Does our available evidence show that some particular religion is correct?

Does our available evidence show that some particular religion is correct? It seems unlikely, given the great diversity of religious - and non-religious - views of the world. But if no religious beliefs can be shown true on the evidence, can it be right to make a religious commitment? Should people make 'leaps of faith'? Or would we all be better off avoiding commitments that outrun our evidence? And, if leaps of faith can be acceptable, how do we tell the (...) difference between goodand bad ones - between sound religion and dogmatic ideology or fundamentalist fanaticism? Believing by Faith offers answers to these questions, inspired by a famous attempt to justify faith made by William James in 1896. In doing so, it engages critically with much recent discussion in the philosophyof religion, and, especially, the epistemology of religious belief. (shrink)

The role of contingent contexts in formulating relations between properties of systems at different descriptive levels is addressed. Based on the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions for interlevel relations, a comprehensive classification of such relations is proposed, providing a transparent conceptual framework for discussing particular versions of reduction, emergence, and supervenience. One of these versions, contextual emergence, is demonstrated using two physical examples: molecular structure and chirality, and thermal equilibrium and temperature. The concept of stability is emphasized as a (...) basic guiding principle of contextual property emergence. (shrink)

An overview of chaos, indeterminism, free will and the relationship between physics and free will.

Contextual emergence was originally proposed as an inter-level relation between different levels of description to describe an epistemic notion of emergence in physics. Here, we discuss the ontic extension of this relation to different domains or levels of physical reality using the properties of temperature and molecular shape as detailed case studies. We emphasize the concepts of stability conditions and multiple realizability as key features of contextual emergence. Some broader implications contextual emergence has for the foundations of physics and cognitive (...) and neural sciences are given in the concluding discussion. Relevant facts about algebras of observables are found in the appendices along with an abstract definition of Kubo-Martin-Schwinger states. (shrink)

The initial argument presented herein is not significantly original—it is a simple reflection upon a notion of computation originally developed by Putnam and criticised by Chalmers et al. . In what follows, instead of seeking to justify Putnam’s conclusion that every open system implements every Finite State Automaton and hence that psychological states of the brain cannot be functional states of a computer, I will establish the weaker result that, over a finite time window every open system implements the trace (...) of FSA Q, as it executes program on input . If correct the resulting bold philosophical claim is that phenomenal states—such as feelings and visual experiences—can never be understood or explained functionally. (shrink)

The big news about chaos is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system's behavior. The so-called butterfly effect has become one of the most popular images of chaos. The idea is that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Argentina could cause a tornado in Texas three weeks later. By contrast, in an identical copy of the world sans the Argentinian butterfly, no such storm would have arisen (...) in Texas. The mathematical version of this property is known as sensitive dependence. However, it turns out that sensitive dependence is somewhat old news, so some of the implications flowing from it are perhaps not such “big news” after all. Still, chaos studies have highlighted these implications in fresh ways and led to thinking about other implications as well. -/- In addition to exhibiting sensitive dependence, chaotic systems possess two other properties: they are deterministic and nonlinear (Smith 2007). This entry discusses systems exhibiting these three properties and what their philosophical implications might be for theories and theoretical understanding, confirmation, explanation, realism, determinism, free will and consciousness, and human and divine action. (shrink)

In the mid-1970s, the biomedical model of medicine gave way to the biopsychosocial model of medicine; it was billed as a more comprehensive and compassionate model of medicine. After more than a century of disentangling medicine from religion, the medicine and spirituality movement is attempting to bring religion and spirituality back into medicine. It is doing so under a biopsychosociospiritual model. I unpack one model for allowing religion back into medicine called the RCOPE. RCOPE is an instrument designed to categorize (...) religion and spirituality as psychological coping mechanisms. I explore how such instruments are related to the history of statistical measurement and demonstrate the political impetus that governs such enterprises. The biopsychosociospiritual medicine is billed as a more holistic and comprehensive model. This new model of medicine offers total care. However, I demonstrate how this total care becomes totalizing, indeed totalitarian, admitting religion and spirituality back into the fold of medicine under a new secularized medical control. (shrink)

