This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore, drawing on the work of Aristotle, evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. It defines and explores common sense beliefs, and defends them from challenges from prominent philosophers.

The free energy principle is notoriously difficult to understand. In this paper, we relate the principle to a framework that philosophers of biology are familiar with: Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. We argue that: systems that minimise free energy are systems with a proper function; and Karl Friston’s notion of implicit modelling can be understood in terms of Millikan’s notion of mapping relations. Our analysis reveals some surprising formal similarities between the two frameworks, and suggests interesting lines of future research. We hope (...) this will aid further philosophical evaluation of the free energy principle. (shrink)

Few ideas in the history of philosophy have come in for the sustained criticism meted out to Aristotle’s notion of final causation. According to Aristotle and the scholastics, final causes are not just one kind of cause among many, but the very ‘cause of causes’. To appreciate the connection between final causes and efficient causes, it is useful to gather a few reminders of the Aristotelian approach to causation in general. The Aristotelian notion of causation in general has two essential (...) components: a cause is that on which something depends in itself, and a cause is a principle in itself influencing being in another. For the scholastics, the effort to understand the natural order is in large part a matter of identifying these causes in the phenomenon under investigation. For final causes in cases of human agency are, in the last analysis, only ens rationis, namely, beings of reason. (shrink)

The rise of cognitive neuroscience is the most important scientific and intellectual development of the last thirty years. Findings pour forth, and major initiatives for brain research continue. The social sciences have responded to this development slowly--for good reasons. The implications of particular controversial findings, such as the discovery of mirror neurons, have been ambiguous, controversial within neuroscience itself, and difficult to integrate with conventional social science. Yet many of these findings, such as those of experimental neuro-economics, pose very direct (...) challenges to standard social science. At the same time, however, the known facts of social science, for example about linguistic and moral diversity, pose a significant challenge to standard neuroscience approaches, which tend to focus on "universal" aspects of human and animal cognition. A serious encounter between cognitive neuroscience and social science is likely to be challenging, and transformative, for both parties. Although a literature has developed on proposals to integrate neuroscience and social science, these proposals go in divergent directions. None of them has a developed conception of social life. This book surveys these issues, introduces the basic alternative conceptions both of the mental world and the social world, and show how, with sufficient modification, they can be fit together in plausible ways. The book is not a "new theory " of anything, but rather an exploration of the critical issues that relate to the social aspects of cognition which expands the topic from the social neuroscience of immediate interpersonal interaction to the whole range of places where social variation interacts with the cognitive. The focus is on the conceptual problems produced by any attempt to take these issues seriously, and also on the new resources and considerations relevant to doing so. But it is also on the need for a revision of social theoretical concepts in order to utilize these resources. The book points to some conclusions, especially about how the process of what was known as socialization needs to be understood in cognitive science friendly terms. But there is no attempt to resolve the underlying issues within cognitive science, which will doubtless persist. (shrink)

Prominent views about representation share a premise: that mathematical communication theory is blind to representational content. Here I challenge that premise by rejecting two common misconceptions: that Claude Shannon said that the meanings of signals are irrelevant for communication theory (he didn't and they aren't), and that since correlational measures can't distinguish representations from natural signs, communication theory can't distinguish them either (the premise is true but the conclusion is false; no valid argument can link them).

This chapter contains sections titled: Reply to Devitt and Jackson Reply to Egan Reply to Cowie Reply to Goldman Reply to Sterelny Reply to Prinz Reply to Godfrey‐Smith Reply to Sosa Reply to Bishop References.

Harry Collins is a science studies scholar no other description fits without qualification who has contributed enormously to the discussion of tacit knowledge. Collins says that he is providing an account for the ontologically bashful, meaning, presumably, that it does not carry the burdens of Durkheim's notion of the collective consciousness. Polanyi says that 'a wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable'. Collins wants to translate this into 'strings must be interpreted before they are meaningful'. Somatic limits are the source of the (...) mystery element of tacit knowledge. In fact, machines can be programmed to do the things it involves, although they will do it in a different way. In Social Cartesianism, the individual is not the unit of analysis: the individual merely shares the collectivity's knowledge. Collins point in these contexts is that functional substitutability implies nothing about similarity in underlying causal structure. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance explores the concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field. Illustrated by a collection of inspiring case studies and edited by three pioneers in collective intelligence, this handbook serves as a unique primer on the science of collective intelligence applied to public challenges and will inspire public actors, academics, students, and activists across the world to apply collective intelligence in policymaking (...) and administration to explore its potential, both to foster policy innovations and reinvent democracy. The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance is essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners of public policy, public administration, governance, public management, information technology and systems, innovation and democracy as well as more broadly for political science, psychology, management studies, public organizations and individual policy practitioners, public authorities, civil society activists and service providers. (shrink)

