Abrahamic traditions that pose an epistemological problem for us: "It no less flies in the face of modern science to believe that the preserver god Vishnu once incarnated himself as Krishna, not merely to give counsel to the spiritual warrior Arjuna, but also, among many other exploits, to make love to 20,000 milkmaids in a single day" (p. 5). Even so, he holds that there is much truth in the sacred texts and narratives of the world's religions (pp. 31-32). As will become apparent in my later remarks, it is not altogether clear to me what sort of truth Rosemont is talking about, but it seems to be more a matter of a certain ego-reduction and a sort of mystical feeling than anything else.Rosemont recognizes not only the epistemological objections to religion, but also the moral ones. He understands the violence and suffering that has been directly and indirectly associated with religion in human history. Yet, in this connection, he says:[E]fforts to exorcise religion from the human realm because of the mischief that has been committed in its name is to throw out the baby with the bath water, and equally to suggest a third response, that there is no hope for the cross-cultural dialogues necessary for [End Page 404] the creation and maintenance of a more peaceful and just twenty-first century until and unless everyone can come to understand how an intelligent and thoroughly decent human being might come to be, or remain, a subscriber to one or another of the world's faiths.(p. 10)It is the phenomenon of spiritual experience and not the doctrine or ontology of any tradition that Rosemont finds of philosophical interest. He thinks that instead of focusing on some purported factual knowledge about the world that we are to believe directly, we should instead concentrate on the instructions that the traditions offer about how to live purposively in the world and derive nonmaterial nurturance from it. "The basis of such nurturance is religious experience" (p. 17).Rosemont begins his remarks on religious experience with a critique of Kierkegaard the purpose of which is to show that lived experience is of one piece. Rosemont attributes to Kierkegaard the position that there are distinguishable and autonomously separable spheres of existence such as the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual. Speaking of Kierkegaard's three stages, he says that "Almost all of the world's religious traditions, especially the Asian, affirm... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion, particularly within Christianity. The book begins by examining the difference between the general concepts of knowledge and belief, the relation between faith and knowledge, and reasons why belief as faith, and not knowledge, is central to the Abrahamic religions. The book explores the ambivalence about religious knowledge within Christianity. Some religious thinkers explicitly accepted and sought religious knowledge, as did (...) St. Thomas Aquinas, while others, notably Søren Kierkegaard, cast knowledge and seeking it as incompatible with faith. The book also examines two antithetical religious intuitions about knowledge, both at home in the Christian tradition. For one, faith requires a struggle with doubt. For the other, faith requires a certainty that excludes doubt. For the first, religious knowledge would destroy faith. For the second, religious knowledge is compatible with faith and completes it. Though the book focuses on the Christian tradition, it also considers other traditions, including a chapter on the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religious traditions. The final chapter examines how coming to Wisdom as personified in the Jewish and Christian traditions may be distinct from attaining religious knowledge. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Some members from the cast of New Essays in Philosophical Theology set the tone of this anthology, although with essays not included in that volume. The Flew-Hare-Mitchell-Crombie discussion on falsifiability is the only selection from that volume included here. Also included in the same section are Wisdom's "Gods," much of Braithwaite's Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief, and selections by Diogenes Allen and John Hick. The opening section of the book is on the logical status of (...) religious language. Besides essays by MacIntyre, McPherson, and Crombie, it contains William Christian's article on truth-claims in religion and also a clear, sympathetic account by Father Bochenski on the formal structure of religious discourse. The section of the book on the question of literalness includes selections from Ayer, Tillich, Mascall, Buber, and Bultmann. The section on the possibility of religious knowledge includes essays by Calvin O. Schrag, Paul F. Schmidt, and Kierkegaard. Santoni's introduction discusses all the essays, ties them together, and consequently gives a rationale for their inclusion. On the whole, the anthology is thorough, unified, and, in spite of its restricted and well-worn theme, remarkably nonrepetative.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering (...) a wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

Mike Almeida recently published a paper entitled “Evil Is Not Evidence,” but that title rather understates his conclusion. He argues that no “states of affairs constitute any (non-trivial) evidence for or against the existence of God” (p. 1, original emphasis) (bare page references are to Almeida, 2022). It of course follows from that that evil is not evidence against the existence of God, but it also follows that apparent design or even direct experience of God are not non-trivial evidence for (...) the existence of God. While his title suggests a conclusion favorable to theists, it might in fact be a poisoned pawn, since his conclusion also entails that arguments from design or religious experience are completely hopeless. Such a radical transformation of the traditional debate between theists and atheists bears scrutinizing. In particular, Almeida appeals to a notion of evidence that I'm going to argue is mistaken. The basic argument I am going to make is that Almeida is taking strict implication to be an evidentially relevant relation. In particular he's embracing one of the paradoxes of strict implication, that a necessary truth is strictly implied by any claim whatever, and he's assuming that not only is the inference valid, pace relevance logics, but that it provides evidence for the implied proposition. I'm going to argue this is a mistake. Even if we grant that the inference is valid, we shouldn't accept that it provides evidence. (shrink)

In this paper, it is shown that as people often convert their beliefs into knowledge through many external means, knowledge cannot be considered exclusive in a justified belief where its justification has been achieved internally. If we do not consider these people’s beliefs as knowledge, we will face some problems; not only will we be caught up in pervasive skepticism but we would also be rejecting the reality of most human items of knowledge. Therefore, to (...) acquire our knowledge, we do not need to use internalism as externalism provides us with new facilities. Philosophy of religion may achieve new solutions through this expansion in epistemology. In this paper, four currents in the philosophy of religion that have used epistemological externalism are mentioned. It is also shown that religious epistemology, based on the trusted hearings which follow Greco’s path, provides a reliable way to justify religious beliefs.However, if we have a justification for religious beliefs through reassured hearings, all religions can claim that their followers believe in their own religious beliefs in this way; so they must be justified, and therefore, all religions must acquire true knowledge, and this is nothing but pluralism.But it seems that to explain the diversity of religions, we do not need to resort to religious pluralism. It can be said that beliefs based on trusted hearings do not rely on their confidence only in the religious preachings, but their confidence in the religious preachings that have been transferred correctly and also that the religious preachings which are based on trusted hearings depend on another preaching and each has been assured through its previous preaching. If some kind of mistrust occurs in this chain then the ultimate believer in the reliability of the narrated in this chain or their collection (in Greco’s particular view) cannot turn his belief into knowledge with the necessary justification.But the problem is what the end of the chain is based on. In some religions, a person can believe in the ability to understand many spiritualities and he has attempted to convey his findings to others. It is clear thatat the end of this chain, if it is the personal findings or readings of a person from spirituality, then the difference in spiritual reception among the early leaders can justify the diversity of religions. Therefore, this type of religious epistemology is dependent on the source of narrations.But some religions speak of believing in an existential truth and one of the consequences of believing in his existence will also be to achieve spirituality. They also believe that their early leaders have based their teachings on their confident hearings of that existential truth.In the meantime, Abrahamic religions believe in God as that existential truth. If a religion (such as Islam) can show the correctness of the chain of reassurance that leads to the prophet’s speech from God and also the prophet considers it not as his concept of spirituality but rather he has stated it because it is the same as the word sent by God, he can show the source of his teachings to be God.What we should ultimately be sure about in this type of epistemology is that he has been able to establish a relationship with God and has conveyed God’s words. In this paper, four paths are mentioned to achieve this assurance. (shrink)

Globalizing processes have rendered as analytically insufficient accounts of authority in the Muslim world that rely exclusively on the interaction between text, discursive method and personified knowledge. The construction and negotiation of globalized authority in Islam, it is argued, can only be understood by reference to a set of pluralizing processes that intensify and in some instances radicalize a tendency towards authoritative pluralism that has long been present in Islam. This can be understood in terms of (1) functionalization, (...) or changes in terms of how individual Muslims understand the social purpose and ends of knowledge seeking; (2) respatialization; and (3) mediatization or interrelated changes in terms of how far away and in what kinds of spaces and media one seeks authority or authorization. Collectively, such pluralizing processes combine to construct global Islamic authority in diverse forms that transcend or challenge conventional understandings of religious knowledge, its location and mode of articulation. Reference is made throughout to illustrative ethnographic examples, social movements and practices. (shrink)

Creating one's identity is an on-going process, which is greatly dependent on language. Having this idea as a starting point in the study of religiosity, sharing self-reported experiences can be seen as an integral part in constructing one's religious identity and personal conviction. In this article, I would like to present the idea of bringing together narrative research and the psychological approach to the study of religious experience with the help of personal experience stories about God's guidance told (...) by Christian believers who are members of a charismatic revival movement. (shrink)

. This paper outlines an evolutionary theory of knowledge involving not only conceptual but also behavioral and experiential knowledge. It suggests human knowledge is continuous at the behavioral and experiential level with that of nonhuman animals. By contrasting an evolutionary understanding of ultimate reality with the more traditional, personalistic understanding, the paper shows how an evolutionary epistemology applies to religion in terms of both general and special revelation. Finally, the paper explores how one might (...) respond to the problem of religious knowledge in a pluralistic age and how a nonpersonal, evolutionary understanding of God might be religiously adequate. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

The author intends this book to be a theoretical contribution to the sociology of knowledge. Her main effort is to isolate and describe what she takes to be four irreducible systems of knowledge which dictate, for those who share in them, "thinking and action concerned with the nature of the world." The four systems of knowledge, which she calls magical, religious, mystical and scientific, are connected to specific types of thought. There are three basic types of (...) thought connection: empirical, rational, and abstractive. Empirical thought establishes connections at the purely observational level, whereas rational thought, of which mathematical and metaphysical systems are examples, makes connections only at the theoretic level. By contrast, abstractive thinking connects the observational and theoretic levels. Magical thought is purely empirical. Mystical thought accepts the evidence of empirical observation, but seeks to abstract the individual's thought to a theoretic end state which is not rational. Religious knowledge combines rational connections among concepts with abstractive connection of concepts to observables, but the religious concepts are not identified with any empirical objects. Finally, scientific thought combines rational, empirical and abstractive thought. Each of these four systems of knowledge has a characteristic conception of power. In a magical system, power consists of the ability to gain observable ends. For mystical knowledge systems, power is the individual's achievement of escape from empiricism and rationalism. In religious systems individuals may have authority, but power belongs exclusively to "god." In scientific systems of knowledge, power "consists of ability to theoretically anticipate or explain empirical transformations." Likewise, each of the four systems of knowledge is related in some way to certain social situations. In the light of these theoretical distinctions, the author examines a number of theories and developments in social science and the history of thought. She finds Malinowski's distinctions between magic, religion and science quite inadequate. Weber's sociology of religion fares better. She invokes the development of planetary astronomy, of mechanics, and of evolutionary biology to illustrate her definition of science. Finally, the problem of knowledge in the modern world is seen to be due not to an overemphasis on science as she defines it, but to the persistence of magical thought in the political, economic and social spheres. Though the author's efforts at definition are interesting, this is in many ways a difficult and unsatisfying book. Written in a lapidary style, which is lacking both in grace and connectives, the book utilizes historical and sociological data very selectively. No reference is made to what has been done in the sociology of knowledge by Scheler, Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann. Finally, the book bristles with questionable epistemological assumptions and with statements which seem quite incompatible with the findings of recent work in the study of religion.--H. F. (shrink)

