This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Did the Universe Begin to Exist? Everything That Begins to Exist Has a Cause The Cause of the Universe Properties of the First Cause Objections Conclusion References.

The authors of this lively and thorough introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective introduce you to the principal subdisciplines of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics and philosophy ...

Craig and Moreland present a rigorous analysis and critique of the major varieties of contemporary philosophical naturalism and advocate that it should be abandoned in light of the serious difficulties raised against it. The contributors draw on a wide range of topics including: epistemology, philosophy of science, value theory to basic analytic ontology, philosophy of mind and agency, and natural theology.

James Franklin aspires to a realist view of mathematical objects as concrete, rather than abstract, objects. It is shown that he fails to carry out his program but is forced to revert to Platonism.

Craig Eisendrath reinterprets and unifies the writings of the late-nineteenth-century psychologist William James and the twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. James's psychology achieves greater depth by its grounding in philosophic doctrine, and Whitehead's abstract and frequently abstruse philosophy gains greater specificity through the concrete illustrations provided by a wealth of psychological evidence. The result is an extension of James and an exegesis of Whitehead. The merging of James's theory of will and Whitehead's theory of (...) concrescence and organism is the central pivot of the book. Eisendrath discusses as well the philosophical traditions behind both men and analyzes their theories on perception, time, space, causality, the nature and role of ideas, the laws of nature, God and civilization. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism.

1. As indicated in the Acknowledgments, the sourcebook, The Essential Santayana, is the product of the input of a short list of scholars who, give or take a few names, constitute the “Santayana revival” heralded on the back-cover. Martin A. Coleman has acted as the clearing house for their suggestions, while also writing an Introduction, arranging the readings into five general headings, and providing thumb-nail synopses of each of the readings in each category. While all this is a solid contribution (...) on Coleman’s part, the back-cover contains two questionable if not plainly fallacious “advertisements.” The first is the claim that Santayana, along with William James and Josiah Royce, ranks as “one of the founders.. (shrink)

The Tomb of Jesus and His Family? Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs near Jerusalem’s Walls. Edited by James H. Charlesworth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Pp. xx + 585, illus. $48.

This article explores “pragmatic arguments” for theistic belief – that is, arguments for believing in God that appeal, not to evidence in favor of God’s existence, but rather to alleged practical benefits that come from belief in God. Central to this exploration is a consideration of Jeff Jordan’s recent defense of “the Jamesian wager,” which portrays itself as building on the case for belief presented in William James’s essay “The Will to Believe.” According to Jordan, religious belief creates (...) significant gains in this‐worldly happiness , and provided the individual does not have decisive evidence against God’s existence, these gains give the individual sufficient reason to strive to believe in God. In its exploration of this argument, the article presents an overview of recent social scientific work on the this‐worldly effects of religious belief. It canvases several challenges to pragmatic arguments, namely, a challenge according to which happiness rooted in false belief is worth less than that rooted in truth, a perfectionistic challenge alleging that one should strive for personal excellence rather than happiness, and a challenge alleging that any happiness gains of religious belief are outweighed by the potential harms brought about by religious belief. (shrink)

Chapter 5 aims to understand the contemporary philosophical climate in terms of a dominant philosophy, and argues that it is found in the ‘Agency Theory’, or ‘Practice Ideal’: the thesis that we are the creators of our own environment and values, that the realities which we meet with are the works of man. Craig argues that from about 1780, ‘activity’, ‘practice’ and similar concepts began to come to the fore, and provided new solutions of metaphysical and epistemological problems. The (...) idea was to some extent anticipated in writers of the eighteenth century: in Pascal’s famous wager on the existence of God the value of truth has receded, and considerations of what serves a certain purpose have come to regulate belief; Hume saw in our imagination, not in our reason, the governing, and essentially active, principle that supports our beliefs; finally Kant’s transcendental idealism not only provided the key concept of ‘the world as we experience it’ that incorporated both concepts and impressions, but amounted to the claim that the world of our experience is of our own making. But the real rise of the Agency Theory took place in the nineteenth century: Marx and Engels, rejecting both theistic and idealist metaphysics, set up a new ideal for man, who was to be the free architect and builder of his own social world, in virtue of his grasp of the laws governing society and the processes of social change; following Peirce, William James and other American Pragmatists argued that belief is primarily an instrument for the attainment of our goals, and that man is fully autonomous, his creations subject to no controls or standards other than those which he himself imposes; Nietzsche, the most vociferous champion of agency and creativity, affirmed the idea, and constructed his account of reality, truth, and knowledge, and his aspirations for man around it. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between William James’s radical empiricism and Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism by considering how dominant technologies of locomotion and travel in their respective historical times influenced their thinking and the style of their prose. Highlighting the imagery of trains and ground movement in James and planes and flight in Deleuze, I suggest that each constructs an empiricism that resonates with and reacts to the emerging forms of mass movement in his own time. The (...) essay serves as an invitation to read James and Deleuze together with attention to the aesthetic qualities of their writing and as united in an ongoing project of honing philosophy to the pace of its time. (shrink)

