Nature as Sacred Ground: A Metaphysics for Religious Naturalism is the fifth book on religious naturalism that Donald Crosby has published since 2002, and it must be seen in that context. Religion of Nature makes the claim for the religious and metaphysical ultimacy of nature, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil explores possible responses of religious naturalism's to natural and human evil, The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Beings argues for giving (...) moral consideration to all sentient beings, and More Than Discourse: Symbolic Expressions of Naturalistic Faith discusses the role of nondiscursive symbols... (shrink)

Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, at a time when they were both millionaires many times over, recorded a song called "Gone Fishin'". Its theme was as familiar as it was implausible: how they would much rather sit by "some shady, wady pool", etc., than be enmeshed, as they were, in the feverish pursuit of money and fame. The record was a huge success, making the singers even richer and more famous than they had been before: which was, after all, (...) their intention in making it. It will hardly need saying that neither singer ever did in fact renounce show business and "go fishin'" instead; or that this experiment, if it had been tried, would have been an ignominious failure. It has been tried often enough. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese ThinkersPamela D. WinfieldMystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers. By Louis Roy, O.P.Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. 229. Hardcover $62.50. Paper $20.95.Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers by Louis Roy presents a stimulating array of thinkers on the subject of consciousness, self-reflective consciousness, and mystical consciousness. Louis Roy's primary sources focus (...) on the somewhat standard canon of via negativa and Zeninfluenced thinkers and practitioners (Plotinus, Eckhardt, Schleiermacher, Nishitani, Hisamatsu, and Suzuki), but he also includes Bergson, Brentano, Heidegger, Hume, Husserl, Nietzsche, Nishida, Sartre, Schelling, and Tillich in his discussion. His secondary sources range widely, so the competing terminologies and conceptual schemes of Crosby, Forman, Granfield, Heiler, Helminiak, James, Johnston, Moore, Morelli, Price, Searle, and Tart can at times be confusing without an outline or chart. He aptly organizes his material into three sections, however: part 1 summarizes major Western philosophies of consciousness, part 2 presents three classic mystical writings from the Western canon, and part 3 compares Western views of the self and nothingness with those of Zen Buddhism. Roy's careful research and terse writing style, moreover, serve as an excellent introduction and basic starting point for further research into each one of these individual thinkers.Of all these sources however, it is evident that Roy favors the fourfold scheme of the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan. As he states in his preface, Roy sets out "to develop an understanding of consciousness, mostly rooted in Bernard Lonergan's works and applied to the mystical life" (p. x). Lonergan traces the trajectory of human intentionality across four levels: (1) averting to an object, (2) knowing it, (3) [End Page 493] judging it to be true, and (4) appreciating its value. Following Lonergan's cue, Morelli has consequently claimed that "Being in love with God is the basic fulfillment of our conscious intentionality" (p. 32), and Michael Sharkey has characterized Lonergan's philosophy as a nondualistic "cognition by communion, and not encounter."1 Roy now articulates a threefold scheme to explicate the transition from everyday objectifying consciousness to this mystical, unitive consciousness.In order to accomplish this transition, Roy establishes a middle baseline B-consciousness that mediates between everyday and mystical consciousness. This analytic scheme can be outlined as follows.2(1) Consciousness C: "consciousness of" things. This everyday positional awareness engenders subject-object dualism.(2) Consciousness B: ordinary "consciousness in" that permeates all mental acts (noesis). This is a baseline non-positional consciousness that pervades and underlies all subject-object distinctions. In moments of self-reflection, this kind of "consciousness-in" can itself become C's object of awareness (what Plotinus calls antilepsis).(3) Consciousness A: mystical (as opposed to ordinary) "consciousness in." This is the same as consciousness B but is present in objectless states. Roy indicates that this highest or deepest consciousness refers to union with God, the divine, the sacred, or emptiness or nothingness in the Zen Buddhist sense. He argues that since consciousness C can become aware of B, then it can avert to, know, accurately judge, and appreciate A as well. Roy writes:Thanks to his [i.e. Lonergan's] efforts, we have come to realize that our conscious intentionality [what Roy calls consciousness-of, also called consciousness C] is able to develop an account of ordinary consciousness [consciousness B] and to employ this account analogically so as to make true judgments about mystical consciousness [consciousness A], without presuming that the latter can be fully comprehended.(p. 188)Throughout the volume, Roy provides ample evidence that we can become aware of our own noetic activity and noematic content (i.e., the act of thinking as well as our thoughts). He also surveys a wide range of apophatic mystics and philosophers who seem to indicate that this intentional process extends to becoming aware of consciousness A's "no-thinking" and "no-thought" as well (what Zen Buddhism terms munen-musō). But can our everyday objectifying awareness truly grasp the subjectless-objectless state of no-thingness so often described by mystics the world over? Can union with the Godhead or... (shrink)