In philosophy of religion, there are few more frequently visited topics than the problem of evil, which has attracted considerable interest since the time of Epicurus. It is well known that the problem of evil involves responding to the apparent tension between 1) belief in the existence of a good, all powerful, all knowing God and 2) the existence of evil—such as personal suffering embodied in the experience of cancer. While a great deal has been written concerning abstract philosophical (...) theories that academics use to explain the existence of evil, much less has been written about how religious lay people make sense of evil and suffering. What explanations, meanings, and perceptions do they hold concerning the religious significance of evil? What can theologians and philosophers learn from these lay experiences? Our interdisciplinary team designed an experiment to identify the religious significance that personal suffering held for a group of religious cancer sufferers. We interviewed twenty-nine self-identified evangelical Christians who had received a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lives for our experiment. Since all interviewees identified as Christians, it was expected that they would assent to belief in a theistic God. It was also expected that each interviewee would assent the existence of evil and see their cancer experience as a dramatic and personal instance of an evil event. The explicit existential threat of cancer guarantees that the individual has much at stake in the experience. Furthermore, the pain and suffering that typically accompanies either the cancer itself or cancer treatments make it a compelling example of evil experienced in a very personal way. Finally, even when successfully treated, the ongoing threat of potentially fatal recurrence looms over the sufferer for years to come. We asked 17 questions related to the religious significance of their cancer experience in each interview and coded these interviews looking for five distinct types of explanations for/meaning of evil: trusting God in mystery, free will, moral development, spiritual growth, and growth in human relationships/community. These categories were meant to correspond loosely to five philosophical responses to the existence of evil.Our interviews included several important results. First, 79% of interviewees had at least one answer that fit into the ‘trust God in mystery’ category of responses with 48% using this category of responses as their most frequently cited theme. This result could be interpreted as a kind of generic theodical response: God has a good, but unknown reason for allowing evil/suffering. Alternatively, another possible interpretation is that at least some of these interviewees intuited something similar to skeptical theism, since it claims that if one understands the type of God proposed by theism and possesses an accurate view of human cognitive capacities, it is apparent that there is no real tension to be resolved between theism and the existence of evil. Some of our interviewees seemed to believe not only that the answer to why evil exists is mysterious, but that they simply could not have the necessary perspective to judge what kinds of purposes God might have for allowing this painful episode in their lives.While it was unsurprising that religious sufferers would find it important to trust God in ambiguous difficult circumstances, more surprisingly, we found that 52% of our respondents did not judge that their cancer experience was at all in tension with their religious beliefs. Whereas a broad range of philosophers and theologians acknowledge that there is at least an apparent conflict between the existence of a good, all-powerful God and the existence of evil, most of our interviewees did not even perceive an apparent tension between theistic beliefs and their painful cancer experiences that would be in need of additional reconciliation.There are at least two ways this result might be interpreted. First, our interviewees might hold additional beliefs that make the existence of evil easier for them to accept. After all, these interviewees were not ‘bare theists’ who held only to the existence of God, but presumably held a broad range of religious beliefs which may already serve to reconcile the existence of evil: that growing closer to God is more important than earthly life itself, that in evil in this life allows us a greater appreciation of a blessed eternity, or simply that ‘God works for our good in mysterious ways.’ Thus, a fully developed Christian worldview may already accommodate the existence of evil in a way not fully appreciated by philosophers.Another possible interpretation is that at least some of our interviewees were not adequately reflective to perceive the tension between their religious beliefs and their experience of suffering. There is at least some reason to doubt this explanation as an overarching interpretation of this result since our interviewees were generally well educated with the median participant holding at least a Bachelor’s degree, and most were ongoing participants in a cancer support group ensuring long-term ongoing engagement with their cancer experience.A final significant finding is that a high portion of our interviewees, 83% reported specific examples of beneficial personal growth—moral, spiritual, or relational— that resulted from their cancer experience. When asked about their cancer experience’s broad effect upon their lives in these areas they volunteered at least one example of a benefit they received in these areas. Depending on one’s accompanying value theory and whether such benefits might have been otherwise achieved, they might provide a morally sufficient reason for the existence of suffering. Our interviewees frequently described experiencing the kind of benefits at the heart of John Hick’s soul making theodicy and Eleonore Stump’s ‘spiritual growth’ theodicy, providing at least some corroborating evidence for such views. Experiences common to our interviewees were similar to what such theodicies would predict. (shrink)

Starting from the acceptance of the Egalitarian Principle I exhibited a version which I considered too lax (BEP) and one I considered too strict (NEP), arriving at a version (MEP) which allows that there can be tolerance-limiting reasons for adhering to traditions but only if they are based on unreasoned knowledge claims. In fact, I hold that the situation most of us find ourselves in restricts such claims on religious topics to very general ones. Hence the choice (...) between NEP and MEP is not significant.It follows that we should take up one of two positions concerning religious traditions: either we argue from the shared assumptions of a variety of traditions without genuine participation in any of them; or we justify participation in one of them by noting various marks of reliability, such as serendipitous understanding. (shrink)

In traditional societies, knowledge is organized in hierarchical chains through which authority is legitimated by custom. Because the majority of the population is illiterate, sacred knowledge is conveyed orally and ritualistically, but the ultimate source of religious authority is typically invested in the Book. The hadith are a good example of traditional practice. These chains of Islamic knowledge were also characteristically local, consensual and lay, unlike in Christianity, with its emergent ecclesiastical bureaucracies, episcopal structures (...) and ordained priests. In one sense, Islam has no church. While there are important institutional differences between the world religions, network society opens up significant challenges to traditional authority, rapidly increasing the flow of religious knowledge and commodities. With global flows of knowledge on the Internet, power is no longer embodied and the person is simply a switchpoint in the information flow. The logic of networking is that control cannot be concentrated for long at any single point in the system; knowledge, which is by definition only temporary, is democratically produced at an infinite number of sites. In this Andy Warhol world, every human can, in principle, have their own site. While the Chinese Communist Party and several Middle Eastern states attempt to control this flow, their efforts are only partially successful. The result is that traditional forms of religious authority are constantly disrupted and challenged, but at the same time the Internet creates new opportunities for evangelism, religious instruction and piety. The outcome of these processes is, however, unknown and unknowable. There is a need, therefore, to invent a new theory of authority that is post-Weberian in reconstructing the conventional format of charisma, tradition and legal rationalism. (shrink)

The _Epic of Gilgamesh_, a 3600-year 12-tablet collection, was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War, and fraudulently imported into the United States. In September, 2021, UNESCO facilitated its repatriation to Iraq, which is seen as an occasion to consolidate Iraq’s efforts to rebuild its legacy, since the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is of immense cultural, historical and religious value for Iraq The current study examines the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ in the light of the ancient Sumerian and (...) Akkadian traditions. This collection of tablets carries a great legacy of the contemporary Babylonian and Mesopotamian beliefs and socio-religious values, also evident in the use of cuneiform and clay tablets, being ancient forms of writings. The study made use of content analysis and historical and analytical approaches to retrieve data through a documentation research design. The study found that the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is not only a work of religious literature, but a treatise on civilization. On one hand it narrates the stories engrained in the Mesopotamian mythology, such as those of Ninsun, Shamash and Utnapishtim; on the other hand, owing to its content, literary style and tone, characterization and symbolism, this study would be a great contribution to relive the story of Gilgamesh from current literary, and socio-religious perspective and provide a comprehensive account of the legacy and inheritance that it brings in for the modern generation. (shrink)

The efforts to prove God's existence in the history of thought have been one of the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology, and even the most important one. The evidences put furword to prove the existence of God constitute the center of philosophy of religion’s problems not only philosophy of religion, but also the disciplines such as theology-kalam and Islamic philosophy are also seriously concerned. When we look at the history of philosophy, it is clear that almost (...) all philosophers are interested in the evidence in favour of and against the existence of God. Especially in recent times, religious experience has often been regarded as evidence of the existence of God. Studies in the field of religious and mystical experience have put forward many arguments concerning the use of religious experience as evidence. However, this study has been limited to experience of sense and pure consciousness claims rather than examining all of these arguments. In this study firstly, the analogy between experience of sense and religious experience will be deal with, and then claims that conciousness can be emptied by a number of methods which are defended by mystics. In addition, it will be tried to defend the opinion that the mystical experiences which are the common point of the two approaches are valid. The main emphasis of the article will be that these arguments can be used as evidence for the existence of God.Summary: Religious experience - which has not been considered as one of the classical evidences regarding the existence of God before being popular by recent studies – is started to be called one of the arguments. The most important reason for not arguing religious experience among the evidences of God’s existence is that it is a personal experience and therefore contains subjective perspectives. However, many researchers, who refuse to accept the criticism raised against religious experience with restricting to subjectivity, emphasized the importance of religious experience by highlighting the objective aspects of such experiences. This emphasis was not only on its significance, but also on the fact that it had a cognitive feature and thus it could provide evidence for the existence of God. The argument of religious experience is generally defined as an effort for demonstrating to existence of God with reference to several feelings such as spiritual experiences of human in face of creator and sacred Being, encounter with God, uniting, and annihilating selfness in Him. The emergence of such efforts, especially after the XVIIIth century, indicates that the history of the evidence does not go back much earlier. However, even if notas evidence, it is possible to extend the traces of religious and mystical experience to the history of religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Considering a great amount of the previous literature focused on religious experience in the West, It is easily seen that such research is still new. The main purpose in addressing such a controversial issue is to make the argument on the religious experience more current and to show whether the religious experience would be able to use as evidence for the existence of God.First title of this study comprises many different claims such as Walter T. Stace’s The Argument from Unanimity Richard Swinburne’s The Principle of Credulity, William P. Alston’s Perceiving God, John Hick’s Experience-as. However, instead of briefly giving out very different claims, the study chooses to focus on two arguments which are less discussed and can be given in more detail. The first is the argument based on the analogy between the religious experience and the sense experience. The fundamental point of this argument is sense experience. With reference to the similarities between the sense experience and the religious experience, it can be argued that religious experience is also cognitive and may function as an evidence for the existence of God. In other words, being perceptual and noetic, namely cognitive, of sense experience is addressed as a similar side of religious experience. Whether it is imaginary or real, eventually, it is necessary for an experience to have an object and being experience of something. Therefore, the religious experience includes the perception of a Transcendent Being that is beyond and in excess of the individual who experiences. Perception of the sense experience will definitely be different from the perception of religious experience. Researchers who think that the five sense organs do not run the perception of Sacred Beings, identified broader and various meanings for the perception. Thereby, in this approach, where the semantic field of perception is expanded, it was contended that human beings were able to perceive the transcendent, eternal, and unlimited God, and this can be explained in the epistemological sense. In order to use religious experiences as an evidence for the existence of God, it is necessary to determine whether such experiences are caused by God rather than something else. This raises the issue of the validity of religious experience. The researchers in this area have propounded various criteria to identify whether religious experience is existed or not. Experiences, which do not meet the criteria, are not considered existed even if they claim to be religious experience.The second is the argument that discusses whether it is possible to suggest an evidence for the existence of God by utilizing pure consciousness events. In general, this argument claims that the consciousness gets clear, and thus, mystic or Sufi experiences the Divine One with pure consciousness by discharging consciousness from all sensual contents and removing it from secular desire and wishes. The argument, which claims the experience of Divine One is direct, therefore uninterpretable, and experienced by pure consciousness, believes clearing the consciousness of mystics from sensual qualities such as seeing, hearing, and tasting. It is stated that it is possible for mystics to empty their sensory images and get rid of them, and thus, their desires and wishes could be lost. Especially, the thinkers who are connected with the philosophy of perennialism and defend this approach, thought that people, who have distinct religion, culture, and beliefs in different parts of the world and in various time periods, had the same experience and considered such experiences were universal by suggesting that this similarity could be called as common essence.Even though the claim which offers that the events of pure consciousness are the same everywhere have been criticized in many respects, the advocates of this approach have argued that the experience has the common essence, but the interpretation is different. This relationship, which was tried to be established between experience and commentary, caused a lot of work for both the thinkers who put forward the claims of pure consciousness and the researchers who opposed it. However, examining the relationship between experience and interpretation requires serious studies in socio-psychological, cultural and religious fields. Therefore, in order not to exceed the limits of the article, the relationship between experience and interpretation is briefly mentioned.While discussing two arguments, the main claims of the arguments were addressed, and the criticisms directed to this argument were not discussed as much as possible. However, some fundamental criticisms have been mentioned shortly for a better understanding of the discussion. Since such western-oriented claims mostly were deployed in a western context, the study excluded the comparison of the claims across different cultures. (shrink)

