“The Problem of Divine Hiddenness” is an infelicitous phrase for two reasons. First, while it suggests that God both exists and hides, this phrase actually refers to a strategy of arguing that various forms of nonbelief in God constitute evidence for God’s nonexistence. Second, it suggests that there is only one problem for theistic belief here, while in fact this phrase refers to a family of arguments for atheism. This entry focuses on contemporary arguments from nonbelief to atheism. The most (...) important of these is defended by J. L. Schellenberg. Schellenberg claims that a loving God would ensure that there is no reasonable or inculpable nonbelief in his existence, since this belief is required for human beings to enter into a relationship with God, and since (according to theism) having such a relationship with creatures is a great good, and indeed is one of God’s most important goals. But, Schellenberg argues, since such nonbelief occurs among those capable of belief in God, theism should be rejected. The citations collected under General Overviews all concern Schellenberg’s argument. Other authors have independently constructed different arguments from nonbelief to atheism, and these are surveyed under Other Arguments from Nonbelief. The final five sections of this bibliography survey responses to arguments from hiddenness to atheism. Most of this literature explicitly concerns Schellenberg’s argument, but many of these replies could also be directed against the other arguments surveyed here. There are important connections between the problem of divine hiddenness and the problem of evil, and the relevant literature is discussed in a preliminary section entitled Divine Hiddenness in the Context of the Problem of Evil. (shrink)

In recent years, epistemologists have devoted enormous attention to this question: what should happen when two epistemic peers disagree about the truth-value of some proposition? Some have argued that that in all such cases, both parties are rationally required to revise their position in some way. Others have maintained that, in at least some cases, neither party is rationally required to revise her position. In this paper, I examine a provocative and under-appreciated argument for the latter view due to Elgin (...) Disagreement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 53–68, 2010; The Philosopher’s Magazine, fourth quarter, pp 77–82, 2012; True enough, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017; in: Johnson Voicing dissent: the ethics and epistemology of making disagreement public, Routledge, New York, pp 10–21, 2018). I defend it against a series of objections, and I then identify some fruitful ways in which her view could be developed further. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Der folgende Beitrag handelt vom Rückgriff auf den Körper an der Grenze und will einige der besonderen Problematiken skizzieren, die sich durch eine kontrollpolitisch begründete Ontologie des Körpers und seine weitere Verarbeitung als datenbankgestützte Identität im Kontext der europäischen Migrationspolitik ergeben. Er will damit einen Beitrag zur Politisierung der konstitutiven Instabilität einer verkörperten Identität leisten, d. h. einer Identität und vor allem auch eines Körpers, wie sie – gewissermaßen gegen das somatische Identitätskriterium, demgemäß „wir“ unser Körper „sind“ – von (...) Feminist*innen wie etwa Elizabeth Grosz oder Niamh Stephenson und Dimitris Papadopoulos und, für den Bereich der Surveillance Studies, etwa von Kirstie Ball postuliert wurde. Im ersten Teil des Textes greifen wir drei Fälle auf. Sie haben sich infolge der Flüchtlingsbewegungen nach Europa ab 2015 ereignet und sind ihrerseits – wie wir zeigen werden, ganz und gar nicht rational begründet – zu Skandalen beschworen und anschließend als Argumente angeführt worden, um sowohl für die gesellschaftliche und politische Akzeptanz als auch für die Zweckmäßigkeit einer zunehmenden Daten-Interoperabilität und einer Ausweitung der Geltungsbereiche zu werben, wie sie sich anhand der EURODAC-Novellierung erkennen lassen, die sich gegenwärtig vollzieht. Im zweiten Teil fassen wir den EURODAC-Recast zusammen – und skizzieren damit eine neue Entwicklungsphase der soziotechnischen Assemblage, durch die in den europäischen Entwicklungs- und Forschungseinrichtungen der biometrischen Identifikation und der Kontrolle der Mobilität eine verkörperte Identität der Migration produziert wird. (shrink)

_The Ethics and Religious Philosophy of Etty Hillesum_ offers a comprehensive account of international scholarship on the life, works and vision of the Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, and her struggle to come to terms with her personal life in the context of the Holocaust.