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (Foucault, 1984, 85)In this essay, I take a note from Michel Foucault regarding the notion of biopolitics. For Foucault, biopolitics has both repressive and constitutive properties. Foucault's claim is that with the rise of modern government, the state became exceedingly (...) concerned about the body politic, the bodies that make up the polis, including the health of those bodies. However, Giorgio Agamben claims that Foucault and all western political philosophy misses the relationship between power and Sovereignty, with disastrous results and totalizing tendencies. I explore the case of Terri Schiavo claiming that the social conservatives have attempted to politicize bare life in its legal maneuverings, but I also show how the social liberals open an uncontrollable space between life and death. Both the left and the right miss the aporia at the heart of western political philosophy, and bioethics is complicit in the totalizing effects of contemporary medicine. (shrink)

Moral philosphy, in both the Kantian and Utilitarian traditions, has it as an ideal to provide a set of principles which dominate all other considerations and which will consistently resolve all moral problems. This is often taken to imply that guilt or remorse is irrational if it occurs in circumstances in which one does ones duty but also harms others. This essay explores the possibility of giving up this ideal in favor of a more complex view of morality in which (...) resolutions of conflict are worked out affectively rather than logically. (shrink)

Research suggests that people with psychopathic traits experience fear-inducing stimuli differently from others, seeming to interpret fear as more positive and less negative. We expected that this reaction, termed fear enjoyment, would impact the effect of fear-inducing stimuli on self-report risk-taking behaviour. Risk-taking was measured before and after viewing excitement- and fear-inducing videos (N = 825). As expected from research showing that fear induction tends to reduce risk-taking tendencies, participants showed reduced risk-taking scores following a fear-inducing stimulus. Importantly, this relationship (...) was moderated by psychopathic traits. Participants who did not decrease their risk-taking tendencies following the video scored significantly higher on psychopathic traits. Also, some of the variance in the relationship between psychopathic traits and change in risk-taking was partly accounted for by fear enjoyment, suggesting that future research should examine whether fear enjoyment may play a role in the relationship between psychopathy and risk-taking. (shrink)

Technology is evolving at a rate faster than human evolution, especially human moral evolution. There are those who claim that we must morally bioenhance the human due to existential threats (such as climate change and the looming possibility of cognitive enhancement) and due to the fact that the human animal has a weak moral will. To address these existential threats, we must design human morality into human beings technologically. By moral bioenhancement, these authors mean that we must intervene technologically in (...) the biology of the human animal in order to get it to behave morally to address these existential threats. I will bring the idea of moral bioenhancement into conversation with two philosophers of technology. Bernard Stiegler has argued that technology and culture, and thus technology and human beings, have always evolved hand in hand. Peter-Paul Verbeek notes that we have always designed morality into technology, and thus he sees technology as mediating human morality. When we offload human intentionality onto technology, Verbeek argues, technological objects and systems participate in shaping the moral subjectivity of the human actor. I will show that modern technological bioenhancement obliterates human being. Whereas in the past, human culture was handed from generation to generation through the mediation of technology, in the modern era, the human becomes the raw material upon which a technological will (imperative) rides. (shrink)

This chapter provides a gentle introduction to contextual emergence and its implications for the structure of the material world as well as implications for meaning in our world.

Through an empirical analysis of YouTube videos, blogs, and interviews, this article explores how partners experience intimacy and desire in relation to trans men’s body modifications. Building on Salamon’s conception of trans bodies as emerging within relations of desire, I argue that partners’ experiences of trans men’s bodies are crucially shaped by their intimate bonds with trans men as people, rather than reducible to generic parts. Partners continue to experience trans men as essentially the same people through gender transition, despite (...) fears that testosterone might alter their personalities. Their intimate bonds with trans men also open up space for new relations of desire to emerge, including attraction to bodily changes they might otherwise find unattractive. These partnerships work to expand ideas about which bodies can be desired as male or masculine, and undercut the literalness of sexual identity labels. Thus, the lived realities of gender transition, as they materialize within this context, challenge hegemonic conceptions of gender, sexuality, and desire. (shrink)