If God exists, where can we find adequate evidence for God's existence? In this book, Paul Moser offers a new perspective on the evidence for God that centers on a morally robust version of theism that is cognitively resilient. The resulting evidence for God is not speculative, abstract, or casual. Rather, it is morally and existentially challenging to humans, as they themselves responsively and willingly become evidence of God's reality in receiving and reflecting God's moral character for others. Moser calls (...) this 'personifying evidence of God,' because it requires the evidence to be personified in an intentional agent - such as a human - and thereby to be inherent evidence of an intentional agent. Contrasting this approach with skepticism, scientific naturalism, fideism, and natural theology, Moser also grapples with the potential problems of divine hiddenness, religious diversity, and vast evil. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Disenchantment of the WorldAndrew KeittIn 1688 Anglican divine William Wharton published a short tract entitled The Enthusiasm of the Church of Rome demonstrated in some observations upon the life of Ignatius Loyola. Typical of the confessional propaganda of the day, Wharton's work contrasted the "rationality" of Protestantism with what he considered to be the superstition and obscurantism of the Catholic faith:It (...) has been the peculiar happiness of the Church of England to create a right sense of Religion and Piety in all her Communicants, and secure to them the practice of a rational Devotion. She makes no pretensions to private Inspirations, and extraordinary Illuminations of the Holy Ghost; and all her Children are more apt to deride, than admire the follies of the Enthusiasts.... Not so the Church of Rome, which in all her Offices and publick Ceremonies promotes and foments it, hath on many occasions given publick applause and approbation to it, and oweth the greatest part of her peculiar Doctrines, and present prosperity to the Enthusiasm of her Followers.1The "enthusiasm" to which Wharton refers had become the object of intense controversy in late seventeenth-century England. The term enthusiasm in this context meant highly emotional, deeply embodied religious experience in [End Page 231] the form of inspired raptures, miraculous revelations, and prophetic power. It was an epithet used with increasing frequency during this period to condemn not only Catholics but also members of radical Protestant sects such as the Diggers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchy Men.The efforts of mainstream Protestant denominations to distance themselves from the "ultrasupernaturalism" of religious enthusiasts would seem to fit within a Weberian paradigm in which the Protestant Reformation functions as a catalyst for the "disenchantment of the world," the process by which the boundaries of the supernatural were supposedly rolled back in the modern West.2 Indeed, many historians of early modern Europe have adopted, either implicitly or explicitly, such a model. Lawrence Stone, for example, reflects this school of thought with his assertion that by the end of the seventeenth century, Protestantism's "more rational and coherent view of nature and its relationship to God's providence" created a worldview in which magical or miraculous explanations of events became increasingly untenable.3Catholicism, on the other hand, has often been portrayed as maintaining a more porous boundary between nature and supernature. Summarizing what he calls the "Weberian consensus," sociologist Peter Berger offers the following analysis, which reads remarkably like a translation of Wharton's characterization of Catholicism into the language of the social sciences:The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels—the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles—a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen.4In recent years, however, as historians have emphasized the structural parallels between the various confessions in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such stark contrasts have become increasingly suspect.5 Consequently, scholars have underscored the need for comparative work on the topic. Michael Heyd, for example, has suggested such a strategy in his work on the reaction to religious enthusiasm in seventeenth-century Europe.6 [End Page 232] Although Heyd focuses primarily on the English case, he recommends an integrative, comparative approach. He describes how religious enthusiasm became "the subject of detailed analysis—theological, social, psychological and even medical" in the closing decades of the seventeenth century in England, and he details the efforts of both religious and secular authorities "to distinguish carefully between true inspiration and a false one, between the natural realm and the truly supernatural."7 Heyd links this reaction against religious enthusiasm to the disenchantment of the world and asks to what extent these trends were unique to the Anglican tradition in England.8Lorraine Daston has emphasized the need for comparative study as well. Religious enthusiasm plays an important role in Daston's "historical epistemology," which traces the development of modern notions of "fact" and "evidence," and their relationship to changing attitudes toward the miraculous in early modern Europe. The... (shrink)

According to the knowledge view of evidence notoriously defended by Timothy Williamson (2000), for any subject, her evidence consists of all and only her propositional knowledge (E=K). Many have found (E=K) implausible. However, few have offered arguments against Williamson’s positive case for (E=K). In this paper, I propose an argument against Williamson’s positive case in favour of (E=K). Central to my argument is the possibility of the knowledge of necessary truths. I also draw some more (...) general conclusions concerning theorizing about evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Jewish and Christian Encounters with BuddhismHarold KasimowA thousand years hence, historians will look back at the twentieth century and remember it not for the struggle between Liberalism and Communism but for the momentous human discovery of the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism.—Arnold ToynbeeBeginning in the 1960s many American Jews and Christians have become fascinated with the Buddhist tradition and have immersed themselves in the study and (...) practice of Buddhism. In this presentation I will examine how Christian and Jewish leaders have responded to this phenomenon. Some have been quite suspicious of such interreligious and cross-cultural encounters, claiming that Buddhism is a great threat to their religions. However, others have argued that their encounters with Buddhism have led them to deeper insight into their own traditions and have helped them to become better human beings. Their practice of Buddhist meditation has been a way for them to develop sensitivity to God and greater commitment to their own traditions. Still others have converted to Buddhism; it is estimated that of the three million Buddhists in America, fully one million are converts from Christianity and Judaism.Because of the complexity and diversity within Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, I will focus on the responses of leading Orthodox Jews and Roman Catholic Christians to Theravada Buddhism and to the Zen school in Mahayana, the two forms of Buddhism to which many Americans are drawn and with which I have some personal experience. I will first examine how members of the Jewish and Christian traditions view other religions, because an individual’s perception of the encounter is shaped by how their religion views the Buddhist tradition. This will help us understand why religious authorities find this fascination with Buddhism so problematic.the jewish-buddhist encounterHistorically, Judaism has largely been interpreted by its thinkers as the only true religion. However, this does not mean that members of other faiths may not attain [End Page 21] salvation. According to the Talmudic Doctrine of the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, “the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,” that is, all human beings can attain salvation who establish courts of law and who refrain from idolatry, murder, blasphemy against God, incest, theft, and eating the limb of a live animal. Jewish authorities claim that because Christianity and Islam worship God they are not to be considered idolatrous, although some question the monotheistic nature of Christianity because of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. However, there is no question that members of Asian religions are practicing idolatrous worship, avodah zarah (“strange worship”). They are therefore in violation of the Noahide Law not to worship idols.With some exceptions, Orthodox rabbis in recent times agree with Rabbi Avigdor Miller (1908–2001) that “Buddhism, Shintoism, and all other religions of the Far East are forms of idol worship.”1 For Rabbi Miller the Torah contains all the knowledge that is necessary for Jews, and to even study another religious tradition is an affront to God. That this attitude toward the study of alien texts is common today is evident from the reaction of Rabbi Chaim Zvi Hollander to the suggestion of Rabbi Zalman Schachter that it is permissible to explore Asian forms of spirituality. Hollander charges that “Zalman Schachter’s incredible advice is a direct contradiction of the Almighty’s request that we not seek out and explore the spiritual modes of the Goyim, even if it is for the purpose of enhancing our spiritual experience in the service of our God.”2 He further states that “the practice of any religion other than Judaism is for a Jew an act of Avoda Zara.”3For Rabbis Miller and Hollander, blending Judaism with the Buddhist tradition, which is not concerned with a creator God and which rejects the idea of self, is inconceivable and more dangerous than Jews who convert to another religious tradition. However, even among the Orthodox, there are divergent views. Irving Greenberg, one of the outstanding liberal Orthodox rabbis of our generation, after meeting with the Dalai Lama wrote, “the Dalai Lama taught us a lot about Buddhism, even more about menschlichkeit... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Future of ReligionMark WoodThe Future of Religion. By Richard RortyGianni Vattimo. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 91 pp.In The Future of Religion, Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo provide contrasting and often complementary reflections on the future of religion after the end of metaphysics. They join a growing number of contemporary theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics who recognize (...) that we are presently undergoing [End Page 162] what may well prove to be the most significant turning point in the history of religious experience, a movement beyond the separatism resulting from absolutist and exclusionary religious claims. In addition to post-Enlightenment critiques of religion, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the retreat of religion resulting from, in Darwin’s words, “the gradual illumination of men’s minds” by advances in science, globalization’s world-transforming integration of individuals from diverse religious backgrounds into communities of shared interest and concern are further weakening the confidence with which any particular religious tradition may claim to possess absolute truth and, even more, fostering transreligious conversation and the formation of a postmetaphysical spiritual culture.The future of religion, writes Vattimo in Vero e falso Universalismo cristiano, lies not in “seeking the triumph of one faith over the others.” Rather we must “rediscover—after the ‘metaphysical’ age of absolutisms and of the identity between truth and authority—the possibility of a postmodern religious experience in which the relation with the divine is no longer corrupted by fear, violence, and superstition” (p. 26). We know all to well the horrific costs of failing to accomplish this goal, and today the union of religious absolutisms and weapons of mass destruction make our failure potentially catastrophic.In his introduction, “A Religion without Theists or Atheists,” Zabala notes that Rorty and Vattimo present a way of thinking beyond the ontotheological tradition that “consists of weakening and dissolving the ancient European concept of ‘Being’ and the very idea of ‘ontological status.’ This new, weak way of thought not only opens up alternative directions, it also recovers tradition: the relationship between the believer and God is not conceived as power-laden but as a gentler relationship, in which God hands over all his power to man” (p. 3). In the “Age of Interpretation” neither science, nor philosophy, nor religion enjoys epistemological or ontological authority over the other. The resulting “Gadamerian culture of dialogue,” which understands that “all positions are equally ‘valid’ because ‘of the lack of confidence in truth’ constitutes the greatest success obtained by the deconstruction of metaphysics” (p. 11). After metaphysics, “postmodern man, no longer needful of the extreme, magical reassurance supplied by the idea of God, accepts the probably that history is not on his side at all and that there is no power capable of guaranteeing him the happiness he seeks” (ibid.). Living without metaphysical foundations means affirming our ontological historicity, epistemological insecurity, and existential finitude. Rather than “search for truth,” says Zabala, we now “seek solidarity, charity, and irony” (pp. 17–18).In “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” Rorty articulates the historical movement to postmetaphysical thinking as one in which “philosophy professors began to stop asking “bad questions—questions like ‘What really exists?’ ‘What are the scope and limits of human knowledge?’ and ‘How does language hook up with reality?’” and began to focus on questions regarding how we can best practice solidarity, charity, and love (p. 29). Rorty’s description of our situation leads him to confess that his earlier self-identification as an atheist was philosophically mistaken. To deny the existence of God assumes one has evidence in support of this claim. But evidence against is equally empirically unavailable as is evidence for the existence of God. President [End Page 163] Bush, Rorty adds, is at least right about this much when he says that “‘atheism is a faith’ because it is ‘subject to neither confirmation nor refutation by means of argument or evidence’” (p. 33). The shift from atheism to anticlericalism is a shift from a metaphysical to a political stance, signifying Rorty’s commitment to challenging antidemocratic structures of power that legitimate their existence by claiming they have been ordained by... (shrink)