When Georg von der Gabelentz’s book Die Sprachwissenschaft was published, the historical-comparative paradigm was the dominant perspective in empirical linguistic enquiry, and the then current theory of language was fijirmly rooted in language psychology. While itself based in this tradition, Gabelentz’s Sprachwissenschaft nevertheless strikes another chord, which sets it apart from contemporary sources. This chapter argues that the book is particularly noteworthy for its wide-ranging bottom-up approach to linguistic phenomena and its propensity to conceive of language both as object and (...) instrument of enquiry in a sense akin to the ‘reflexive’ stance that later would become a hallmark of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The ‘phenomenological mindset’ can in particular be retraced in the way a diffferent philosophy of the language sciences and theory of meaning take shape in Die Sprachwissenschaft. (shrink)

William Rowe’s a posteriori arguments for the non-existence of God are well-known. Rather less attention has been given, however, to Rowe’s intriguing a priori argument for atheism. In this paper, I examine the three published responses to Rowe’s a priori argument (due to Bruce Langtry, William Morris, and Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, respectively). I conclude that none is decisive, but I show that Rowe’s argument nevertheless requires more defence than he provides.

In the March 1927 number of this Journal Mr. Klaas, who is studying abroad, showed the lack of opposition between science and religion. In May he gave the reason. His newest contribution striking contribution striking points out their recognized relations. The Editor.

This is a review of the issue of randomness in quantum mechanics, with special emphasis on its ambiguity; for example, randomness has different antipodal relationships to determinism, computability, and compressibility. Following a philosophical discussion of randomness in general, I argue that deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are strictly speaking incompatible with the Born rule. I also stress the role of outliers, i.e. measurement outcomes that are not 1-random. Although these occur with low probability, their very existence implies that the no-signaling (...) principle used in proofs of randomness of outcomes of quantum-mechanical measurements should be reinterpreted statistically, like the second law of thermodynamics. In three appendices I discuss the Born rule and its status in both single and repeated experiments, review the notion of 1-randomness that in various guises was investigated by Kolmogorov and others and treat Bell’s Theorem and the Free Will Theorem with their implications for randomness. (shrink)

This book studies the foundations of quantum theory through its relationship to classical physics. This idea goes back to the Copenhagen Interpretation (in the original version due to Bohr and Heisenberg), which the author relates to the mathematical formalism of operator algebras originally created by von Neumann. The book therefore includes comprehensive appendices on functional analysis and C*-algebras, as well as a briefer one on logic, category theory, and topos theory. Matters of foundational as well as mathematical interest that are (...) covered in detail include symmetry (and its "spontaneous" breaking), the measurement problem, the Kochen-Specker, Free Will, and Bell Theorems, the Kadison-Singer conjecture, quantization, indistinguishable particles, the quantum theory of large systems, and quantum logic, the latter in connection with the topos approach to quantum theory. This book is Open Access under a CC BY licence. (shrink)

Theism is the view that God exists; naturalism is the view that there are no supernatural beings, processes, mechanisms, or forces. This Element explores whether things are better, worse, or neither on theism relative to naturalism. It introduces readers to the central philosophical issues that bear on this question, and it distinguishes a wide range of ways it can be answered. It critically examines four views, three of which hold that things are better on theism than on naturalism, and one (...) of which holds just the opposite. (shrink)

I argue that Bohmian mechanics cannot reasonably be claimed to be a deterministic theory. If one assumes the “quantum equilibrium distribution” provided by the wave function of the universe, Bohmian mechanics requires an external random oracle in order to describe the algorithmic randomness properties of typical outcome sequences of long runs of repeated identical experiments. This oracle lies beyond the scope of Bohmian mechanics, including the impossibility of explaining the randomness property in question from “random” initial conditions. Thus the advantages (...) of Bohmian mechanics over other interpretations of quantum mechanics, if any, must lie at an ontological level, and in its potential to derive the quantum equilibrium distribution and hence the Born rule. (shrink)

The question of whether God exists has long preoccupied philosophers. Many accounts of God have been proposed, and many arguments for and against God’s existence have been offered and discussed. But while philosophers have been busy trying to determine whether or not God exists, they have generally neglected to ask this question: "Does it _matter _whether God exists?" _Does God Matter?_ features ten original essays written by prominent philosophers of religion that address this very important, yet surprisingly neglected, question. One (...) natural way to approach this question is to seek to understand what difference God’s existence would—or does—make to the value of the world and the well-being of its inhabitants. The three essays in Section I defend versions of _pro-theism_: the view that God’s existence would, or does, make things better than they would otherwise be. The three subsequent essays in Section II defend _anti-theism_: the view that God’s existence would, or does, make things worse than they would otherwise be. The final four essays in Section III consider the interplay between the existential and axiological debates concerning the existence of God. This book presents important research on a growing topic in philosophy of religion that will also be of keen interest to scholars working in other areas of philosophy, and in other disciplines. (shrink)

Using side-by-side Sacks forcing, it is shown that it is consistent that $2^\omega$ be large and that there be many types of ultrafilters of character $\omega_1$.