Lexical Semantics is about the meaning of words. Although obviously a central concern of linguistics, the semantic behaviour of words has been unduly neglected in the current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. In this textbook D. A. Cruse establishes in a principled and disciplined way the descriptive and generalizable facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will have to encompass. Among the topics covered in depth are (...) idiomaticity, lexical ambiguity, synonymy, hierarchical relations such as hyponymy and meronymy, and various types of oppositeness. Syntagmatic relations are also treated in some detail. The discussions are richly illustrated by examples drawn almost entirely from English. Although a familiarity with traditional grammar is assumed, readers with no technical linguistic background will find the exposition always accessible. All readers with an interest in semantics will find in this original text not only essential background but a stimulating new perspective on the field. (shrink)

William James and Alfred North Whitehead strongly rejected materialism as a metaphysical option. While James lived and wrote only up to the beginning of the revolution in physics that brought to the fore fundamentally different theories such as quantum theory and the special and general theories of relativity, Whitehead, as an accomplished mathematician, was readily conversant with these new developments. Since their respective times, however, much innovation and refinement of theories in physics and other natural sciences has taken place. With (...) these later developments, conceptions of matter and its capabilities have undergone far-reaching explicit and implicit changes. A consequence of these... (shrink)

The question of causality has haunted the history of Western metaphysics since the time of the Pre-Socratic philosophy. Hand-in-hand with attempts to address this question is the promise of unlocking larger and more complicated questions pertaining to human freedom. But what of novelty? In this brilliant extended essay Donald A. Crosby contends that, though novelty can't be comprehended without efficient causality, causality requires a concept of novelty; without it cause and effect relations are unintelligible and, indeed, impossible.

Catalog of the collection of the Madamkhand Museum of Art, named after the wife of Batzhargalyn Batbai︠a︡r, businessman and member of the Mongolian Khural.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious NaturalismDonald A. Crosby (bio)The poet Mary Oliver speaks as a kind of religious naturalist when she writes in her book of prose and poetry Winter Hours, “I would not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, (...) along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendent relationship to rapture, and with words, I celebrate the rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.”1 She speaks as a poet and not as a philosopher or religious scholar, but she does so as one who is ardently in touch with the sacredness of nature. Her vocation as a poet is testimony to this constant attunement. Her daily walks in the woods and by the sea are her portals of access to the temple of the natural world. Her every step makes contact with holy ground.Oliver’s poetic vocation shows itself to be in deep sympathy with all of the living and nonliving aspects of nature, and thus with the imminent ecological crisis of our time, when she reflects later in this same book, “The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense of honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”2Poet, philosopher, religious scholar, ecologist, and perceptive human being are bound together in Mary Oliver’s alert responses to the sacredness of nature. She captures in both her poetic and prose writing the essential spirit and outlook of religious naturalism. I do not claim that she is a religious naturalist; that would be going beyond what I am capable of knowing. But she certainly sounds like one in many respects throughout the poetry and prose of this book.I want us to keep constantly in mind her spirit and outlook as we ponder the cogency, adequacy, and appeal of religious naturalism as a way of thinking and living religiously, for they are the ultimate tests of that adequacy. I want us to do so by considering objections of various sorts arguing that religious [End Page 24] naturalism fails to be sufficiently religious in the way of satisfying the deepest discernments, needs, hopes, and foundations of authentic religious faith. My plan for this essay is to present what I surmise to be some of the most substantive objections, and to reply to each of them in turn.I do so in defense of the thesis that religious naturalism—at least as I have come to interpret and understand it over many years—is a strong contender for having an honored place among the religions of the world. My personal conception of religious naturalism is of course only one of many, and other religious naturalists might have different kinds of response to at least some of these objections. But my responses indicate the capability of religious naturalism to take such objections seriously into account and to provide plausible answers to them.The objections I want to respond to in this essay are six in number. All of them, as will be seen, assume a kind of panpsychism or the primordiality of some kind of mind or spirit, a view I find unnecessary and tending strongly toward an untenable mind-matter dualism in my defense of religious naturalism. 3 The first one is that nature by itself has no overarching purpose or reason for being. The second is that if mind and spirit are emergent rather than primordial, then they are reducible to blind physical processes, meaning that religion is implausibly reduced to physics. The third objection is that nature is just a mass of meaningless facts, with no objective, dependable values of any kind, including religious values. The fourth objection is that with impersonal nature rather than a personal, loving, God as its focus, religious naturalism lacks essential divine... (shrink)

