We respond to Stephen T. Davis’ criticism of our earlier essay, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis.” We argue that the Standard Model of physics is relevant and decisive in establishing the implausibility and low explanatory power of the Resurrection hypothesis. We also argue that the laws of physics have entailments regarding God and the supernatural and, against Alvin Plantinga, that these same laws lack the proviso “no agent supernaturally interferes.” Finally, we offer Bayesian arguments for the Legend hypothesis and against the (...) Resurrection hypothesis. (shrink)

The hypothesis that God supernaturally raised Jesus from the dead is argued by William Lane Craig to be the best explanation for the empty tomb and postmortem appearances of Jesus because it satisfies seven criteria of adequacy better than rival naturalistic hypotheses. We identify problems with Craig’s criteria-based approach and show, most significantly, that the Resurrection hypothesis fails to fulfill any but the first of his criteria—especially explanatory scope and plausibility.

We respond to Swinburne’s reply to our critique of his argument for the Resurrection by defending the relevance of our counterexamples to his claim that God does not permit grand deception. We reaffirm and clarify our charge that Swinburne ignores two crucial items of Negative Natural Theology (NNT)—that God has an exceptionally weak tendency to raise the dead and that even people with exemplary public records sometimes sin. We show, accordingly, that our total evidence makes it highly probable that Jesus (...) was not sinless, incarnate, or resurrected and that God has permitted massive deception regarding these defining Christian dogmas. (shrink)

In response to Stephen Davis’s criticism of our previous essay, we revisit and defend our arguments that the Resurrection hypothesis is logically incompatible with the Standard Model of particle physics—and thus is maximally implausible—and that it cannot explain the sensory experiences of the Risen Jesus attributed to various witnesses in the New Testament—and thus has low explanatory power. We also review Davis’s reply, noting that he evades our arguments, misstates their conclusions, and distracts the reader with irrelevancies regarding, e.g., what (...) natural laws are, what a miracle is, and how “naturalism” and “supernaturalism” differ as worldviews. Contrary to what Davis claims (even in his abstract), we do not argue that “if the Standard Model of particle physics is true, then the resurrection of Jesus did not occur and physical things can only causally interact with other physical things.” Davis distorts our claims and criticizes straw men of his own creation. (shrink)

We use Bayesian tools to assess Law’s skeptical argument against the historicity of Jesus. We clarify and endorse his sub-argument for the conclusion that there is good reason to be skeptical about the miracle claims of the New Testament. However, we dispute Law’s contamination principle that he claims entails that we should be skeptical about the existence of Jesus. There are problems with Law’s defense of his principle, and we show, more importantly, that it is not supported by Bayesian considerations. (...) Finally, we show that Law’s principle is false in the specific case of Jesus and thereby show, contrary to the main conclusion of Law’s argument, that biblical historians are entitled to remain confident that Jesus existed. (shrink)

We consider the impact of negative natural theology on the prospects of Christian ramified natural theology with reference to Richard Swinburne’s argument for the Incarnation and Resurrection. We argue that Swinburne’s pivotal claim—that God would not allow deceptive evidence to exist for the Incarnation and Resurrection—is refuted by key evidence from negative natural theology. We argue, further, that Swinburne’s argument omits dominating items of evidence of negative natural theology which seem to critically weaken the probability of the Incarnation and Resurrection. (...) Negative natural theology thus serves as a formidable obstacle to Christian ramified natural theology. (shrink)

This paper explores various notions of aesthetic affordance recently developed through embodied, situated and enactive approaches to aesthetic experience by Maria Brincker and Shaun Gallagher, and the similarities and differences between them and the idea of affective affordance put forward by Joel Krueger and Giovanna Colombetti. This discussion is a way to try to offer some answers to the question of what aesthetic affordances particularly afford compared to affective affordances. I will focus on the affordances that we perceive during (...) various aesthetic experiences in which we find ourselves more moved by the object, event or person(s) causing the experience than we had anticipated. I will argue that these experiences emerge as opportunities to carry out an active exploration of aspects of the narrative self that we feel is related to features of the experience; and that one particular brain network likely to be involved in these experiences – i.e. the default network – might help us to understand how these experiences meaningfully change our relationship with ourselves and with the social context of which we are a part. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to advance, within the framework of enactivism, towards a more radically embodied and situated theory of emotions and, in general, of affectivity. Its starting point is that of discussing the well-established notion of bodily resonance (Fuchs 2013, Fuchs & Koch 2014, Fuchs 2018) and the primordial affectivity approach (Colombetti 2014). I will incorporate John Dewey’s theory of emotions, and recent models and empirical finding from cognitive science on the relation between perception and bodily (...) activity (Azzalini, Rebollo & Tallon-Baudry 2019; Allen et al. 2019). The novel element proposed in this paper is taking into consideration the role of bodily oscillatory activity in the perceptual side of cognition through phenomena of relative coordination. This concept from dynamical systems theory allows for an enactivist view of emotions as temporal episodes triggered by a tension that affects the rhythmic interaction between brain, body, and environment. By defending the importance of this enacted rhythm, the body emerges as a truly active agent, gating and modulating affectivity during all the stages of the sensorimotor circuit from perception to action. (shrink)

This book recovers Dionysus and Apollo as the twin conceptual personae of life's dual rhythm in an attempt to redesign contemporary theory through the reciprocal affirmation of event and form, earth and world, dance and philosophy.