Is philosophy of film without theory an oxymoron or a family of non-, anti-, and a-theoretical approaches with which to engage in film-involving philosophical scholarship and understanding? The goal of this collection is to argue for the latter and to do so by example. By demonstrating a mere handful of the many ways in which philosophy of film without theory might be pursued, in tandem with the insights born of these methods, the volume’s contributors both implicitly and explicitly challenge the (...) academic assumption that engaging philosophically with film must be a theoretical activity. Indeed, they indicate the potential for championing without theory scholarship across the humanities for anyone whose projects and practices seek and celebrate humanistic understanding. -/- Contributors include Lucy Bolton, Carla Carmona, James Conant, Katheryn Doran. Maximilian De Gaynesford, Rob van Gerwen, John Gibson, Eran Guter & Inbal Guter, Colin Heber-Percy, Iris Vidmar Jovanović, Andrew Klevan, David Macarthur, Rupert Read, William Rothman, Constantine Sandis, and Sebastian Sunday. Films and television programmed discussed include Gravity, Le notti di Cabiria, Dunkirk, The Handmaid's Tale, Three Colours: Red and many more. -/- In addition there is an interview with Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. (shrink)

An inveterate reviewer of books, Charles Peirce reviewed George Santayana's first two volumes of The Life of Reason in the June 8, 1905 edition of The Nation. Santayana's publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, advertised what was destined to be a five-volume The Life of Reason as having a "pragmatistic flavor." Santayana's five-volume series was in fact a monumental achievement, securing his place as a prominent Harvard philosopher along with such colleagues as William James and Josiah Royce. In the teens (...) of the 20th century Santayana's eloquently written renditions of the natural teleology of ideals received the plaudits of John Dewey and his followers at Columbia University. The Life of Reason remained one of... (shrink)

In this note, I consider an argument advanced by William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair against the possibility of actual infinite collections based onHilbert’s Hotel and alleged problems with inverse operations in transfinite arithmetic. I aim to show that this argument is misguided, since it is based on a mistaken view that the impossibility of defining ℵ0 - ℵ0 entails the impossibility of removing an infinite subcollection from an infinite collection.

Marcel Proust once wrote: “truth will be attained . . . when [the writer] takes two different objects, states the connection between them . . . and encloses them in the necessary links of a well-wrought style . . . within a metaphor.” Inspired in part by Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whom Megan Craig’s Levinas and James identifies as the primary link between William James (1842–1910) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), Proust’s words might well apply to Craig’s (...) own book, which employs a well-wrought style to bring into conversation its titular thinkers, and, in turn, the respective traditions of American pragmatism and French phenomenology with which they are associated. Aiming to “show the expansive space for new work .. (shrink)

The question of evil—its origins, its justification, its solution—has plagued humankind from the beginning. Every generation raises the question and struggles with the responses it is given. Questions about the nature of evil and how it is reconciled with the truth claims of Christianity are unavoidable; we need to be prepared to respond to such questions with great clarity and good faith. God and Evil compiles the best thinking on all angles on the question of evil, from some of the (...) finest scholars in religion, philosophy and apologetics, including Gregory E. Ganssle and Yena Lee Bruce Little Garry DeWeese R. Douglas Geivett James Spiegel Jill Graper Hernandez Win Corduan David Beck With additional chapters addressing "issues in dialogue" such as hell and human origins, and a now-famous debate between evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig and atheist philosopher Michael Tooley, God and Evil provides critical engagement with recent arguments against faith and offers grounds for renewed confidence in the God who is "acquainted with grief.". (shrink)

In this book and the companion volume The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, Craig undertakes the first thorough appraisal of the arguments for and against the tensed and tenseless theories of time.