This collection of inspiring and simple-to-use activities will jumpstart students' understanding of philosophy, and is a treasure trove of ideas for building philosophical enquiry into the curriculum. It offers teachers a range of quick, easy and effective ways for developing children's comprehension of and engagement with philosophy, and will help them 'learn how to learn'. With a wealth of activities, including puzzles, class discussion techniques and group tasks, Jumpstart! Philosophy in the Classroom covers the following topics: curiosity and imagination language (...) for thinking critical thinking creating a community of enquiry. Practical and immersive methods will encourage children to think, analyse, evaluate, discuss, judge and arrive at reasoned conclusions across all areas of the curriculum, stimulating philosophical conversation and changing the way that content is processed and understood in the classroom. This book will be a vital resource for all those who want to develop thinking skills and philosophical enquiry in their school. (shrink)

The 2014 SSE Conference near San Francisco is now behind us, and I’d rate it as quite successful. Apart from the predictable good times shared with friends whom we see only at these get-togethers, several things in particular stood out for me. First, Gerald Pollack’s Dinsdale lecture on the fourth phase of water was unusually interesting, and in fact all the invited talks were both stimulating and entertainingly presented. (Kudos again to Adam Curry for putting together a really first-rate program, (...) and to Jerry Gin for doing such a wonderful job as local host.) Although I wasn’t monitoring the behavior of attendees generally or invited speakers in particular, I happened to sit near or next to Gerald Pollack for much of the meeting. And I have to say that I was also struck and impressed by his attentiveness and openness to the rest of the program. If he missed a presentation, I didn’t see it, and I believe he took careful notes of most (if not all) of the talks as well. I doubt this was a mere courtesy. I believe Pollack exemplifies the kind of inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage I at least take to be a prerequisite for membership in the SSE, but which one sees all too infrequently in the Academy, or in the real world generally. Moreover, the conference was quite well-attended, and I was pleased (and somewhat surprised) that many of those present don’t yet qualify for membership in the AARP.1 The shortage of “young blood” has been a concern, not just for the SSE, but also for other similarly minded organizations to which I belong (e.g., the Parapsychological Association and the Society for Psychical Research)2. Indeed, the SSE Council routinely considers ways to encourage the recruitment and participation of new and young members. Brenda Dunne has certainly helped with this by organizing and hosting the New Members and Young Investigators meetings at the annual conferences, and my spies informed me that this year’s meeting was again a success (and not just because the pizza was very good). (shrink)

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The The Journal of Scientific Exploration is devoted to the open-minded examination of scientific anomalies and other topics on the scientific frontier. Its articles and reviews, written by authorities in their respective fields, cover both data and theory in areas of science that are too often ignored or treated superficially by other scientific publications. This issue of the journal features papers on a variety of subjects. The lead article presents the results of an innovative ball-selection test for ESP, (...) including a successful replication under tighter and presumably more repressive conditions under skeptical supervision at the University of London. The next paper presents a double-blind study of apparent short-term precognition in Bengalese finches. The test tracked whether the birds displayed alarm behavior prior to the random display of a crawling snake video. The third paper discusses an original approach to the study of ostensible macroscopic psychokinetic phenomena produced in a mediumistic sitter-group setting. The participants tried to generate a pseudo-spirit similar to that in the famous Philip experiments, and the researchers deployed various strategies for detecting and measuring physical correlates of the phenomena observed during the sessions. The fourth paper reports an attempt to use random number generators to detect field consciousness while people watched a film in a movie theater. In the fifth paper, researchers report a study that used advanced signal-processing techniques and instantaneous EEG phase coupling to examine interpersonal connectivity between healer and subject. The final paper presents two studies designed to illustrate how laboratory ESP effects might be used to predict real-world, practical events--in this case, the behavior of sets of financial indices. This issue of the JSE is then filled out, as usual, with a large selection of substantive book reviews. (shrink)