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund. (shrink)

En este texto se discuten los principales desarrollos de Alain Badiou en cuanto a las aportaciones de las matemáticas a una ontología materialista de lo múltiple, desde una perspectiva platónica; a través de éstas Badiou pretende enfrentar el reto que implica la antifilosofía de Jacques Lacan. Posteriormente, con base en la crítica que Slavoj Žižek realiza a las nociones de presentación y representación de Badiou, se juzgan los límites y las posibilidades de su propuesta ontológica.

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 195 Pages: 45-68.

William Parry conceived in the early thirties a theory of entail-
ment, the theory of analytic implication, intended to give a formal expression to the idea that the content of the conclusion of a valid argument must be included in the content of its premises. This paper introduces a system of analytic, paraconsistent and quasi-classical propositional logic that does not validate the paradoxes of Parry’s analytic implication. The interpretation of the expressions of this logic will be given in terms of a (...) four-valued semantics,and its proof theory will be provided by a system of signed semantic tableaux that incorporates the techniques developed to improve the efficiency of the tableaux method for many-valued logics.
1. Introduction. (shrink)

This title provides an overview of the atomic nucleus and the theories that seek to explain it. Bringing together a systematic explanation of hadrons, nuclei, and stars for the first time, the author provides the core material needed by students of physics to acquire a solid understanding of nuclear and particle science.

Según Oliver Marchart, autores como Badiou, Lefort, Rancière o Laclau son parte de una misma corriente: el pensamiento político posfundacionalista. Su caracte-rística central no es el rechazo de todo fundamento del orden político, sino de todo fundamento que pretenda ser necesario. En oposición a esta postura y, a partir de un análisis del concepto de hegemonía, se busca mostrar cómo el pensamiento de Laclau no se libra de la metafísica, sino que, por el contrario, desarrolla políticamente la que es -según (...) Heidegger, el padre espiritual del posfundacionalismo- su forma consumada: la metafísica nietzscheana de la voluntad de poder. According to Oliver Marchart, authors such as Badiou, Lefort, Rancière or Laclau are representatives of postfoundationalist political thought, which does not reject all foundations of the political order, but rather those that claim to be necessary. In opposition to this viewpoint and on the basis of an analysis of the concept of hegemony, the paper seeks to show how Laclau's thought fails to free itself of metaphysics. Rather, it develops politically that which according to Heidegger, the "spiritual father" of postfoundationalism, is its consummated form: Nietzsche's metaphysics of the will to power. (shrink)

Como bien su título indica, el presente artículo busca dar cuenta de la génesis de la razón humana. Lo anterior se lleva a cabo, en primera instancia, a través del análisis de la Idea de Dios como lo que, según Schelling, es el contenido de la razón humana, aunque por ello, precisamente, él se constituye como algo racional. Es justamente este carácter racional de Dios lo que constituye el paso de lo absoluto a él, es decir, lo que Schelling denomina (...) la forma más primaria del espíritu. Esta búsqueda de la genealogía de la razón se lleva a cabo, en el presente texto, en los libros “Escrito sobre la libertad” (1809) y en las diferentes versiones de “Las edades del mundo” (1811-1815). En estos textos se elabora un análisis de la presencia de pensadores alemanes como Kant y Fichte en el pensamiento schellinguiano y, además, de conceptos como acto, a través del cual se busca dar cuenta de mejor manera de la llamada potencia originaria, es decir, del querer de aquello llamado ser originario. Así, a través de este análisis, se concluye, por ejemplo, que la potencia es lo siempre pensable que genera el acto pensar. Respecto a una teoría de la racionalidad esto significa lo siguiente: la razón, cuya forma ontologizada es Dios, se instituye espontáneamente a sí misma pero sobre una base que ella no ha puesto. (shrink)

Las nociones de "uno" y de "múltiple" han sido, históricamente, objeto de tratamiento, a la vez, filosófico y teológico. En el contexto de la filosofía islámica oriental, y en el marco de su vertiente más específicamente neoplatónica, el "Príncipe de los Teósofos", Sadrá Sirázi (ob. 1050/1640), estudia ambas desde una perspectiva ontológica y distanciándose del enfoque consignado al respecto por los filósofos peripatéticos del Islam. Adaptando y continuando, de un lado, la gnosis de 1km aI-'Arabi, y, de otro, la sabiduria (...) iluminativa de Sohravardi, MollA Sadrá discute la distinción aviceniana entre un Ser Necesario y una multiplicidad de seres posibles, así como la posibilidad de considerar accidental la realidad de la existencia. Basado en la eoimplicación de tres conceptos fundamentales: i~álat al-wu9ñd (prioridad del ser), i,vahdat al-wu9i2d (unidad del ser) y tagkik (diferenciación y gradación intensiva del ser), el univocismo monadológico de 5adrá puede, por otra parte, permitirnos reevaluar ciertas cuestiones filosóficas que pugnan por ser examinadas hoy a una nueva luz. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 475-491, September 2019.