Revisiting African philosophy’s classic questions, D. A. Masolo advances understandings of what it means to be human—whether of African or other origin. Masolo reframes indigenous knowledge as diversity: How are we to understand the place and structure of consciousness? How does the everyday color the world we know? Where are the boundaries between self and other, universal and particular, and individual and community? From here, he takes a dramatic turn toward Africa’s current political situation and considers why individual rights and (...) freedoms have not been recognized, respected, demanded, or enforced. Masolo offers solutions for containing socially destructive conduct and antisocial tendencies by engaging community. His unique thinking about community and the role of the individual extends African philosophy in new, global directions. (shrink)

In debates about criteria for human death, several camps have emerged, the main two focusing on either loss of the "organism as a whole" (the mainstream view) or loss of consciousness or "personhood." Controversies also rage over the proper definition of "irreversible" in criteria for death. The situation is reminiscent of the proverbial blind men palpating an elephant; each describes the creature according to the part he can touch. Similarly, each camp grasps some aspect of the complex reality of death. (...) The personhood camp, in contrast to the mainstream "organism" camp, recognizes that a human organism can still be a biological living whole even without brain function. The mainstream camp, in contrast to the personhood camp, recognizes that a person can be permanently, even irreversibly unconscious, and still be a living person so long as his/her body is alive. The author proposes that hylomorphic dualism incorporates both these key insights. But to complete the picture of the entire "death elephant," a fundamental paradigm shift is needed to make sense of other seemingly conflicting insights. The author proposes a "semantic bisection" of the concept of death, analogous to the traditional distinction at the beginning of life between "conception" and "birth." To avoid the semantic baggage associated with the term "death," the two new death-related concepts are referred to as "passing away" (or "deceased") and "deanimation," corresponding, respectively, to sociolegal ceasing-to-be (mirror image of birth) and ontological/theological ceasing-to-be of the bodily organism (mirror image of conception). Regarding criteria, the distinguishing feature is whether the cessation of function is permanent (passing away) or irreversible (deanimation). If the "dead donor rule" were renamed the "deceased donor rule" (both acronyms felicitously being "DDR"), the ethics of organ transplantation from non–heart-beating donors could, in principle, be validly governed by the DDR, even though the donors are not yet ontologically "deanimated." Thus, the paradigm shift satisfies both those who insist on maintaining the DDR and those who claim that it has all along been receiving only lip service and should be explicitly loosened to include those who are "as good as dead." Even so, a number of practical caveats remain to be worked out for non–heart-beating protocols. (shrink)

Justice will once take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.

" -- Africa Today "The excellence of this book lies in the wealth of perspectives that it brings to the discussion on what constitutes philosophy, rationality, ...

In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while (...) others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists. (shrink)

A three-valued propositional logic is presented, within which the three values are read as ?true?, ?false? and ?nonsense?. A three-valued extended functional calculus, unrestricted by the theory of types, is then developed. Within the latter system, Bochvar analyzes the Russell paradox and the Grelling-Weyl paradox, formally demonstrating the meaninglessness of both.

D. A. T. Gasking; Mr. Williams on the a Priori1, Analysis, Volume 6, Issue 5-6, 1 September 1939, Pages 69–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/6.5-6.69.

Migrations driven by ethnic, religious, and other forms of social conflict have been common in the past quarter-century, and have in Africa led many to seek refuge and to expect hospitality abroad. This leads to a concern for pluralist ethics, for many receiving refuge abroad expect that they will be able to live by their thoughts and beliefs, creating enclaves of cultural difference. But difference exists in all communities: cultural homogeneity does not exist except in the conservative imagination. Nevertheless, a (...) sameness – the sameness of the value of every person – remains within this plurality. The sameness is conceived in distinct ways in the Natural Law tradition that yields liberalism, in the Golden Rule, in Kant's categorical imperative, and in the Luo culture of Eastern Africa. The Luo precept Luoro remb dhano is compared with these other ethical cosmopolitan wellsprings in this essay. (shrink)

The following article is a response to the position paper of the Hastings Center, “Ethical Challenges of Chronic Illness”, a product of their three year project on Ethics and Chronic Care. The authors of this paper, three prominent bioethicists, Daniel Callahan, Arthur Caplan, and Bruce Jennings, argue that there should be a different ethic for acute and chronic care. In pressing this distinction they provide philosophical grounds for limiting medical care for the elderly and chronically ill. We give a critical (...) survey of their position and reject it as well as any attempt to characterize the physician-patient relationship as a commercial contract. We emphasize, as central features of good medical practice, a commitment to be the patient's agent and a determination to acquire and be guided by knowledge. These commitments may sometimes conflict with efforts to have the physician serve as an instrument of social and economic policies limiting medical care. (shrink)