Since the early 2000s, authoritarianism has risen as an increasingly powerful global phenomenon. This shift has not only social and political implications, but environmental implications too: authoritarian leaders seek to recast the relationship between society and the government in every aspect of public life, including environmental policy. When historians of technology or the environment have investigated the environmental consequences of authoritarian regimes, they have frequently argued that authoritarian regimes have been unable to produce positive environmental results or adjust successfully to (...) global structural change, if they have shown any concern for the environment at all. Put another way, the scholarly consensus holds that authoritarian regimes on both the left and the right generally have demonstrated an anti-environmentalist bias, and when opposed by environmentalist social movements, have succeeded in silencing those voices. This book explores the theme of environmental politics and authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The authors argue that in instances when environmentalist policies offer the possibility of bolstering a country's domestic (nationalist) appeal or its international prestige, authoritarian regimes can endorse and have endorsed environmental protective measures. The collection of essays analyse environmentalist initiatives pursued by authoritarian regimes, and provide explanations for both the successes and failures of such regimes. Looking at a range of case studies from a number of countries, including Brazil, China, Poland and Zimbabwe. (shrink)

Lately I’ve been reviewing the issues concerned with what’s usually called the “super-psi hypothesis.” Very roughly, that hypothesis is the claim that psychic functioning is considerably more extensive and controllable than its seemingly modest experimental manifestations suggest, so much so that it might even play a pervasive role in everyday affairs and operate on a large scale. I’ve already tackled this topic at some length, in order both to clarify the hypothesis and to evaluate the arguments pro and con (see, (...) e.g., Braude 1997, 2003). Here, I want simply to reconsider a suggestion I made in 1997, and which I now think may be more interesting than I appreciated at the time. Some like to protest that the super-psi hypothesis is unfalsifiable, because it seems that we can never prove or demonstrate that psychic functioning did not occur, no matter what the evidence turns out to be. If (as proponents of the super-psi hypothesis suggest) our psychic functioning can be sneaky or naughty—that is, if it can be inconspicuous and pervasive and be triggered by unconscious needs and desires, and if we can’t specify clear or useful limits to its degree of magnitude or refinement, then we can’t, strictly speaking, falsify hypotheses positing its operation. So for example, we can never know for certain whether a particular car crash was caused normally or by virtue of somebody’s PK. In the absence of something like a PK meter, the only difference between those two scenarios would be in their unobservable causal histories. (And even if we had a PK meter, we encounter the nagging problem of a regress of confirmation: Whatever we observe happening to the meter could also be the result of operator or onlooker PK—or seemingly random PK from some other source. So how do we determine for certain what caused the meter fluctuations?). (shrink)

In my view, the time is long overdue to remind—or just as likely, to inform—readers about the Hypothesis of Trans-Temporal Inhibition, advanced by Charles Tart in the 1970s to account for some striking features of data obtained in several of his ESP studies. Although in these studies Tart was exploring the importance of immediate feedback, the real interest of his results lies not so much in the strength of their evidence for ESP—at least as determined by the customary measures of (...) deviation of hits from mean chance expectation.1 It concerns, rather, a certain unexpected pattern in the data, quite unlike familiar position or decline effects. This pattern suggests not only a new way of measuring the presence of ESP effects in data, but also some new ways of conceptualizing psi functioning. Tart’s analysis is quite complicated, and my own brief summary will hardly do justice to the care with which he interpreted his results. But I’ll try to indicate in broad terms what Tart had in mind, and I encourage interested readers to go to the source for the full story (see Tart, 1977a, 1977b, 1983), and also Tart’s more recent thoughts on the subject elsewhere in this issue. To understand Tart’s hypothesis, we must first review a particular approach to analyzing ESP data. Parapsychologists frequently look for evidence of time-displacement in ESP scores, because they’ve realized for some time that, while percipients’ calls at t may not correspond significantly to targets generated at t, they may correspond significantly to targets generated before or after t. For instance, we may obtain no above-chance scores when comparing calls at ti with targets generated at ti. But above-chance scores may result from comparing calls at ti with (say) the (ti + 1)th target. That sort of consistent scoring may be taken as evidence for precognitive ESP. (shrink)