"This article presents an analysis of William Lane Craig’s argument of the finitude of the past based on the impossibility of the formation of an actual infinite. To achieve the aim of this academic work we use, as a primary base, a book written by Craig called Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics and a chapter written by the same author along with James Sinclair called The Kalam Cosmological Argument in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. (...) These works, in our opinion, provide sufficient primary material to study the topic. However, other articles and books by Craig are also referenced, and the commentaries of some other authors, who deal with this problem, are also used. Throughout this work, we consider the historical context and Craig’s incorporation of the kalam cosmological argument. We go on to analyse the presuppositions given by this author and consequently we study, progressively, the formulations that Craig himself made to reach his conclusion. /// Este artigo apresenta uma análise do argumento de William Lane Craig sobre a finitude do passado baseado na impossibilidade da formação de um infinito atual. Para atingir o objetivo deste trabalho acadêmico, utilizamos como fonte primária uma obra escrita pelo próprio Craig, intitulada Fé racional: verdade cristã e apologética, e um capítulo escrito pelo mesmo autor em colaboração com James Sinclair chamado O argumento cosmológico kalam, em The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Estes trabalhos, em nossa opinião, oferecem suficientes elementos para o estudo do tópico. Entretanto, outros artigos e livros de Craig também foram citados, bem como os comentários de vários autores que tratam do problema. No decorrer deste trabalho consideramos o contexto histórico e a incorporação de Craig ao argumento cosmológico kalam. Mais adiante, analisamos primeiramente os pressupostos dados pelo mencionado autor e, em consequência, estudamos progressivamente as formulações feitas pelo próprio Craig para obter suas conclusões. ". (shrink)

The question of whether or not God exists is profoundly fascinating and important. Now two articulate spokesmen--one a Christian, the other an atheist--duel over God's existence in an illuminating battle of ideas. In God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist, William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong bring to the printed page two debates they held before live audiences, preserving all the wit, clarity, and immediacy of their public exchanges. Avoiding overly esoteric arguments, they directly address issues (...) such as religious experience, the Bible, evil, eternity, the origin of the universe, design, and the supposed connection between morality and the existence of God. Employing sharp and humorous arguments, each philosopher strikes quickly to the heart of his opponent's case. For example, Craig claims that we must believe in God in order to explain objective moral values, such as why rape is wrong. Sinnott-Armstrong responds that what makes rape wrong is the harm to victims of rape, so rape is immoral even if there is no God. By assuming a traditional concept of God in their discussion, the authors ensure that they are truly addressing each other's viewpoints and engaging in a disagreement over a unified issue. The book is composed of six chapters that alternate between Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, so that each separate point can be discussed as it arises. Ideal for courses in the philosophy of religion and introduction to philosophy, this lively and direct dialogue will stimulate students and anyone interested in the existence of God, regardless of whether or not they believe in God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RELIGION AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE Paul Ricoeur Université de Nanterre Paris X These are issues that I take very much to heart, so I will risk my own thoughts on the relation between religion and violence, not excluding the violence in and ofreligion. This is to say that I am not evading the objection made by Jean-Pierre Changeux in a recent discussion, namely, that religion as such produces violence. I (...) do not wish to evade the objection nor to hide behind the collateral explanation that it is when religion is detoured by politics that it produces violence. It is the presupposition that religion produces violence that brings me into discussion with René Girard. I encountered his work several decades ago and I have met him intermittently, with moments of distancing and rediscovery. This is the case for me again today regarding one of his later books, The Scapegoat. I cannot forget the dazzling excitement of 1972 when Violence and the Sacred first appeared. And then for me came a moment of hesitation, of doubt: isn't this explanation too psychologizing? Aren't the Gospels too easily exonerated ofthe accusation ofviolence? But I thereafter experienced disappointment with alternative accounts, principally sociological ones, and in particular with the one given by Maurice Bloch in La Violence du religieux. I am going to take the risk of a personal interpretation ofthe intimate relation between religion and violence. My own conviction, at bottom, is that I have been able, by broadening and deepening the issue, to discern the point where this very movement of going deeper bifurcates and branches out toward external violence. I have clarified my position in La Critique et la conviction and in my more recent debate with J.R Changeux, Ce quifait que nouspensons on this complicity between religion and violence. And it was in pursuing the direction opened up in La Critique et la conviction that I rediscovered an 2 Paul Ricoeur interest in The Scapegoat. I found his interpretation not only to be complementary to my own, but its necessary complement. I will now proceed to show how René Girard's thesis is necessary to my own thinking. So now I will go directly to my interpretive proposal, then I will turn to the position of Bloch in La Violence du religieux, a sociological interpretation, in order to come back in the end to Girard. It is by way of reflection on tolerance considered as a progressive initiation that I arrived at the interpretation I am going to present. At its minimal state, we find only the tolerance ofthe intolerant person, who states, "I don't agree with what you believe, I disapprove of it, but I cannot prevent it. I tolerate it in the sense of not being able to prevent it; I would like to prevent it, but I do not have the power to do so." At a second level, tolerance is more positive, saying, "I maintain the conviction that I am the one who has the truth, but I recognize, by way of being accommodating, that you have the right to profess what I hold as false, and I do this in the name ofjustice. That is to say, you certainly have the right, and it is one equal to mine, to profess what you believe, although I take it as false." I would say that the force of the principle ofjustice as thus expressed is this: any other life is worth as much as mine. Let us say that what I recognize here is the right to error. But at this stage I am torn within by the truth that I believe to be unilaterally mine and the justice that entails recognition ofthe other, which I place on another level from that oftruth. I make a further step in pursuing the issue, at a level farther advanced, when I say, "My adversary has perhaps a part ofthe truth but I don't know what it is." I would say that this is the perspectival version oftolerance: the other person sees a side of things, which I cannot see. But our positions cannot be substituted for each other. At this stage there is a... (shrink)