Aumann and Serrano :810–836, 2008) introduce the axiom of duality, which ensures that risk measures respect comparative risk aversion. This paper characterizes all dual risk measures by a simple equivalent condition. This equivalence provides a decomposition result and a construction method, which is used to analyze concrete dual measures. Moreover, this paper aims to extend this characterization to the most general setting. Compared with Aumann and Serrano, it, therefore, relaxes the axiom of positive homogeneity, and allows for risk-neutral and risk-seeking (...) agents, as well as for all integrable gambles. (shrink)

The volume is published on the occasion of the birth centennial of Eugenio Coseriu (1921–2002). It is the first collective volume to appear in English in which various scholars present a variety of perspectives on Coseriu’s scholarly work and discuss its continuing relevance for the language sciences. Coseriu’s international reputation has suffered from his commitment to publish in languages such as Spanish, German, French, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, to the detriment of English. As a consequence, his work is less well-known (...) outside Romance and German linguistics. The volume aims to raise the general awareness of Coseriu’s work among linguists around the world, in accordance with Coseriu’s own adage that it takes a constructive mindset (acknowledging "accomplishments and limitations") to do justice to all scholarly work in the humanities. The articles are organized into three major thematic clusters: 1) philosophy of language, 2) history of the language sciences and 3) theory and practice of "Integral Linguistics". The volume is essential reading for anyone working in these fields and for those seeking to gain deeper understanding of Coseriu’s goal to develop a unitary approach to language which takes as its point of departure the "activity of speaking". (shrink)

Anselmian theism holds that there necessarily exists a being, God, who is essentially unsurpassable in power, knowledge, goodness, and wisdom. This being is also understood to be the creator and sustainer of all that is. In contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, this role is generally understood as follows: God surveys the array of possible worlds, and in his wisdom selects exactly one for actualization, based on its axiological properties. In this paper, I discuss an under-appreciated challenge for this account of (...) the Anselmian God’s selection of a world. In particular, I urge that there are failures of comparability between various possible worlds, and I argue that, given certain assumptions, these failures threaten the rationality of God’s choice of a world. To the extent that rationality is deemed necessary for unsurpassability, this result also challenges the core Anselmian notion that God is an unsurpassable being. (shrink)

In recent decades, scientific theories have postulated the existence of many universes beyond our own. The details and implications of these theories are hotly contested. Some philosophers argue that these scientific models count against the existence of God. Others, however, argue that if God exists, a multiverse is precisely what we should expect to find. Moreover, these philosophers claim that the idea of a divinely created multiverse can help believers in God respond to certain arguments for atheism. These proposals are, (...) of course, also extremely controversial. This volume collects together twelve newly published essays – two by physicists, and ten by philosophers – that discuss various aspects of this issue. Some of the essays support the idea of a divinely created multiverse; others oppose it. Scientific, philosophical, and theological issues are considered. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Background The Problem of No Best World Theistic Responses: Four Categories Works cited.