One of the most valuable features of the early years of both the Proceedings and Journal of the Society for Psychical Research was the frequent publication of intriguing (and often scrupulously investigated) anecdotal reports. Indeed, the enterprising early SPR researchers produced some mammoth reports based on such material, including its 400-page “Report on the Census of Hallucinations” (Society for Psychical Research 1894) and the monumental Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, & Podmore 1886). The pioneers of psychical research were shrewd (...) enough to realize that apparent spontaneous occurrences of ESP and PK, and phenomena suggestive of postmortem survival, could provide valuable clues as to the nature of psychic functioning, and that the collection and careful study of this material was an essential precursor to doing serious theoretical work in the area. Sadly, that lesson seems not to have entirely survived the gnawing tooth of time, as more and more would-be psi researchers, in a misguided attempt to appear conventionally scientific and curry favor with mainstream science, confined their activities and attention strictly to the laboratory, having little familiarity with or comprehension of the day-to-day apparent eruptions of phenomena that drove earlier researchers into the lab in the first place. I mention this now because this issue of the JSE features a contribution by Russell Targ to the material suggestive of postmortem survival—two incidents pointing to the survival of his daughter Elisabeth. The two incidents are considerably more intriguing than most, and they highlight what is probably the most recalcitrant issue in the debate over survival—namely, the apparent standoff between the survivalist and living-agent psi (LAP) interpretations of the evidence. (shrink)

In these editorials I prefer not to revisit issues I’ve covered before, much less recycle previous editorials. But the recent Michigan conference of the SSE has convinced me that the time may have arrived. What provoked me was this. On several occasions I happened to overhear attendees making confidently dismissive remarks about what they took to be the extreme or outlandish views and presentations they’d encountered during the conference. And I was reasonably certain that many of those expressing these opinions (...) did so with little or no justification for the certitude they displayed. With that in mind, I submit again, with a few suitable updates, some remarks I made back in Volume 23. It’s not often that I get to feel like a spokesperson for empirical conservatism. But that happened when I was invited to give a talk at the 50th Annual Conference on Anomalous Phenomena sponsored by the International Fortean Organization (INFO). The occasion provided several healthy illustrations about what I suppose we can call boggle relativity. The conference was stimulating, challenging, and professionally run, and I was happy to meet quite a few very smart and pleasant attendees. (shrink)

During a recent review of some issues concerning the reliability of eyewitness testimony in parapsychology, I was reminded of some fascinating episodes that I believe will interest many JSE readers. These episodes concern a familiar criticism of non-laboratory parapsychological data held, not only by parapsychological skeptics and those only casually familiar with the field, but also by many veteran psi researchers. Challenges to the reliability of eyewitness accounts typically focus on cases of physical mediumship, poltergeists, and apparitions, in which (we’re (...) told) observers ordinarily base their reports on phenomena from darkened séance rooms, or under other poor psychological and physical conditions of observation (e.g., periods of distress or distraction, or objects moving too quickly to be observed and described reliably). Moreover, these are conditions in which observers are particularly liable to misperceive in accordance with their own biases or predispositions in favor of the paranormal. So (we’re told), eyewitness accounts in these cases should be treated with great caution at the very least, because they’re too liable to be contaminated by observer-bias in favor of the paranormal. (shrink)

In 2010, I wrote a pair of editorials dealing with issues concerning peer review and the quality of papers appearing in the JSE. While I’m not so naïve as to think that my editorials exert any great influence (or even that JSE subscribers actually read them), I’m nevertheless a bit surprised to find—five years later—that I still receive a fairly steady stream of complaints about our peer review process. Those complaints fall primarily into two broad categories: (1) charges of rigidity, (...) bias, or tyrannical censorship from authors whose papers were rejected, and (2) complaints from readers who believe that papers appearing in the JSE should never have survived peer review. So I’m thinking it’s time to review the issues again. And since I don’t believe I can substantially improve on what I wrote five years ago, I offer below, in a spirit of unjustified optimism, my two earlier editorials for your (re)consideration. (shrink)