_Naturalism_ provides a rigorous analysis and critique of the major varieties of contemporary philosophical naturalism. The authors advocate the thesis that contemporary naturalism should be abandoned, in light of the serious objections raised against it. Contributors draw on a wide range of topics including: epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and agency, and natural theology.

New B-Theorists of language, while conceding the untranslatability of tensed sentences by tenseless sentences, deny that the ineliminability of tense implies the reality of tensed facts. Thus, New BTheorist Nathan Oaklander explains, For a variety of reasons, ... recent defenders of the tenseless view have come to embrace the thesis that tensed sentences cannot be translated by tenseless ones without loss of meaning. Nevertheless, recent detensers have denied that the ineliminability of tensed language and thought entails the reality of temporal (...) properties. ... Tensed discourse is indeed necessary for timely action, but tensed facts are not, since the truth conditions of tensed sentences can be expressed in a tenseless meta-language that describes unchanging temporal relations between and among events. (shrink)

Epicurus, though popularly and indeed nominally associated with a doctrine advocating the procurement of rather expensive pleasure, lived very simply in his garden with a circle of friends. The 14th of his Sovran Maxims or Cardinal Tenets , as collected by Diogenes Laertius, reads: ‘When tolerable security against our fellowmen is attained, then on a basis of power sufficient to afford support and of material prosperity arises in most genuine form the security of a quiet private life withdrawn from the (...) multitude’ R. D. Hicks, the translator, gives, as an alternative to ‘power sufficient to afford support’, ‘power to expel’, but on either reading, we are to think of Epicurus's garden, both the real place and the conceptualized, or tropologized, topos of wisdom and earthly felicity, as enclosed and exclusive. This enclosure, exclusivity, and—what is also implied—abstention of its inmates from participation in the affairs of state are given apophthegmatic expression in ‘Live hidden!’ We contemplate this adage, or slogan, from an enormous cultural distance and, for most of us, ‘Live hidden!’ is much more likely to trigger secondary reflections about the relations between ethics and politics, private and public, perfection of self and improvement of the world, than it is to constitute an actual, or potential, piece of advice we might think about whether , and how , to follow. (shrink)

Wes Morriston argues that even if we take an endless series of events to be merely potentially, rather than actually, infinite, still no distinction between a beginningless and an endless series of events has been established which is relevant to arguments against the metaphysical possibility of an actually infinite number of things: if a beginningless series is impossible, so is an endless series. The success of Morriston’s argument, however, comes to depend on rejecting the characterization of an endless series of (...) events as a potential infinite. It turns out that according to his own analysis it is vitally relevant whether the series of events is potentially, as opposed to actually, infinite. If it is reasonable to maintain that an endless series of events is potentially infinite while a beginningless series is actually infinite, then a relevant distinction has been established for any person who thinks that an actual infinite cannot exist. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the theology of suffering from a biblical perspective by using literature review as methodology. Methodology: One of the foundational evangelical presuppositions for theological research is that Scripture is divinely authored and is therefore without error, and authoritative for our faith and practice. Findings: The study found that suffering is biblical and should be expected by all Christians as they are not exempted from it, unlike prosperity teaching. Suffering has the purpose of (...) refining and maturing our faith. Further, it is to display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God. Unique Contribution to theory and practice: Therefore, it is recommended for Christians to depend on God at all seasons by asking for wisdom and grace from him. So in this paper, the relationship between suffering and the sovereignty of God and its implication to the church will be discussed with a particular focus on John Piper's work. (shrink)

Wes Morriston argues that even if we take an endless series of events to be merely potentially, rather than actually, infinite, still no distinction between a beginningless and an endless series of events has been established which is relevant to arguments against the metaphysical possibility of an actually infinite number of things: if a beginningless series is impossible, so is an endless series. The success of Morriston’s argument, however, comes to depend on rejecting the characterization of an endless series of (...) events as a potential infinite. It turns out that according to his own analysis it is vitally relevant whether the series of events is potentially, as opposed to actually, infinite. If it is reasonable to maintain that an endless series of events is potentially infinite while a beginningless series is actually infinite, then a relevant distinction has been established for any person who thinks that an actual infinite cannot exist. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Theism and Physical Cosmogony Theism and Physical Eschatology The Fine‐Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life Works cited.