In contemporary analytic philosophy, the problem of evil refers to a family of arguments that attempt to show, by appeal to evil, that God does not exist. Some very important arguments in this family focus on gratuitous evil. Most participants in the relevant discussions, including theists and atheists, agree that God is able to prevent all gratuitous evil and that God would do so. On this view, of course, the occurrence of even a single instance of gratuitous evil falsifies theism. (...) The most common response to such arguments attempts to cast doubt on the claim that gratuitous evil really occurs. The focus of these two survey papers will be a different response—one that has received less attention in the literature. This response attempts to show that God and gratuitous evil are compatible. If it succeeds, then the occurrence of gratuitous evil does not, after all, count against theism. After introducing some key terms, I survey the literature surrounding the attempts by Michael Peterson and John Hick to execute this strategy. In a follow-up paper, I discuss the attempts of William Hasker, Peter van Inwagen, and Michael Almeida, respectively. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Like a Virgin”Levinas’s Anti-Platonic Understanding of Love and DesireBrigitta Keintzel (bio)Translated by Brigitta Keintzel, Benjamin McQuade, and Sophie UitzMy article is divided into three parts. First, I outline transformations in the understanding of love through philosophical tradition from Plato to Levinas, exploring Levinas’s anti-Platonic understanding of love via the relationship between knowledge and love. This relationship is asymmetrical: knowledge functions in the name of love, but love does (...) not function in the name of knowledge. Love is not knowledge but instead entails knowledge. As love of wisdom, knowledge serves in the name of love. The open question here is: how can Platonic love of wisdom or Levinasian ethical desire have the ability to respond to social, political, and cultural challenges — a question I will come back to in the last section.In the second section, I discuss the relationship between love and desire. As opposed to desire, which is explicitly bound to the Desired, along with some ideal position vis-à-vis that person, love possesses a plethora of connotations that often render it vague. Love is bound not only to the self but to other persons — as well as to objects, facts, attitudes, situations, ideas, institutions, cultures, and even governments. Desire, on the other hand, is a stronger term than the timeworn and [End Page 21] much-abused word “love.” It entails a stronger orientation toward the Other with a temporal, prospective connotation: in the horizon of desire, the Other is “not yet,” the Other is future in the present. For Levinas, the delineation of “not-yet”-ness is a central feature for describing alterity and virginity.My central question in the third section is on how sensual love and ethical desire relate to Levinas’s description of the relationship between “intimate” and “real” society. I will show that it is particularly Levinas’s introduction of the figure of the Third that makes it possible to finally overcome the Platonic dualism between individuality and generality. In both erotic love and in ethical desire, the figure of the Third is decisive for exploring Levinas’s understanding of justice. The figure of the Third is not only a witness of the truth between the subject and a desiring Other but also a precondition for establishing this truth. Therefore, it is not necessary to see but to hear the claims of the Third, as well the claims of the Desired.The Wisdom of LoveIn Plato’s interpretation, love is seen as a progression from the discrete, individual, erotic love to the general and comprehensive. The lover feels in him/herself a deficiency and strives to compensate this deficiency — accomplished through various activities of consciousness, involving desire, suffering, thought, perception, the striving toward the good and the beautiful. These are not considered equal in quality but rather form a progression from the particular to the general. Eros remains dutiful to the idea of the good. Renunciation of corporal love is seen as a precondition for attaining love of the good and the beautiful, this being equated with the attainment of immortality. This renunciation, as it has been argued in the dialogue between Alcibiades and Socrates, implies that spiritual, intellectual love is of higher value than corporal love. As opposed to spiritual love, corporal love is fraught with a deficiency that can never be completely assuaged. [End Page 22]This model is based on the myth — related in the Symposium — of the spherical human being, comprised originally of two people in one body, with four hands, four legs, two genders, and two faces. Only the splitting of this single human into two people with two faces and two genders created the longing for a lost unity, expressed in erotic desire for the other gender or the other face. In this narrative, erotic desire is brought into semantic proximity with lost unity and with suffering. Unisexuality is seen as a deficiency, to receive a “truer and more perfect” assuagement only on a spiritual level. The implied antagonism between spiritual (“Platonic”) and corporal love constitutes a narrative motive that — in various forms — particularly marked post-Enlightenment literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In examples... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Like a Virgin”Levinas’s Anti-Platonic Understanding of Love and DesireBrigitta Keintzel (bio)Translated by Brigitta Keintzel, Benjamin McQuade, and Sophie UitzMy article is divided into three parts. First, I outline transformations in the understanding of love through philosophical tradition from Plato to Levinas, exploring Levinas’s anti-Platonic understanding of love via the relationship between knowledge and love. This relationship is asymmetrical: knowledge functions in the name of love, but love does (...) not function in the name of knowledge. Love is not knowledge but instead entails knowledge. As love of wisdom, knowledge serves in the name of love. The open question here is: how can Platonic love of wisdom or Levinasian ethical desire have the ability to respond to social, political, and cultural challenges — a question I will come back to in the last section.In the second section, I discuss the relationship between love and desire. As opposed to desire, which is explicitly bound to the Desired, along with some ideal position vis-à-vis that person, love possesses a plethora of connotations that often render it vague. Love is bound not only to the self but to other persons — as well as to objects, facts, attitudes, situations, ideas, institutions, cultures, and even governments. Desire, on the other hand, is a stronger term than the timeworn and [End Page 21] much-abused word “love.” It entails a stronger orientation toward the Other with a temporal, prospective connotation: in the horizon of desire, the Other is “not yet,” the Other is future in the present. For Levinas, the delineation of “not-yet”-ness is a central feature for describing alterity and virginity.My central question in the third section is on how sensual love and ethical desire relate to Levinas’s description of the relationship between “intimate” and “real” society. I will show that it is particularly Levinas’s introduction of the figure of the Third that makes it possible to finally overcome the Platonic dualism between individuality and generality. In both erotic love and in ethical desire, the figure of the Third is decisive for exploring Levinas’s understanding of justice. The figure of the Third is not only a witness of the truth between the subject and a desiring Other but also a precondition for establishing this truth. Therefore, it is not necessary to see but to hear the claims of the Third, as well the claims of the Desired.The Wisdom of LoveIn Plato’s interpretation, love is seen as a progression from the discrete, individual, erotic love to the general and comprehensive. The lover feels in him/herself a deficiency and strives to compensate this deficiency — accomplished through various activities of consciousness, involving desire, suffering, thought, perception, the striving toward the good and the beautiful. These are not considered equal in quality but rather form a progression from the particular to the general. Eros remains dutiful to the idea of the good. Renunciation of corporal love is seen as a precondition for attaining love of the good and the beautiful, this being equated with the attainment of immortality. This renunciation, as it has been argued in the dialogue between Alcibiades and Socrates, implies that spiritual, intellectual love is of higher value than corporal love. As opposed to spiritual love, corporal love is fraught with a deficiency that can never be completely assuaged. [End Page 22]This model is based on the myth — related in the Symposium — of the spherical human being, comprised originally of two people in one body, with four hands, four legs, two genders, and two faces. Only the splitting of this single human into two people with two faces and two genders created the longing for a lost unity, expressed in erotic desire for the other gender or the other face. In this narrative, erotic desire is brought into semantic proximity with lost unity and with suffering. Unisexuality is seen as a deficiency, to receive a “truer and more perfect” assuagement only on a spiritual level. The implied antagonism between spiritual (“Platonic”) and corporal love constitutes a narrative motive that — in various forms — particularly marked post-Enlightenment literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In examples... (shrink)