According to the knowledge view of evidence notoriously defended by Timothy Williamson (2000), for any subject, her evidence consists of all and only her propositional knowledge (E=K). Many have found (E=K) implausible. However, few have offered arguments against Williamson’s positive case for (E=K). In this paper, I propose an argument against Williamson’s positive case in favour of (E=K). Central to my argument is the possibility of the knowledge of necessary truths. I also draw some more (...) general conclusions concerning theorizing about evidence. Keywords: functions of evidence, E=K, evidential probability, probability raising. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religious Epistemology Through Schillebeeckx and Tibetan Buddhism by Jason VonWachenfeldtRobert MagliolaRELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY THROUGH SCHILLEBEECKX AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM. By Jason VonWachenfeldt. T&T Clark: London, 2021. 240 pp.In his "Introduction," Jason VonWachenfeldt explains the "crisis of authority" experienced by many religious believers, and then commits his book (hereinafter RET) to a "dialogic negotiation" offering middle ways between religious tradition and postmodernity. The "dialogic negotiation" is between (...) the brilliant but controversial Catholic theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009), and the brilliant but controversial Tibetan monk (then ex-monk), Gendun Chopel (1903–1951). They both deconstruct the epistemologies of their respective traditions, but insist on the orthodoxy of their "middle ways."VonWachenfeldt opts for Aaron Stalnaker's methodology of "bridge concepts" (topics enabling interfaith comparison) and the comparison of two "historically situated" individuals (13). He names "religious epistemology" as RET's "bridge-concept," and to further facilitate comparison, three epistemological "categories" are posited: "perspectivalism, hermeneutics, and apophaticism" (64). Schillebeeckx's "phenomenological Thomism" constitutes his perspectivalist first phase, and holds that revelation includes both a "concrete-existential" and non-conceptual "implicit intuition" of the divine reality (32). There is an antinomy between the individual's act of abstraction and the "implicit intuition" of the "reality of God in Godself" (33).Chopel's negative way is more extreme. Chopel is a Madhyamakin but rejects Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka's version which affirms the "conventional validity" of the mundane. For Chopel, all formations lack even conventional validity but "common [End Page 404] beings" falsely affirm them (35). The few "noble ones" (the enlightened) are those aware of pure emptiness (understood as "absence," not "openness"). Schillebeeckx's second phase affirms that one is embedded in ongoing history and cannot escape mundane finitude. God must be seen as "mystery" active within it (45). Chopel's second phase extends the notion that an unbridgeable chasm exists between the conventional and the ultimate but that the Buddha can manipulate the mundane so the leap to enlightenment can occur (49). Schillebeeckx's third phase practices a "negative realist metaphysic": The individual encounters the "really real" external to oneself only by way of "glimpses negative in nature" (58). Chopel's apophaticism describes ultimate reality in terms of a "nonaffirming negative" (63).Next, RET treats the role of religious community in knowledge formation (67). For Schillebeeckx, our "non-divine finitude is precisely the place where the infinite and the finite come most closely into contact" (90). The later Schillebeeckx retains loyalty to the institutional Church but because of the finitude of language and human nature he deems it necessarily subject to critique (92). Chopel practices a "pious skepticism" (97), and increasingly satirizes institutional monasticism (circa 1934, he disrobes). Addressing the role of historical founders of religions, Schillebeeckx maintains that theology should shift from an unsalvageable truth lost in the past to the more eschatological language of "the [always] Coming One" (123). Jesus's epistemological authority does not reside in his ability "to supply answers" as much as it is to open up individuals to "a future reality in the making" (148). Honorific titles such as "Savior" or "Christ" as such are not serviceable. Jesus's story is an exemplar of how to construct meaning in our lives by the "praxis" of helping the suffering. Chopel likewise demythologizes Sakyamuni Buddha (151), but—unlike Schillebeeckx—insists he does so endogenously. For example, he enters the definitive/provisional (nītārtha/neyārtha) debate, but argues that all the teachings of Śākyamuni are both—they are definitive for those whom they help toward emptiness and merely provisional for all others (157, 158).RET's chapter 5 addresses the authority of personal experience in the apophatic knowledge of ultimate reality. How is it possible for "true knowledge" to be "primarily experiential in nature as distinct from being conceptually or linguistically based?" (163). Schillebeeckx holds that our very experience of human finitude brings us negatively in contact with the "unknown ultimate reality itself" (169). He maintains that the apparent lack of ontological contact between beings and ultimate reality (God) is "one-sided," persisting only from the side of our finitude and not from the side of ultimate reality: Though humans can never directly... (shrink)

Does the alleged religious experience of a mystic constitute a reliable source of knowledge about the object of his or her experience? Or does it rationally justify a move from such experience to meaningful beliefs about God or the Absolute which is supposed to be the object of that experience? And are religious beliefs in need of being grounded in religious experience in order to be rationally justified? Although it seems pretty obvious that a great many (...) adherents of all religions find reasons for their beliefs in their religious traditions rather than in their personal religious experiences, one could note that usually these traditions present religious experiences of their founder figures as constituting evidence for their authenticity and truthfulness ; the supposed mystical experiences of some adherents of a given religious tradition are often treated by their co-believers as an important evidence which increases credibility of their own religious convictions. (shrink)

"This book is designed for those who have this concern and puzzlement (though, of course, it offers no guarantee of resolving such puzzlement). It is not designed to be a highly specialized and technical treatise in philosophy of religion but one which can be read and appreciated by students and educated laymen. It has two specific purposes, that of providing a clear picture of development in contemporary philosophy and the impact of these developments in philosophy of religion, and (...) that of systematically exploring the question, "Is there religious knowledge?" Contemporary philosophy is used as a point of reference for devising a framework within which this question can be answered. Space limitations have forced an all-to-brief treatment of some positions. Such brevity tends to distort but I have made efforts to avoid such distortion." -Author's Preface. (shrink)

In this paper I will take it for granted that Zagzebski's position articulates a broadly Catholic perspective, and that Plantinga's position accurately represents a broadly Calvinist one. But I will argue that so construed, the Catholic and the Calvinist are much closer than Zagzebski implies: both views are person-based in an important sense of that term; both are internalist on Zagzebski's usage and externalist on the standard usage; and Plantinga's position is consistent with the social elements that Zagzebski stresses in (...) her view. In the second part of the paper I will identify what I think is the real issue between Zagzebski and Plantinga. Namely, Zagzebski thinks that knowledge requires epistemic responsibility, in the sense that instances of knowledge must be appropriately praiseworthy. Plantinga thinks that no such condition is required for knowledge or warranted belief. I will argue that on this issue Zagzebski is right, and that her virtue approach gives us resources for seeing why. Finally, I will look at the consequences for religious knowledge. Here I will argue that the consequences are minimal. Even if knowledge requires responsibility, Plantinga can still make a good case that religious belief is properly basic. And even if religious belief is properly basic, natural theology can still have an important role in the justification of religious belief. (shrink)

The object of this paper is partly to plead a cause, partly to proclaim a grievance. The last domain of ancient Greek life to attract the serious attention and study of modern scholars has been that of Greek Religion; and the exposition of it has revealed its many vital points of contact with the moral and spiritual energy and the artistic and poetic monuments of the ancient Hellenic race. An enthusiastic votary of this study might venture to hope that (...) some general acquaintance with its facts and ideas would henceforth be recognized as belonging to the general curriculum of Hellenic culture. But any one merely interested in the good workmanship of the classical commentary ought at least to insist that something more than a general acquaintance with this subject should be regarded by those who set themselves to edit certain portions of the Greek classics as an essential preliminary and as a necessary part of their scholarly equipment. The authors to whom this rule specially applies are Hesiod, Pindar and the Attic Dramatists. A satisfying commentary on Hesiod is still a desideratum; and for such an achievement a long apprenticeship in anthropology and religious studies would be a necessity. (shrink)

My thesis is on the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of religion. Contemporary religious epistemology asks the question of how, if at all, can religious belief be rationally justified. I focus on a relatively new tradition that responds to this question known as Reformed Epistemology, as advanced by Alvin Plantinga. Reformed Epistemologists argue that belief in God can be rational, reasonable, and justified without appeal to evidence as was traditionally thought. Plantinga argues that religious (...) belief stems from an innate faculty which produces properly basic beliefs that need not rest on any other beliefs for their justification. My aim is to critically examine these claims. My thesis begins in section I with a discussion of Plantinga’s early attacks on classical foundationalism and Evidentialism, that is, the view that being rational means according one's belief with the evidence. His early goal is to discredit the Evidentialist objection by rebutting the flawed epistemological system he argues it presupposes. In so doing, Plantinga attempts to loosen the canons of basicality to include the belief in God as properly basic. -/- In section II I then discuss Plantinga’s notion of warrant, which is his term for justification – the hallmark difference between true belief and knowledge. After examining the tenability of Plantinga’s concept of what makes belief warranted, I examine how successfully he specifically applies this notion of justification to religious belief. Plantinga’s contention is that religious belief can enjoy enough warrant so that if the belief is true, it will constitute knowledge. In examining this claim I evaluate in section III Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, his Aquinas/Calvin model in section IV, potential rationality defeaters in section V and in section VI the larger question of the internalism / externalism debate and its influence on these central issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews REPLY TO PINCOCK S S Philosophy / U. of Southern California Los Angeles,  -,  @. write to correct errors in Christopher Pincock’s review of my discussion of IRussell. First, according to Pincock, I attempt to “undermine Moore’s views on ethics in Part One, [and] Russell’s conception of analysis in Part Two” by charging them with a pre-Kripkean (...) conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity. Not so. Although I do show that such conflation had negative consequences for the views of several philosophers, Moore and Russell are not among them. Moore’s error—which marred the defence of his thesis that conclusions about goodness are never consequences of purely descriptive premisses —was in tacitly assuming that all necessary/a priori relations among concepts arise from definitions (see my : –). A similar problem occurs in Russell, but only tangentially in connection with one possible route to his problematic principle () in Our Knowledge of the External World, the critique of which was not a part of any attack on his general conception of analysis (: –). () If the occurrence of sense-data constitutes verification of S, then S must be (at least partly) about sense-data.  Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. : The Dawn of Analysis (Princeton: Princeton U. P., ), pp. –.  Russell, n.s.  (winter –): – (at ).  Except when otherwise indicated, all references to OKEW will be to the revised,  Allen and Unwin edition. Although this was the edition I used in writing my chapter on OKEW, my bibliographical citation was a confused amalgam of different editions. The work was originally published in  by Open Court; there was a second printing in ; and in  Allen and Unwin re-issued it by purchasing extra sheets of the  printing, and binding them. In , Russell revised the work, which Allen and Unwin then published as a revised edition. That edition is identical to the Routledge paperback edition now in print and used by students. (Russell revised the  edition again for Norton’s  edition, which was reset for the Mentor paperback.) Except at one point, which I will identify later, the difference between the  and the  editions doesn’t affect my dispute with Pincock. Thanks to the editor, Kenneth Blackwell, for kindly sharing his extensive knowledge of the bibliographical history with me, and to Ross Scimeca, the head librarian at the incomparable Hoose Philosophy Library at , for furnishing me with copies of the editions I needed to sort this out. _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52 Reviews  Evidently, Pincock has confused the error about definition, which I expose, with a pre-Kripkean conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity, which is not mentioned in Parts One and Two. This is a blunder. The advances in our understanding of crucial logical, semantic, epistemological, and modal notions which I identify as paramount achievements of the analytic tradition are not limited to those made by Kripke. To suggest otherwise is a distortion. Second, Pincock errs when he objects that in citing () as a source for the view that sense-data statements give the content of material-object statements, I ascribe “some form of latent verificationism” to Russell. If the objection is that Russell was no verificationist—since he didn’t hold that S is meaningful only if S is verifiable—the reply is that I never suggested otherwise. What I said is that () together with () Verification always consists in the occurrence of sense-data constituted a historical precursor to verificationism (: ). Perhaps, then, Pincock objects to my reconstruction of Russell’s argument: since (i) truths of physics and common sense are known by being verified, (ii) it follows from () and () that our knowledge of them is knowledge of sense-data. Perhaps, Pincock thinks that Russell would reject (i). Citing Russell … if there is any knowledge of general truths at all, there must be some knowledge of general truths which is independent of empirical evidence, i.e. does not depend upon the data of sense. (OKEW, pp. –; OKEW, p. ) Pincock concludes that scientific knowledge, for Russell, is justified partly by sense-data, and partly by associated logical principles about relations... (shrink)