In his final writings Guattari designed a four-functor meta-model with which to map subjective resingularisation against the backdrop of what he saw as the late-modern admixture of ecological collapse, social deterioration and subjective decomposition. I examine here Guattari’s fourfold in neo-structuralist terms and then engage in a discussion on the difference between worlding and deterritorialisation, reassessing in this sense Guattari’s concept of machinic indices in conversation with the works of anthropologists. Further, I show that Guattari’s fourfold is reminiscent of Heidegger’s (...) Geviert, which I place at the very core of Heidegger’s project of overcoming the modern Ge-stell. Lastly, from the fact that Guattari’s fourfold opens onto the question of worlding and that Heidegger points to our incapability to tune in and sing back to the earth’s song, I draw the conclusion that they put forward an eco-cosmo-poetics that points beyond the flat ontology of today’s new materialism and the subtractive logic of speculative realism. (shrink)

‘I don’t believe that we can change moral intuitions except as educators – that is, not as theoreticians and not as writers’. (Jürgen Habermas 1992, 202) ‘The thinker as lifestyle, as vision, as ex...

Prácticamente ningún estudioso duda de que la llamada historia deuteronomista o “de la segunda Ley”, incluida en el corpus bíblico para configurar algunos de los principales libros que lo componen, fue redactada durante el exilio babilónico y revisada posteriormente. Y no se produce esa duda porque el estudio histórico-crítico del texto bíblico, así como el análisis histórico del periodo correspondiente, han venido a mostrar, que la compilación y definitiva puesta por escrito de los libros históricos de la Biblia tuvo lugar (...) en una época mucho más tardía de lo dogmáticamente establecido. Pues bien, similar método histórico-crítico se aplica hoy en día también al estudio del texto coránico, si bien con mucho menor seguimiento y aún rodeado de una serie de estereotipos narrativos asociados al dogma islámico pero que entre numerosos estudiosos no es menos dogmático. (shrink)

El presente artículo consta de dos partes. En la primera trataré de proponer una nueva hipótesis, basada en las distinciones formuladas por A. Ritschl, F. J. A. Hort y M. Simon y en la particularidad del cristianismo asirio, acerca de la naturaleza del judeocristianismo y sus divisiones. En la segunda trataré de ofrecer al lector una mirada al peculiar cristianismo asirio de los primeros siglos de la era común por medio de un resumen de los argumentos esgrimidos por Afraates (fl. (...) ca. 300-350 d.C.) en defensa de la divinidad de Cristo en su Demostración 17: Sobre Cristo en tanto que Hijo de Dios. (shrink)

This essay pursues Gilbert Durand’s plea for a new anthropological spirit that would overcome the bureaucracy-or-madness dichotomy which has since Nietzsche left its imprint upon contemporary thought, forcing it to choose between an “Apollonian” ontology established upon some kind of first principle and a “Dionysian” ontology consisting in the erasure of any founding norm. It does so by reclaiming Dionysus and Apollo’s original twin-ness and dual affirmation in dialogue with contemporary anthropological theory, especially Roy Wagner’s thesis on the interplay of (...) “elicitation” and “containment” in sociocultural life. What would happen then, I ask, if we were to reimagine today’s philosophical game – which after Heidegger Deleuze, and Derrida turns variously and increasingly around subtraction – otherwise: as a chiastic board on which Apollo would cut Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus would in turn restore despite Apollo’s cuts, and on which the obliteration of any of the two gods would entail the inevitable dismemberment of the other? Accordingly, I offer a full reassessment of Dionysus’s and Apollo’s complementary roles in ancient-Greek culture in discussion not only with Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy but also with Ihab Hassan’s postmodern critique of Orpheus. All of it less with the purpose of putting forward a new metaphysics than with the intent of restating the translucent-ness that keeps together reality and thought against any claim that they are either transparent or opaque to one another. (shrink)

Presentamos en este escrito la doctrina sufi relativa a la teleonomía y expresión divinas y al modo en que los hombres son interpelados por su actividad, luz, y beneficencia, con especial atención a la obra de Muhyi'd-din Ibn al-`arabi y conforme a los contenidos de una enseñanza que remite, asimismo, al horizonte temprano del pensar occidental. Querríamos contribuir con ello a esclarecer, desde una óptica filosófica, algunos de los motivos preliminares de la teoreticidad característica de la espiritualidad islámica.