If one formulates Helmholtz’s ideas about perception in terms of modern-day theories one arrives at a model of perceptual inference and learning that can explain a remarkable range of neurobiological facts. Using constructs from statistical physics it can be shown that the problems of inferring what cause our sensory inputs and learning causal regularities in the sensorium can be resolved using exactly the same principles. Furthermore, inference and learning can proceed in a biologically plausible fashion. The ensuing scheme rests on (...) Empirical Bayes and hierarchical models of how sensory information is generated. The use of hierarchical models enables the brain to construct prior expectations in a dynamic and context-sensitive fashion. This scheme provides a principled way to understand many aspects of the brain’s organisation and responses. In this paper, we suggest that these perceptual processes are just one emergent property of systems that conform to a free-energy principle. The free-energy considered here represents a bound on the surprise inherent in any exchange with the environment, under expectations encoded by its state or configuration. A system can minimise free-energy by changing its configuration to change the way it samples the environment, or to change its expectations. These changes correspond to action and perception, respectively, and lead to an adaptive exchange with the environment that is characteristic of biological systems. This treatment implies that the system’s state and structure encode an implicit and probabilistic model of the environment. We will look at models entailed by the brain and how minimisation of free-energy can explain its dynamics and structure. (shrink)

God is traditionally taken to be a perfect being, and the creator and sustainer of all that is. So, if theism is true, what sort of world should we expect? To answer this question, we need an account of the array of possible worlds from which God is said to choose. It seems that either there is (a) exactly one best possible world; or (b) more than one unsurpassable world; or (c) an infinite hierarchy of increasingly better worlds. Influential arguments (...) for atheism have been advanced on each hierarchy, and these jointly comprise a daunting trilemma for theism. In this paper, I argue that if theism is true, we should expect the actual world to be a multiverse comprised of all and only those universes which are worthy of creation and sustenance. I further argue that this multiverse is the unique best of all possible worlds. Finally, I explain how his unconventional view bears on the trilemma for theism. (shrink)

philosophy of language, the study of the essence of language and its importance to mankind and culture, is concerned with the relationship between linguistic signs and thought, knowledge , consciousness, logic, communication, truth, reference, and reality.

In contemporary analytic philosophy, the problem of evil refers to a family of arguments that attempt to show, by appeal to evil, that God does not exist. Some very important arguments in this family focus on gratuitous evil. Most participants in the relevant discussions, including theists and atheists, agree that God is able to prevent all gratuitous evil, and that God would do so. On this view, of course, the occurrence of even a single instance of gratuitous evil falsifies theism. (...) The most common response to such arguments attempts to cast doubt on the claim that gratuitous evil really occurs. The focus of these two survey papers will be a different response – one that has received less attention in the literature. This response attempts to show that God and gratuitous evil are compatible. If it succeeds, then the occurrence of gratuitous evil does not, after all, count against theism. In the prequel to this paper, I surveyed the literature surrounding the attempts by Michael Peterson and John Hick to execute this strategy. Here, I survey the attempts due to William Hasker, Peter van Inwagen, and Michael Almeida, respectively. (shrink)