Greco argues that knowledge by transmission involves joint agency whose norms are governed by the quality of the social relations in the transmission, and these norms differ from the norms generating knowledge in the source. This approach to the transmission of knowledge allows Greco to respond to three common arguments against the rationality of religious belief on testimony: the argument against belief in miracles, the argument from luck, and the argument from peer disagreement. I agree with (...) Greco’s position on the transmission of knowledge or reasonable belief in these cases and argue that the distinction between first person and third person reasons for belief can strengthen his position. The experience upon which a belief is based can be transferred intersubjectively and strengthens the ground for the belief based on experience, including the belief in miracles. Trust is another first person reason for belief, not only a background condition for reasonable transmission, and it also can be transmitted and is an important component in the formation and preservation of traditions. This feature permits a reply to the arguments from luck and from disagreement with people outside the tradition. But this feature also shows why we find these arguments threatening since we are rationally committed to a minimal degree of trust in all other reasonable persons. (shrink)

Macaulay was wrong: The British public in one of its periodic fits of morality may be a ridiculous spectacle but it has at least one rival in the reaction we have recently witnessed to ‘cultural relativism’, ‘postmodernism’, and suchlike phenomena. One good illustration of the point is the argument of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998: London, Profile Books). Sokal and Bricmont spend the greater part of their time holding various postmodernist writers up to ridicule, and it would (...) be a waste of time to defend it against them. However, their most seriously argued chapter (chapter four) is a critique, not of postmodernism, but of epistemic relativism in the philosophy of science, as mainly exemplified by the work of Popper, Feyerabend, and Kuhn, and it is important to answer the case they make. There are many reasons for finding that case unconvincing. For example: (i) Sokal and Bricmont repeatedly imply that epistemic relativism is counter-intuitive. Against them it can be objected that some quite ordinary proposition can be both true and, at the same time, only true for beings with certain types of visual apparatus or with a certain cultural history. Nor are they right in claiming that all scientists find epistemic relativism implausible. Some do, but Chomsky doesn't. Neither does Stephen Hawking; (ii) Sokal and Bricmont suppose that there is a single, uniquely correct description of the universe ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but all the evidence we have suggests the contrary; (iii) it is not the case that epistemic relativism entails that any description is just as good as any other, so they are wrong to insist that it must endorse all manner of silly superstition; (iv) Sokal and Bricmont frequently insist that “the scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or in other domains of human knowledge” but this glosses over great differences between the procedures appropriate to different areas of inquiry – science on the one hand, history and/or psychoanalysis on the other. (shrink)

The eight essays assembled under this title were originally presented at the 1965 Great Thinkers Forum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Georgia. These essays are now being published in the conviction that they all make "valuable contributions toward the understanding and resolution of the contemporary challenge to theology and religion." The challenge in question is the one that comes from neopositivism and linguistic analysis. By the time the reader comes to the (...) end of his own effort he finds himself wondering in what sense the 1965 papers are to count as valuable contributions. No doubt they are valuable in the sense that it is worthwhile watching a single-minded philosopher pouring his soul out in an attempt at showing how the "disguised nonsense" of religious language is "patent nonsense," or how the "putatively factual assertions" of religious language are "bogus, pseudo-factual statements, devoid of the kind of intelligibility that believers rightly demand of them." Along the way one may collect pearls of rare beauty, such as the statement that "There is no convention in English or logical rule which makes ‘there is no God’ a contradiction," or questions such as "Who has observed him under controlled conditions?" Another contribution of the same general usefulness may well be that the thoughtful reader is being initiated to the exertions of that transformational hermeneutics by which pseudo-assertive religious statements are being rescued from wholesale meaninglessness, and accorded the innocuous meaningfulness of emotive or convictional language, or of disguised moral discourse. Professor Frank H. Harrison III makes an interesting attempt at injecting into the landscape, linguistically and epistemologically so bleak, what he calls "knowledge by acquaintance," which is in his vocabulary the equivalent of what mysticism calls amor Dei, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes as a seeing with the heart. The discussion of myth by Professor Robert H. Ayers ignores what happens to be the heart of the matter in mythic thinking, namely the absence of the distinction between object and subject, but does provide a good introduction to the "profusion of confusion" that flourishes around myth, "one of the most traveled hobos in our times.". (shrink)

With respect to many, if not most issues, there exist significant differences of opinion among individuals who seem to be equally knowledgeable and sincere. Individuals who apparently have access to the same information and are equally interested in the truth affirm incompatible perspectives on, for instance, significant social, political, and economic issues. Such diversity of opinion, though, is nowhere more evident than in the area of religious thought. On almost every religious issue, honest, knowledgeable people hold significantly diverse, (...) often incompatible beliefs. -/- Religious diversity of this sort can fruitfully be explored in many ways — for instance, from psychological, anthropological, or historical perspectives. The current discussion, however, will concern itself primarily with those key issues surrounding religious diversity with which philosophers, especially analytic philosophers of religion, are most concerned at present. Specifically, our discussion will focus primarily on the following questions: How pervasive is religious diversity? Does the reality of this diversity require a response? Can a person who acknowledges religious diversity remain justified in claiming just one perspective to be correct? If so, is it morally justifiable to attempt to convert others to a different perspective? Can it justifiably be claimed that only one religion offers a path into the eternal presence of God? The answers to such questions are not simply academic. They increasingly have great impact on how we treat others, both personally and corporately. (shrink)