This book accomplishes the nearly miraculous achievement of being both substantive and highly entertaining. According to Barrington, “JOTT,” derived from “Just One of Those Things,” stands for a kind of “spatial discontinuity”—namely, a motley class of events in which objects appear or disappear in mysterious ways. For example, some can be classified as “Walkabouts,” in which “an article disappears from the place where it was known to have been and is found in another place.” Similarly, in “Comebacks,” “a known article (...) disappears from the place where it was known to have been and later is found back in the same place.” And in “Turn-ups,” “a known article from an uncertain location appears in a place where it is known not to have been before it was found there.” The other primary categories in Barrington’s taxonomy are Flyaway, Windfall, and Trade-in (the reader might be able to guess what these are). The central contention of this book is that JOTT phenomena merit the attention of psi researchers and theorists of the paranormal. I’ve often lamented that lab research in parapsychology is premature, because we have no decent idea what kind of organic function scientists are trying to investigate under inevitably straitjacketed laboratory conditions. Not only are we ignorant of psi's finer‑grained features, we don't even know what its natural history might be–for example, whether it has an evolutionary role or primary or overall purpose or function (although there=s no shortage of speculation on these matters). Of course, there=s no reason to think that psychic phenomena occur only for parapsychologists, much less only when those parapsychologists set out to look for them. After all, a major motivation for conducting formal studies is that we have evidence of psi occurring spontaneously in life. Moreover, there are good reasons for thinking that psi might be triggered unconsciously or subconsciously, in which case it might also occur surreptitiously. But since we=re a very long way from understanding the nature and function of everyday psi, we don't know whether psychic functioning is an ability (like musical ability) or whether it=s a brute endowment such as the capacity to see or to move one's limbs. Obviously, then, in the absence of this rudimentary knowledge, we have no idea whether (or to what extent) our experimental procedures are even appropriate to the phenomena. After all, many human capacities or endowments are situation-sensitive and can only be evaluated in real-life contexts. (shrink)

How do-or how should-we parse the world into kinds of things? Going back at least to Plato, most philosophers have done so with respect to some notion or other of natural kinds. And many analyses of natural kinds have been essentialistic-that is defining those kinds with respect to universals, or some set of intrinsic properties, or necessary and sufficient conditions. And there's a long-standing dispute between thinkers who regard scientific categories as natural kinds with essential properties fixed by nature-those that (...) "cut nature at its joints"-and thinkers who maintain that our classifications and categories have no essence and instead merely reflect human interests and values. A typical example of the former would be "having a mass of 1.7 × 10-27," and examples of the latter would be the categories of "ADHD," "race," or "child abuse." Khalidi aims for an epistemic, naturalistic, non-essentialist, account of natural kinds, one which comfortably embraces not only the usual candidates favored by essentialists (e.g., elementary particles, chemical elements, biological species), but also categories in the social and behavioral sciences. Drawing on cases from many scientific fields, from fluid mechanics and polymer science to virology and psychiatry, Khalidi argues that "natural kinds are investigative or epistemic kinds, in the sense that they are the categories revealed by our systematic attempts to gain knowledge of nature" (p. 43). Moreover, he claims that natural kinds can be "fuzzy" (i.e. have indefinite boundaries), satisfy epistemic virtues to varying degrees, and be mind-dependent in a way that doesn't detract from their reality or objectivity. Although the book is pitched for a sophisticated and philosophically informed audience (and, needless to say, too complex to be adequately summarized in a brief notice such as this), it's clearly written, nuanced, compellingly argued, and worth the effort for JSE readers curious about the unavoidable metaphysical dimensions of doing science of any kind. (shrink)

This slender and interesting volume by three Dutch philosophers examines the manner in which eight prominent philosophers dealt with ostensibly paranormal experiences arising both spontaneously and also as the result of hypnosis. Hans Gerding covers both Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer; Rico Sneller discusses Friedrich Joseph Schelling, Hans Driesch, and Gabriel Marcel; and Hein van Dongen considers William James, Henri Bergson, and Jacques Derrida. My guess is that JSE readers might already know about Kant’s apparent ambivalence (or perhaps just change (...) of heart) about Swedenborg’s vision of a Stockholm fire (and his other reported experiences), as well as William James’s investigations of mental mediumship (Mrs. Piper in particular) and his experiments with altered states. Nevertheless, I expect they will find much that they didn’t already know in those chapters, as well as in the others of course. (shrink)