E. Haavi Morreim's book, Holding Health Care Accountable , insightfully describes several features of the current crisis in malpractice in relation to the health care marketplace. In this essay, I delineate the key and eminently practical guide for reform that she lays out. I argue that her insights bring us to more fundamental aspects than immanent medical economy and accountability - aspects that are ignored at present. I describe the features of immanent economy and how they tend to cover over (...) epistemological and existential finitude in medicine, show how economy can in fact create new medical knowledge, and show that necessary error is a real feature of day-to-day medical practice. The current system, even with Morreim's reforms, remains at the level of immanent economy, but with modifications may point to the features of medicine that transcend medical knowledge and economy. The gifts of medicine cannot be reduced to the immanent medical economy, and any attempt to do so results in crisis. A health care that points to finitude and fallibility is one that points to the mystery of human existence and mortality. Any health care financing system that helps to delineate finitude - both epistemological and existential - is one that will give patients a new lease on living and dying. (shrink)

This article serves as the introduction to the Annual Review special section entitled ‘Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Project: Computational Practices and Circumscribed Futures’. As such, it introduces the collective undertaking of the Internation Project in relation to Stiegler’s long career as a thinker, educator and community organizer. The introduction pursues a number of themes addressed in the section’s contributions, including pharmacological logic, transindividuation, computational practices, bifurcation and negentropy (means of slowing entropic processes at individual and collective levels). All of (...) these themes pertain to the climate crises the world collectively faces and posit means by which futures can be conceived in less detrimental and destructive economic, social, technological and intellectual ways. The Internation Collective as represented and furthered in this special section responds to the demands of climate crises through a macroeconomic model designed to combat entropy at various scales, from the bio-chemical to the biosphere. (shrink)

The fundamental problem on which Ilya Prigogine and the Brussels-Austin Group have focused can be stated briefly as follows. Our observations indicate that there is an arrow of time in our experience of the world (e.g., decay of unstable radioactive atoms like Uranium, or the mixing of cream in coffee). Most of the fundamental equations of physics are time reversible, however, presenting an apparent conflict between our theoretical descriptions and experimental observations. Many have thought that the observed arrow of time (...) was either an artifact of our observations or due to very special initial conditions. An alternative approach, followed by the Brussels-Austin Group, is to consider the observed direction of time to be a basic physical phenomenon and to develop a mathematical formalism that can describe this direction as being due to the dynamics of physical systems. In part I of this essay, I review and assess an attempt to carry out an approach that received much of their attention from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. In part II, I will discuss their more recent approach using rigged Hilbert spaces. (shrink)

This second part of a two-part essay discusses recent developments in the Brussels-Austin Group after the mid 1980s. The fundamental concerns are the same as in their similarity transformation approach (see Part I), but the contemporary approach utilizes rigged Hilbert space (whereas the older approach used Hilbert space). While the emphasis on nonequilibrium statistical mechanics remains the same, the use of similarity transformations shifts to the background. In its place arose an interest in the physical features of large Poincaré systems, (...) nonlinear dynamics and the mathematical tools necessary to analyze them. (shrink)

The writings of Jean Baudrillard have dramatically altered the face of critical theory & promise to pose challenges well into the 21st century. His work on simulation, media, the status of the image, the system of objects, hyperreality, & information technology continues to influence intellectual work in a diverse set of fields.

Using a number of his recent site-specific installations, conceptual artist and theorist Victor Burgin discusses the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works that combine both still and moving images. In the process he modifies Bazin’s question ‘What is cinema?’ to ask ‘What is a camera?’ These works extend and develop Burgin’s long-standing interest in the relationship of aesthetics and politics as rendered through visualization technologies, especially as it pertains to space. Burgin’s (...) discussion constructs a genealogy of seeing, visualizing and image-making as technologically-determined and crafted. The ideology of vision and the ideological artefacts produced by and through visual technologies from perspectival painting to analog photography to computer imaging constitute, in Burgin’s argument, ‘the ideological chora of our spectacular global village’. (shrink)

Despite his banishment from the philosophy shelves in bookshops, Jung’s thought represents, in fact, a highly sophisticated philosophical position. Maybe it’s time we began to take Jung seriously as a philosopher.

Despite his banishment from the philosophy shelves in bookshops, Jung’s thought represents, in fact, a highly sophisticated philosophical position. Maybe it’s time we began to take Jung seriously as a philosopher.