Book Reviews in this article Baptism and Resurrection: Studies in Pauline Theology against its Graeco‐Roman Background. By A.J.M. Wedderburn. Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians. By Frances Young and David Ford. Jesus and God in Paul's Eschatology. By L. Joseph Kreitzer. The Acts of the Apostles : By Hans Conzelmann. The Genesis of Christology: Foundations for a Theology of the New Testament. By Petr Pokorny. The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. (...) By Hans Küng, translated by J.R. Stephenson. The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology. By Brian Hebblethwaite. Models for God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. By Sallie McFague. Pp. xv, 224, London, SCM Press, 1987, £8.50 Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology. By Michael G. Lawler. The Sacrifice We Offer: The Tridentine Dogma and its Reinterpretation. By David N. Power. New Eucharistic Prayers: An Ecumenical Study of their Development and Structure. Edited by Frank C. Senn. To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage. By Kenneth W. Stevenson. Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God. By George Guiver. The Long‐Legged Fly. By Don Cupitt. Approaches to Auschwitz. By Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth. Natural Law and Justice. By Lloyd L. Weinreb. Christian Morality: The Word Becomes Flesh. By Josef Fuchs S.J., translated by Brian McNeil. Medicine in Contemporary Society: King's College Studies 1986–87. Edited by Peter Byrne. Military Ethics: Guidelines for Peace and War. By N. Fotion and G. Elfstrom. Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action. By Alan Donagan. Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry. Edited by Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillet. The Rationality of Emotion. By Ronald de Sousa. The Psychology of Personality: An Epistemological Inquiry. By James T. Lamiell. Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. By Anne Sheppard. The Ascetic Element in Culture and Criticism. By Geoffrey Gait Harpham. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. By Michael Heim. Education and Philosophical Anthropology: Toward a New View of Man for the Humanities and English. By David Holbrook. Evolution and the Humanities. By David Holbrook. Further Studies in Philosophical Anthropology. By David Holbrook. Women in Western Political Philosophy. Edited by Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus. The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes. By Nicholas Jolley. Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas. By Stephen M. Nadler. Later Medieval Philosophy : An Introduction. By John Marenbon. Either/Or. By Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987: Vol. One, Wittgenstein. By A.C. Grayling. Questions on Wittgenstein. By Rudolf Haller. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy. By David Pears, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Vol. One, The Later Wittgenstein: The Emergence of a New Philosophical Method. By S. Stephen Hilmy. Knowledge of God: Calvin, Einstein and Polanyi. By Iain Paul. Conceptual Change and Religious Practice with Special Reference to Jews in Britain and Israel. By Janice Williams. The World's Religions. Edited by Stewart Sutherland, Leslie Houlden, Peter Clarke and Friedhelm Hardy. Religions in Conversation: Christian Identity and Religious Pluralism. By Michael Barnes. Theravāda Buddhism, A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modem Colombo. By Richard Gombrich. Mahāyāna Buddhism, The Doctrinal Foundations. By Paul Williams. Hinduism in Great Britain: The Perpetuation of Religion in an Alien Cultural Milieu. Edited by Richard Burghart. The Way of the Black Messiah. By Theo Witvliet. The Meaning of Religious Conversion in Africa. By Cyril C. Okorocha. Common Ground: Christianity, African Religion and Philosophy. By Emmanuel K. Twesigye. Islamic Spirituality I: Foundations. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. By Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine. By J. Neusner. Language and the Worship of the Church. Edited by David Jasper and R.C.D. Jasper. The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development and Meaning of Stational Liturgy. By John E. Baldovin. Leontii Presbyteri Constantinopolitani Homiliae. Edited by Cornells Datema and Pauline Allen. Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. By James A. Brundage. Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation. By Klaus D Alonso de Zorita: RoyalJudge and Christian Humanist, 1512–1585. By Ralph H. Vigil. Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571–1591. By Stafford Poole. Archbishop William Laud. By Charles Carlton. The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730. By Callum G. Brown. Pastors and Pluralism in Württemberg, 1918–1933. By David J. Diephouse. The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol. One: Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions, 1918–1934. By Klaus Scholder. Reforming Fundamentalism. Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. By George M. Marsden. The Hellenistic Philosophers Vol. II: Greek and Latin Texts with Notes and Bibliography. By A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley. Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed. Edited by R.C.D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming. The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart. By Cyprian Smith. Meister Eckhart: The Man from whom God Hid Nothing. Edited by Ursula Fleming. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola: A New Translation. Translated by Elisabeth Meier Tetlow. Courtfield and the Vaughans: An English Catholic Inheritance. By Mary Vaughan. Trinity College, Washington D.C.: The First Eighty Years, 1897–1977. By Columba Mullaly. John Henry Newman on the Idea of Church. By Edward Jeremy Miller. Journey from Paradise: Aft Athos and the Interior Life. By Ralph Harper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RECONSIDERING AQUINAS AS POSTLIBERAL THEOLOGIAN FREDERICK J. CROSSON University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana IN A RECENT issue of this journal 1 Bruce Marshall argued that the position of Thomas Aquinas on faith and reasonin particular on the meaning of assertions about God-can be read as fundamentally convergent with that of the contemporary theologian, George Lindbeck. The claim is striking because, as Marshall acknowledges, the traditional reading (...) of Aquinas is quite different. Traditionally-Gilson is Marshall's example -it has been thought that the conclusion of a demonstration of God's existence or unity could be true, could correspond to reality, quite independently of the religious doctrines concerning the revealed mysteries of the Godhead. But Marshall argues that, in fact, the texts of Aquinas explicitly deny that the non-believer is really succeeding in talking about God at all. The claim is a challenging one, and one from which there seems much to learn, because it is not only bold-and so promises a significant shift in the traditional understanding of Aquinas's meaning-but confronts many of the texts which seem to warrant that traditional understanding. Even if his reading is wrong, which I believe it is, there is benefit in thinking through the reasons why it is wrong and in clarifying not only what Aquinas taught but also what is at issue. I propose to do three things: first, to state the interpretation which Marshall, enlarging on Lindbeck, wants to give of the 1 Bruce D. Marshall, "Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian," The Thomist 53 (July 89) : 353-402. The article is followed by George Lindbeck, "Response to Bruce Marshall," 403-406. 481 482 FREDERICK J. CROSSON position of Aquinas on the possibility of natural knowledge of God; second, to examine several instances of Marshall's reading which are integral to his arguments but which I think are wrong, i.e., misconstrue the texts he is dealing with; third, to reflect briefly on one of the larger issues which seem to me involved in the questions here discussed, namely the commensurability of the teachings of the major religious traditions. I In Lindbeck's view,2 the propositions about God (or "the Ultimate Mystery") which religious doctrines assert can have " ontological truth " or correspond to reality only if the categories in terms of which those propositions are formulated are adequate to express that reality. This condition may be called the " categorial truth " of the doctrine, and " can thus be described as potential ontological truth,... a religion has this kind of truth when its ' categories ' are capable of being used to describe what is ultimately real" (359).3 The categorial truth of religious doctrine is thus a necessary condition for its teachings to be "ontologically true," i.e., to correspond to what is. But it is not a sufficient condition. The categories employed by the teachings must be used in the proper way: the composing and dividing of the categories (e.g., "Father," "person," "nature") must be a composing and dividing which asserts what, according to the religious doctrine, really is combined and separated. But for the utterances 4 of a believer to be ontologically true, they 2 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984). 3 Page numbers without other citation will be to Marshall's article; see note 1. 4 Lindbeck also seems to make it a necessary condition of " ontological truth" that the utterance be performative in J. L. Austin's sense. The Nature of Doctrine, p. 68 et pass. Since Marshall does not dwell on this in his article, I only note it here. For a brief but incisive criticism of this condition, see Paul Griffiths, "An Apology for Apologetics," Faith and Philosophy 5 (Oct. 1988) : 409-11. It may be that Lindbeck was led to stress utterances as the locus of truth, curious though that seems, because the alternative is to make what is uttered true, and that would be independent of the person's practice in a way that utterance seems not to be. AQUINAS AS POSTLIBERAL THEOLOGIAN 483 must also be consistent or cohere with the paradigmatic propositions of the religion, with its revealed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 203-205 [Access article in PDF] The Taipai, Taiwan, Museum of World Religions Maria Reis Habito Dallas, Texas A new museum dedicated to exploring the world's great religious traditions opened in Taipei this past November. Its professed mission is rather unique: to teach about religions and religious life in the world, and to provide instructive experiences about the variety of the world's religious (...) expressions as a basis for mutual understanding, peace, and love among peoples of the world. The vision for the museum as a place that will foster religious learning, interreligious dialogue, and cooperation was developed by its founder, the Venerable Dharma Master Hsin Tao. He conceived the museum as an educational institution that will "explore the fundamental values that are at the roots of all religions." The mission of the museum—"to encourage respect, tolerance and love by fostering dialogue among people of all faiths and backgrounds as we work together to create greater understanding and peaceful interaction in the New Millennium"—has attracted widespread support among his disciples in Taiwan and overseas, whose contributions have made the museum project possible. The Content of the Museum of World Religions The goal in the content development and design of the museum has been twofold: (1) to create an institution of learning in which the visitor will find well structured information about important aspects of the world's religions and (2) to create an interactive space that, in the words of Ralph Applebaum, "immerses the visitors in an experience that enables them to view religion from many different perspectives to gain a better understanding of their own faith and the faith of others." To this, Professor Sullivan added, "[V]isitors will be invited to explore all religions as expressions of a universal search for purpose, meaning, and enlightenment. The museum will be a living monument to the human spirit and a sanctuary honoring the world's myriad faith traditions." To engage the visitor in this exploration, the visit to the museum has been designed as a journey that, even though not a ritual per se, has a structure analogous to the three-part structure of religious rituals.First, visitors experience a moment of separation from everyday life and enter into a very different quality of space and time. Second, during this kind of "time out," [End Page 203] suspended between the normal moments of everyday activity, the visitors undergo a special and intense experience, during which they receive knowledge that transforms their understanding and alters their self-perception. Such transformation occurs in the face of powerful sacred objects, symbols, or events that are displayed and experiencedin relatively dramatic presentations in the museum. They invite the visitor to participate and interact. Thirdly, steps are undertaken to reinsert the visitor back into the life of daily activity.There are fourteen steps to the museum experience, each of which lands the visitor in a different place, with its own experience of time. At each step, in each place, the religious structure of time is viewed on a different scale, seen under a different order of magnification. The museum experience is an orderly succession of times, magnified and mapped onto a series of spaces that invite the visitor's interaction. The aim is to offer the visitor an experience that, like a ritual, is satisfying and transformative and yet remains an experience proper to an institute of learning.As an example of one of the steps, imagine coming from the lobby (step 5) into the Prime Times Theater (step 6). The panel on the eastern wall of the lobby slides aside, and you enter into the darkened theater as into a cave. You are implanted there in the mysterious and primeval space to relive the experience of the seed of love and peace, planted in the fertile grounds of origins. In a fifteen-minute film you view the primordial times described in religious myths and relive the drama and emotion of how life came to be as it is. A powerful weave of narration and imagery retells the stories and poses fundamental questions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thoughts on Why, How, and What Buddhists Can Learn from Christian TheologiansJohn MakranskyWith my co-panelists, I am asked to respond to the question: "Can and should Buddhists and Christians do theology (or Buddhology) together, and if so why and how?"1 I will respond as a Tibetan Buddhist of Nyingma tradition. My answer is "yes," we can and should, where "doing theology together" for me means learning things from (...) Christian theologians that illumine significant aspects of my Buddhist understanding. How is one to learn things for Buddhist understanding from Christian theology—what method should be used? I find the method of comparative theology, as developed recently by scholars such as Francis Clooney and James Fredericks, to be a productive approach for interreligious theological learning, including Christian-Buddhist learning. But first the question of why must be addressed: a Buddhist comparative theology must be motivated and informed by a theology of religions that convincingly articulates for Buddhists why they can learn things from religious others that can make a positive difference for their own understanding and practice of awakening.If the why and how to learn from religious others is well enough addressed, then one would have the motivation and orientation to explore specific Buddhist learnings from non-Buddhist theologies. In what follows, then, I will make a start at addressing the how, why and what of Buddhist interreligious learning by briefly summarizing the method of comparative theology, considerations toward developing a Buddhist theology of religions that can support such learning by Buddhists, and some examples of Christian themes that have been resources for my own learning.Comparative TheologyThe purpose of comparative theology is to learn from a different religious tradition in enough depth and specificity to shine significant new light on your own. By paying careful attention to elements of another religious tradition in their own context of doctrine and practice, your perspective on corresponding elements of your own faith may be shifted in ways that permit new insights to emerge. This does not merely [End Page 119] involve learning at a distance about other religious beliefs and cultures that leaves your own religious self-understanding unaffected. Rather, comparative theological analysis provides a method to learn from religious others in specific ways that newly inform your understanding of your own faith and may also energize and deepen your practice of it.2 For this kind of learning to occur, certain supportive dispositions are necessary, such as those identified in Catherine Cornille's book The Im-Possibilty of Interreligious Dialogue. These include: (1) doctrinal humility, the acknowledgment that the doctrinal formulations of your own tradition, including its formulations of other religions, are conditioned viewpoints that have never perfectly captured the whole truth; (2) knowledgeable commitment to your own religious tradition, so that whatever you learn from religious others may inform your religious community and tradition through you; and (3) in the context of potential Buddhists learning from Christians, a belief that there is enough common ground between Buddhism and Christianity that it is possible to hear things from Christians that make a positive difference for Buddhists in their own understanding and practice of awakening.3Theologies of ReligionsFor such dispositions to support comparative theological learning, in turn, they must be motivated and informed by an adequate theology of religions. A theology of religions is an understanding of other religious systems that explores their potential truth from within the theological framework of your own religious tradition. You can, as an individual, learn many things from other religions. But for your learning to inform not only yourself but also your religious community and tradition, it must make sense to your tradition in its own framework of understanding. And as Mark Heim, John Thatamanil, and Kristen Kiblinger have argued, behind any interest (or disinterest) in learning from other religions lies a theology of religions that is either conscious or unconscious.4 How do I see the potential to learn significant truths from religious others? If my theology of religions is uncritically exclusivist, I may see only errors in religious others unaware that my perspective on them is limited by my own vision. Or if my theology of religions is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 225-237 [Access article in PDF] Did Bayle Read Saint-Evremond? Thomas M. Lennon Of course Bayle read Saint-Evremond—he quotes him. Moreover, he published one of Saint-Evremond's texts. But there is reading, and then there is reading. There is selective, inattentive perusal of excerpts or even secondary sources, with no attempt to penetrate beyond a superficial understanding; and then there is comprehensive, close (...) scrutiny of the best primary sources, with sensitivity to nuance, and attention to context. In short, there is a difference between skimming and studying. Did Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) skim or study the work of Saint-Evremond (ca.1614-1703)?This article argues that Bayle's first-hand knowledge of Saint-Evremond's work was superficial and dependent on a secondary source that gives that work a less than obvious, and hitherto unappreciated meaning for Bayle. This shift matters because it bears on the question of the status of Bayle's religious faith. With her classic Pierre Bayle (1963-64), Elizabeth Labrousse set aside the traditional view of Bayle as a religious skeptic whose professions of faith cannot be taken at face value. Such had been the view held by many in Bayle's own time, most notably by Pierre Jurieu, and near-universally from the Enlightenment into the twentieth century. Very recently, in a work that is no less impressive than hers on this and other topics in Bayle, Gianluca Mori has defended the traditional view, basing a part of his argument on Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond. 1 Thus the question above. Moreover, the matter of Bayle's religious belief is not a merely biographical one. First, there is the fact of his [End Page 225] influence, especially given his huge readership, although Bayle's influence may well be other than anything he intended. Secondly, in any case, the interpretation of Bayle's work as a whole depends on it, for virtually everything he wrote besides the Dictionnaire has a religious dimension.To appreciate the importance of the question, something must first be said about Charles de Marguetel de St. Denis, sieur de Saint-Evremond. He was known in his time, and still is, as a libertine. It is difficult, however, to define libertinage beyond a combination of hedonistic mores and dubious religious beliefs—Epicureanism in some loose and popular sense. 2 What is more important, in any case, is how Bayle might have thought the term applied to Saint-Evremond; and here it is clear that outright atheism may have been at issue. Bayle reports that it was publicly known that Saint-Evremond "ended his long life, just as he had lived it, en esprit fort." He seems certainly to have died without benefit of religion. When asked on his deathbed whether he wished to be reconciled, says Bayle, he answered yes, "with all my heart. I would like to be reconciled with my appetite. For my stomach is no longer functioning in its usual way." Bayle was often at pains to insist upon the ultimate inaccessibility of others' real beliefs (and of the inappropriateness of attempting to reach them). In this case, however, he was prepared to hold up Saint-Evremond as a counter-example to the widely-held belief that there were no speculative atheists, i.e., people who would sincerely deny the existence of God, but only practical atheists, i.e., people who live as if they did not believe in the existence of God, but who, try as they may, are at least occasionally aware of it. 3This view of Saint-Evremond is important because, when accused of irreligion himself, Bayle cited the libertine's work as indicative of his own beliefs. To understand how Bayle came to be accused, and the significance of this response to it, some of the historical background is first necessary. Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique sold better than any text in the eighteenth century, philosophical or otherwise; and it was a best-seller right from the publication of its first edition, in... (shrink)