If there is any one author in the history of moral thought who has come to be associated with the idea of natural law, it is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Many things have been written about Aquinas's natural law teaching, and from many different perspectives. The aim of this book is to help see it from his own perspective. That is why the focus is metaphysical. Aquinas's whole moral doctrine is laden with metaphysics, and his natural law teaching especially so, because (...) it is all about first principles. The book centers on how Aquinas thinks the first principles of practical reason, which for him are what make up natural law, function as laws. It is a controversial question, and the book engages a variety of readers of Aquinas, including Francisco Suárez, Jacques Maritain, prominent analytical philosophers, Straussians, and the initiators of the New Natural Law theory. Among the issues addressed are the relation between natural law and natural inclination, how far natural law depends on knowledge of human nature, what its obligatory force consists in, and, above all, how it is related to what for Aquinas is the first principle of all being, the divine will. (shrink)

If Saint Thomas Aquinas was a great theologian, it is in no small part because he was a great philosopher. And he was a great philosopher because he was a great metaphysician. In the twentieth century, metaphysics was not much in vogue, among either theologians or even philosophers; but now it is making a comeback, and once the contours of Thomas's metaphysical vision are glimpsed, it looks like anything but a museum piece. It only needs some dusting off. Many are (...) studying Thomas now for the answers that he might be able to give to current questions, but he is perhaps even more interesting for the questions that he can raise regarding current answers: about the physical world, about human life and knowledge, and (needless to say) about God. This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas's philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations. (shrink)

After summarizing the content of my book, Kant and Mysticism, I warn against four preliminary misconceptions. The book never argues that Kant viewed himself as a mystic, fully acknowledges Kant’s negative view of mysticism, offers no comprehensive overview of mystical traditions, and aims to initiate a dialogue, not to have the final word. I then respond to the foregoing essays by the five critics.

The prelims comprise: Half‐Title Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations.

Relativism is central to the social sciences for the simple reason that customs and morals are diverse, and explaining this diversity is one of its major tasks. The explanations have relativistic implications, but they vary according to the type of explanation. In the nineteenth century evolutionary explanations dominated: differences were relative to stages. The social determination of ideas followed from these accounts, but could be logically separated from them. In the twentieth century, accounts based on the culture concept, understood loosely (...) in neo-Kantian terms as a matter of different shared presuppositions, dominated. This conception informed a relativistic methodological approach to history and disciplinary differences, exemplified in the methodological writings of Max Weber, where they were related to values. This was more radical, in the sense that there was no further explanation of the presuppositions. They simply differed. As this conception was expanded into the epistemic realm, it became even more radical, by being applied to science itself. The “Strong Programme in the sociology of science” observed a principle of symmetry, which held that true and false scientific beliefs needed to be explained using the same explanatory tools. In each of these cases problems of reflexivity and self-undermining played a role. (shrink)

Palmquist’s Commentary provides the first definitive clarification on Kant’s Philosophy of Religion in English; it includes the full text of Pluhar’s translation, interspersed with explanations, providing both a detailed overview and an original interpretation of Kant’s work. Offers definitive, sentence-level commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason Presents a thoroughly revised version of Pluhar’s translation of the full text of Kant’s Religion, including detailed notes comparing the translation with the others still in use today Identifies most of (...) the several hundred changes Kant made to the second (1794) edition and unearths evidence that many major changes were responses to criticisms of the first edition Provides both a detailed overview and original interpretation of Kant’s work on the philosophy of religion Demonstrates that Kant’s arguments in Religion are not only cogent, but have clear and profound practical applications to the way religion is actually practiced in the world today Includes a glossary aimed at justifying new translations of key technical terms in Religion, many of which have previously neglected religious and theological implications. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

This unique book is a complete guide to spiritual Raja and Kriya Yoga. Beginning with historical and spiritual accounts of all Yoga traditions, it covers Raja and Kriya Yoga in depth, with instruction on the asanas, breathing techniques and meditations. The book is an invaluable resource for yoga practitioners, as well as spiritual seekers.