According to the safety account of knowledge, one knows that p only if one’s belief could not easily have been false. An important issue for the account is whether we should only examine the target belief when evaluating whether a belief is safe or not. In this paper, it is argued that, if we should only examine the target belief, then the account fails to account for ignorance of necessary truths. But, if we should also (...) examine beliefs in other relevant propositions, then the account fails to account for knowledge from falsehood. Therefore, the safety account of knowledge is undermined by knowledge from falsehood and ignorance of necessary truths. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism by Swami MedhanandaAnantanand Rambachan (bio)Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism. By Swami Medhananda. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 412. Hardcover $99.00, isbn 978-0-197624-46-3.As a young man, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, addressed a direct question to the teachers he encountered in his quest for religious certainty. "Have you seen God?" asked Vivekananda. The first affirmative reply to his (...) question came in 1882 when he met Ramakrishna (1836-1886), who eventually became his teacher and mentor:"Do you believe in God, Sir?" asked Vivekananda."Yes," replied Ramakrishna."Can you prove it Sir?""Yes.""How?""Because I see him just as I see you here, only in a much intenser sense."(p. 144)Ramakrishna's unhesitating reply had a deep impact on the young Vivekananda. "For the first time," said Vivekananda, "I found a man who dared to say that he saw God, that religion was a reality to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense way than we can sense the world" (p. 144).This pivotal encounter with Ramakrishna and his claim about the perception of God found more systematic expression in Vivekananda's arguments for supersensuous perception as the only ultimately authoritative source of knowledge about the nature of God and other matters that are not accessible through our ordinary ways of knowing. Medhananda's book, Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism, is a wide-ranging discussion of many facets of Vivekananda's interpretations of the tradition of Advaita Vedānta and religion in general. These include the decisive influence of Ramakrishna on Vivekananda, Vivekananda's departure from Śaṅkara, and his understanding of the possibilities and limits of reason, the nature of faith and the hard problem of consciousness. The single theme, implicitly and explicitly, present throughout his discussion, is the reality and epistemic significance of mystical experience: "For Vivekananda, we can achieve 'objective certitude' of God's existence…through a self-authenticating realization of God that guarantees its own veridicality" (p. 285). [End Page 1] Medhananda ends his work calling for greater recognition of the importance of spiritual experience for our understanding of the nature of consciousness (p. 371). One comes away from his work thinking that the edifice of Vivekananda's philosophy stands or fall on his arguments for supersensuous perception as the highest authority for religious claims. Medhanananda is critical of appeals by Vivekananda to scripture unless such appeals are buttressed by affirming the supremacy of supersensuous experience (p. 341). Medhananda regards references to scripture alone as dogmatic. In those Advaita traditions, however, that regard scripture as a source of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), arguments for scripture are not asserted without appeals to reason and the evidence of other sources of valid knowledge (Rambachan 1991). In other words, appeals to scripture are not always dogmatically irrational.At the end of The Limits of Scripture: Vivekananda's Reinterpretation of the Vedas, I invited those who are the direct heirs of Vivekananda's legacy and those movements who have come under his influence "to provide a consistent and coherent account of the synthesis that he attempted" (p. 137). I regard Medhananda's work as a significant contribution to this much-needed task. His work on Vivekananda is an exercise in apologetics, understood as the effort to defend and clarify religious teachings through systematic argument, and is one of the most detailed, scholarly, and vigorous contemporary expositions of Vivekananda's thought. As a work in apologetics, however, readers will not find any significant criticism of Vivekananda's thought. The single significant one I found is his observation that there is a patronizing element in Vivekananda's situating of dualistic traditions on a lower salvific level than non-dualism (pp. 88-90).I am heartened by the fact that Medhananda acknowledges important differences between Vivekananda and Śaṅkara on several significant issues. As a scholar-monk of the Ramakrishna Order, Medhananda's position is unusual on this issue, and he must diverge from prominent members of his Order in this regard. At the heart of this difference is Śaṅkara's insistence on the... (shrink)

A pesar de que los historiadores han considerado frecuentemente que el conocimiento histórico moderno surge como contraparte a la filosofía de la historia y el positivismo, en la idea tradicional de narración la herencia de la filosofía dialéctica de Hegel es recurrente: en ambos casos, el devenir de la auto-constitución del ser determina el método de conocimiento. Hegel afirma que las fases de la lógica no son solamente condiciones trascendentales que hacen posible la experiencia, sino etapas en la auto-determinación del (...) Espíritu. Ranke sostiene que la narración es el método histórico apropiado debido a que la historia misma posee una estructura narrativa. Desde la década de 1970, esta idea de narración experimenta una crisis. Nuestra hipótesis es que las perspectivas predominantes de este concepto utilizadas actualmente por historiadores y teóricos de la historia corresponden a las principales posturas del pensamiento filosófico contemporáneo: la narración como modelo analítico, la narración como competencias del discurso práctico, la narración como mecanismo de legitimación, la narración sin estructura y la narración como necesidad transcultural. Despite the fact that historians have often considered that modern historical knowledge originates in opposition to philosophy of history and positivism, in the traditional idea of narration the inheritance of Hegel's dialectical philosophy is recurrent: in both cases, the becoming of the self-constitution of the Being determines the knowledge method. Hegel asseverates that phases of logic are not only transcendental conditions that make possible the experience, but stages in the self-determination of Spirit. Ranke affirms that narration is the historical appropriate method due to the fact that the history itself possesses a narrative structure. Since 1970's, this idea of narration undergoes a crisis. Our hypothesis is that the prevalent perspectives of this concept, used at present by historians and theorists of history, correspond to the principal positions of contemporary philosophical thought: narration as an analytic model, narration as condition of practical discourse, narration as a function of legitimation, narration without structure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics by Daniel P. ScheidJohn J. FitzgeraldThe Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics Daniel P. Scheid new york: oxford university press, 2016. 264 pp. $31.95Published shortly after the first encyclical to focus on the environment (Pope Francis's Laudato Si'), Daniel Scheid's first book is a significant advance in Christian ethics and religious ecology. Scheid argues (...) that resources in Catholic social thought and other religious traditions can move one to an appreciation of a common good that includes the "more than human world" (xiv). In particular, he "aim[s] (1) to extend Catholic social thought ecologically, and (2) to extend Catholic ecological ethics comparatively" (8).The argument begins by broadening the notion of the common good into a "Catholic cosmic common good," which "emphasizes the centrality of God, the goodness of creation, and humanity's dignified and privileged but contextualized role within the story of creation" (32). This vision is then informed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Thomas Berry. Next, Scheid widens solidarity, a virtue that (per John Paul II) involves "commit[ting] oneself to the common good" (86), into "Earth solidarity," which attends to all ecosystems and species, particularly those most impacted by environmental damage. Solidarity cannot be exercised without respecting others' rights, and Scheid contends that these include "Earth rights" of biota, abiota, and ecosystems. Finally, in order to really "test the potential for the cosmic common good as a ground for interreligious ecological ethics" (124–25), he turns to three non-Abrahamic traditions that each support, augment, and challenge elements of his vision. A Hindu dharmic ecology is theocentric and blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, Buddhist traditions are nontheistic and highlight how all are [End Page 197] interrelated, and American Indians (specifically the Lakota) condemn individualism and demonstrate certain advantages of a more spatial (rather than simply temporal) perspective.The Cosmic Common Good covers an impressive range of thought in under two hundred pages of main text. While the argumentation is intricate, the logical ordering of chapters, the repetition of important points, and some vivid examples assist the reader in following along. The case for Earth rights is especially bold and well argued; Scheid considers objections to them and shows that they can be intelligibly grounded (as prima facie and proportionately weighted) in self-governance and creaturely dignity. This is a very promising development in Catholic social thought, as recent key magisterial teachings do not explicitly affirm that animals have dignity (or rights) but limit themselves to the notion that harming animals is "contrary to human dignity" (see Laudato Si', §§ 92, 130, quoting Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2418).While the book is generally comprehensive, there are a few surprising lacunae. First, although Scheid himself recognizes that "a properly Catholic ecological ethics would certainly not dismiss the centrality of the Bible" (198n16), there is very little reference to it. The author briefly alludes to the Psalms' portrayal of the natural world (47, 181), but more integration of the Old and New Testaments would have been illuminating. And while The Cosmic Common Good makes a commendable last-minute effort to incorporate insights from Laudato Si', Francis's predecessor Benedict XVI (often dubbed "the Green Pope") receives too-short shrift. Benedict's ecological views are referenced only on one page, perhaps because they are somewhat more anthropocentric than the "Earth-centered or cosmos-centered" ethic developed by Scheid (24). Regardless, the former pope's frequent calls for environmental responsibility to the poor, future generations, and animals would surely lend some healthy support to the cosmic common good. But these omissions do not detract much from the merits of this book, which should be read "not as a definitive conclusion but as an invitation to generate greater interreligious dialogue and cooperation on an issue that demands extensive and immediate action" (11). Professional academics, graduate students, and others who are somewhat versed in the sophisticated issues Scheid raises would do well to take up his invitation. [End Page 198]John J. FitzgeraldSt. John's University (New York)Copyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In this paper, first, I distinguish four questions concerning evidence: (a) the ontological question: what kind of entity qualifies as evidence? (b) the possession question: what is it for S to possess evidence? (c) the evidential relation question: what is it for one or a set of things to be evidence for another? And (d) the evidential basis question: how does S’s evidence contribute to forming, maintaining, or revising S’s doxastic attitudes? Williamson’s E = K thesis is only concerned (...) with question (b). Next, I argue that three recent arguments against the E = K thesis miss the target either because they combine the E = K thesis with something alien, or because they conflate these questions. The arguments I address are the argument from access to evidence, the argument from evidential bootstrapping, and the argument from true belief based on falsehood. The argument from access to evidence combines the E = K thesis with a quasi-skeptical consideration. The argument from evidential bootstrapping is only directed at Williamson’s theory of probability, which is his answer to question (c). The argument from true belief based on falsehood derives its force from an assumption about the basing relation as an answer to question (d). Although I do not deny that it is possible to argue for or against the E = K thesis by appealing to answers to other questions than (b), it is no easy task. (shrink)

The Prophet forbade the visit to the grave to everyone, men and women, in the early years of Islam, as it would lead to inconvenient consequences and cause a number of prohibitions. Scholars are in agreement on this issue. Because at that time, many traditions of ignorance, especially polytheism, were still alive. The Arabs committed acts that led to polytheism in the graves, said bad words, cried shouting, lamented, and boasted about the dead in the graves. Since women are more (...) prone to these negative behaviors, the Prophet specifically forbade them from visiting and made statements containing heavy threats. Most of the scholars later said that the ban was lifted because the commandments and prohibitions of Islam were thoroughly adopted and started to be applied, while some of the people of tabiin argued that the ban continued. And those who say that the ban has been lifted it is divided into two, one part said that it is for all men and women, the other part however, said that the ban has been lifted only for men and continues for women. In this article, first of all, the narrations of the Prophet that encourage the visit to the grave, stating that he and his companions personally visited the grave, will be transmitted and evaluated. Later, the seemingly contradictory narrations that prohibit visiting the grave for women and again state that their visit is not forbidden will be examined, different opinions, sectarian, fiqhi disputes and interpretations put forward to this day about visiting the grave will be transmitted one by one, and will be evaluated by considering the evidences and the reasons. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” explores the boundaries between religions by exploring the ambiguous place of yoga in various religious traditions, both modern and premodern. Recently, certain Hindus and Christians have tried to argue that yoga is an essentially Hindu practice, making their case by appealing to the Yoga Sutras, a text by the Sanskrit author Patanjali. However, on closer examination, the Yoga Sutras seem to exist in a fuzzy, indeterminate space that is not (...) quite “Hindu” in the way the word is understood today. For instance, other Sanskrit authors of the first millennium CE criticized Patanjali's yoga teachings for not being properly theistic and for having strong affinities to Buddhism and Jainism. Yoga was also integrated into at least one of the “religions of the book” in the medieval period: in India in the second millennium, yoga was practiced widely among Sufis, who adapted it in surprising and idiosyncratic ways to make it compatible with their own Islamic philosophies. Nicholson concludes with an appeal for a more nuanced understanding of religious contact that goes beyond the pejorative term syncretism to acknowledge that religious mixing has been a central force in the development not only of Hinduism and Islam, but also of Christianity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christian Identity and Genuine Openness to the Religious Beliefs of OthersSchubert M. OgdenNot the least important thing I have learned from my participation in the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter is that genuine interreligious dialogue is possible only under certain conditions. Specifically, I am now confirmed in the assumption I made in beginning my participation that one can enter into such dialogue only if one can somehow (...) claim truth for one's own religious beliefs without thereby denying, explicitly or implicitly, that others' religious beliefs also may possibly be true. But how is it possible to claim that one's own beliefs as a Christian are true while allowing for at least the possible truth of others' beliefs as well?This is how I, as a Christian, formulate the question—or, at any rate, one of the questions—that I took to be raised by the topic discussed at the most recent meeting of our group: "Religious Identity and Openness in a Pluralistic World." One implication of this formulation, obviously, is that, in my view, a necessary aspect of Christian identity, as of religious identity generally, is the confession, or profession, of certain religious beliefs, together with the claim that these beliefs are true. Moreover, by "true" in this context I understand not merely "substantially true," in the sense of agreeing in substance with any other true religious or existential beliefs, but also "formally true," in the sense of providing the norm with which any other religious or existential beliefs must agree in order to be true beliefs. With this understanding, then, the question I propose to pursue really asks, "How is it possible to be a Christian and to claim formal truth for one's own religious beliefs while allowing that others' beliefs also can be formally true?"This explains, in turn, why the other operative term in the title of my paper is not simply "openness," but "genuine openness." One might possibly think—or be thought—to be open to the religious beliefs of others simply because one allowed that their beliefs could indeed be true provided only that they substantially agreed with Christian beliefs taken as the norm for judging their truth. But on my analysis of the claim that others themselves make for the truth of their beliefs, one would [End Page 21] not be genuinely open to their beliefs at all. For their claim is that their beliefs are formally true and therefore themselves the norm with which all other religious or existential beliefs, including Christian beliefs, must agree if their own claim to be true is a valid claim. My test of "genuine openness," then, is openness to at least the possibility that the religious beliefs of others are formally true in the same sense in which I as a Christian claim my own religious beliefs to be so.The other thing to note about my formulation of the question is what it does and does not ask. It does not ask whether it is possible to claim formal truth for my beliefs as a Christian while allowing that others' religious beliefs also can be formally true; rather, simply assuming that it is possible, somehow, to do this, it asks how it is possible. In other words, what are the necessary conditions of the possibility of claiming formal truth for one's own religious beliefs as a Christian while allowing that others' religious beliefs also can be formally true?With this clarification of our question, I now want to indicate how I, as a Christian and a theologian, answer it. This I propose to do by briefly developing my answer against another that is currently being given to it by what appears to be a growing number of other Christians and theologians.I refer to those who are commonly called—and call themselves—"religious (or Christian) pluralists," or simply "pluralists." According to these Christians and theologians, the monistic claim traditionally made for the truth of Christian beliefs, to the effect that they alone among religious or existential beliefs are formally true, can no longer be defended and should be given up. Far from being the only true religion, Christianity is in fact... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Common Sense and Theological 9 9 Exper_,ence on the Bas s o,f Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy NATHAN ROTENSTREICH The position of Franz Rosenzweig's thinking within the framework of presentday philosophy is difficult to ascertain. Though he was deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition, his chief work, The Star o] Redemption (Der Stern der Erlgsung, 1921), was conceived outside the main discussions of the philosophical controversy in the twenties. He (...) formulated his ideas side by side with the trends of German philosophy, but not by way of keeping pace with these trends. Yet his polemic against traditional philosophy in general, and against idealism in particular brings Rosenzweig close to the character of the rebellion represented by Existenz-Philosophie. 1 I The question of grounding a philosophical system or a set of philosophical ideas with an objective toward faith clearly poses the difficulty, in terms of the ultimate authority, of maintaining the validity of such a system of ideas. Could that authority be reason, which as a source of ideas and confirmation is outside faith while having consequences or expressions within the scope of faith? Or is faith, asserting the existence of God and his relations to world and man, an independent source? In case faith is an independent source, does it have the guarantee of its validity in its own boundaries, or does it still point to a source of validity which is outside faith and yet is not reason? It seems that Franz Rosenzweig was willy-nilly in his concern with this question. As said before the first approach would have been to construct a system along rational lines. This, however, would have done violence to a basic anti-rationalistic trait in Rosenzweig's thinking that can be clearly discerned in his The Star o] Redemption, in his Kleinere Schri]ten and in his small book, Understanding the Sick and Healthy, published until now in English only. Rosenzweig's criticism of rationalism may be summed up as follows: a) Reason strives for a unified conception of the world; and in support of this monistic fiction its assimilative energy is ready to seize upon all arguments that militate against the doctrines and practices of faith. b) Reason tends to ignore the existence of the individual which it regards as 1On the relation between Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger, see Karl LSwith, "M. Heideggerand F. Rosenzweigor Temporality and Eternity," Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch,III (Sept., 1942),53-77. [353] 354 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY merely one of the variations of an all-inclusive unity. The question of the relation of the particular to the general or of the individual to the whole, which has engrossed philosophers since time immemorial, has no place in rationalistic systems. c) Since reason places the understanding above the things to be understood (and hence also above the data of religious experience, including the existence of God), we find that from a speculative and historical point of view rationalism has a strong bias against religion or theology. The other way open to Rosenzweig was to rely on the principle of Revelation, but he could not adopt this principle as the basis of his system for the following reasons" a) The first reason can be understood from Schelling's paradox: He who adheres to Revelation does not philosophize, and he who philosophizes finds Revelation inadequate for his purposes. Since Rosenzweig was basically a philosopher --despite his protestations to the contrary--he was precluded by that very fact from appealing to the evidence furnished by Revelation. On the contrary, he sought to find a non-rational basis for Revelation itself. b) The second reason that precluded Rosenzweig from taking the traditional course of relying on Revelation is implicit in that principle itself as Rosenzweig understood it. Revelation in his system has no enlightening or cognitive significance, or what is called in Christian theology Kerygma, instructive knowledge. In Revelation, he says, God reveals only revelation; He reveals himself to man and to man alone.2 In his view, then, Revelation does not transmit informative content and hence has no dogmatic significance. It is a dialogue that posits the existence of the participants, the existence of God, and (highly important for... (shrink)

Understanding the hadiths requires not only knowing the language well but also knowing the intention of the narrator, the environment and context in which the word is uttered. Furthermore, within a language, the presence of the words which have entirely disconnected from their real meaning due to the metaphoric and idiomatic use of them developed in time requires making more efforts to understand them. In this respect, the expression ‘Aqrā-Ḥalqā’ used by Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) for Ṣafiyya in the Farewell (...) Sermon when he was leaving Mecca, is mostly attributed to inauspiciousness and thus, requires special investigation. Determination of the correct meaning and use of the expression will prevent any misunderstanding. However, only the literal equivalences of the expression have been used in its annotations and translations until now. By including the annotations and translations of the expression in dictionaries and Ġarību'l- Ḥadīth books, which were written with a more specific purpose, this study aims to find the most suitable meaning by considering all these data and the data which compatible with the sunnah.Summary: Before the leaving of Prophet Muhammad after the Farewell Sermon, he learned that one of his wife Ṣafiyya is in her period (ḥayḍ). After hearing this, he used the expression ‘Aqrā-Ḥalqā’. These statements are not frequently used in the Arabic language. The expressions, which we encounter in some ancient Arab poems, were mentioned several times in some hadiths while narrating the stories of the past societies (ummah), and as far as we can see they were used only for Ṣafiyya by the Prophet. The reason for Prophet's expression was because after he was informed that Ṣafiyya was in period, he thought that she did not make the obligatory circumambulation. Depending on this, the Prophet thought that they could not returning to Medina immediately; thus, he said this word with the confusion and anxiety caused by the difficulty of staying in Mecca for a while with a crowded pilgrim group. With regard to the meaning of these words, both the diversity in the translations and some negative comments and inferences in the annotations, this study was written.There is a sufficient amount of information about the meanings of this expression in classical dictionaries and works such as Ġarību'l- Ḥadīth. These works state that they have meanings such as death, injury, infertility, illness, bad luck and mourning at the root of the words. Although the fundamental roots of the words have these meanings, the expressions have undergone a change and transformation. As with some other examples in the Arabic language, these words have lost their relevance for their meaning root gradually and have been used more often for astonishment. This information is included in both classical sources and contemporary studies on the subject.Despite the fact that the expression has become independent from their root meaning and has an astonishing sense used in case of confusion, negative emphasis comes to the fore both in Turkish translations and in some commentaries. In Turkish translations, the usages which are related directly to the word itself and emphasizing its meaning for bad luck are dominant, but sometimes translations that give the meaning of astonishment, sometimes translations that are not related to the word have been made, and sometimes they have been contented with latinizing the word instead of translation. Additionally, the malediction used in searching the correct meaning to the word leads to an emphasize toward negativity.While most of the annotations do not give much information about the expressions, it is seen that some authors give a negative meaning to the words and accordingly, they make a comparison between Ṣafiyya and ‘Ā’isha. Because of the special situation of ‘Ā’isha, she was upset that she could not make umrah and she conveyed this situation to our Prophet. Hence the Prophet produced a solution for her to complete her umrah. In the one hand, producing a solution to ‘Ā’isha by the Prophet and comforting her, on the other hand, his expression ‘Aqrā-Ḥalqā’ for Ṣafiyya in a similar situation led some scholars to conclude that Ṣafiyya was not as valuable as ‘Ā’isha in the eyes of the Prophet. However, this result is not acceptable. Although there is no evidence for this, in another annotation, it is conveyed that the Prophet had said these words to her by its meaning for “her tongue is long” because Ṣafiyya spoke to the Prophet with disrespect. Another commentary based on this promise makes the provision that a man can talk heavily to his wife when she delays something.The implications that depend on the assumption these words have negative meanings and produce results related to this assumption are incompatible with other data of circumcision. It could not be possible that the Prophet, who defended Ṣafiyya against the criticism against Ṣafiyya and who even guided him to defend himself, had a bad word for his wife. If the meaning of bad luck is given, then the Prophet will be the first person who disregards his own word “there is no bad luck”. Besides, the Prophet's good communication with the women in all areas of his life makes it impossible for him to say "damn" to one of his wives. It seems it is not logical for the Prophet to say this word to his wife, who is waiting in sorrow in front of his tent even after special worship Hajj.The translations, which are opposed to both the basic principles of religion and the guide life of Prophet, bring many problems. This translations, on the one hand, are drawing a portrait of a prophet who is intolerant to women and their specific situations, degrading women, and able to say rude and bad words whenever he wishes, on the other hand, are reflecting an image for the Prophet who does not comply with his own warnings. However, based on the information provided by the classical dictionaries, translations such as "Alas!" to indicate the magnitude and gravity of the situation that the word is currently facing, or "Wow!" to express the astonishment, will prevent all these negative consequences.As in many other fields, the translation of religious texts, especially hadiths, appears as an area that needs to be carefully considered in this regard. Thus, the expression ‘Aqrā-Ḥalqā’ was chosen as the main theme of this study. The translation of hadiths has an essential function and the only way for those who do not speak Arabic is to learn about the life of the Prophet. For this reason, one of the main results of the study is that only knowledge on grammar is not sufficient for the translation of the hadiths. On the contrary, the persons who will translate hadiths must have many competencies in the field such as the reasons for hadiths, their relationship with other hadiths, and understanding the hadith in line with the basic principles. Beyond this knowledge, it should be expected to master areas that require particular studies such as strange words in the language, meaningful constrictions, enlargements and shifts over time, proverbs and idiomatic expressions. Otherwise, it will be impossible to prevent a biased and wrong prophet representation. (shrink)