This is a review of an extraordinary tome by Charles Taylor, A secular Age. The book contains about 800 pages of intricate analysis and debate.1 This review attempts to summarise the author’s discussion of secularism under a few key headings and then offers a brief discussion of the material in each case. In the final section, it offers some personal reflections on the missiological implications of his main themes.

The article discusses the twin and, to a certain extent, reciprocal ideas of ‘Manifest Success’ and ‘Manifest Destiny.’ It argues that, as developed respectively by certain streams of thought within Islamic communities and religiously motivated political movements within the USA, they both display strong ideological characteristics in the negative sense. Apart from the historical evidence that contradicts their utopian aspirations, the sense of identity and destiny which they wish to inspire is politically dangerous for being illusory. Muslims and Christians need (...) to be aware of the ideological instrumentalising of their faith traditions, in order to be able to repudiate the undesirable appropriation of their core beliefs. (shrink)

Ted Honderich, 74, formerly Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London, recently published a short book on consciousness (Honderich, 2004). Colin McGinn, 57, his former colleague at University College London and now a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, Florida, reviewed it (McGinn, 2007a). The review is quite long and detailed, but the first sentences set the tone. McGinn on Honderich: 'This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the (...) ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.'. (shrink)

Understanding consciousness is one of the central scientific challenges of our time. This book presents Andy Ross's recent work and discusses a range of perspectives on the core issues. The chapters are based on texts written for a variety of occasions and audiences. Reading them in order, one senses a growing clarity in the articulation of the new ideas, some of which are deep and rather subtle, and glimpses the outlines of a dynamic field. Ross has taken pains to unify (...) the collection and make the main thread clearly visible. His new ideas are of fundamental importance, and readers who grapple with them should gain insight that amply rewards the effort. (shrink)

In an era of climate change, deforestation, melting ice caps, poisoned environments, and species loss, many people are turning to the power of the arts and humanities for sustainable solutions to global ecological problems. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities offers a practical and accessible guide to this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. This book provides an overview of the Environmental Humanities' evolution from the activist movements of the early and mid-twentieth century to more recent debates over climate change, sustainability, energy policy, (...) and habitat degradation in the Anthropocene era. The text introduces readers to seminal writings, artworks, campaigns, and movements while demystifying important terms such as the Anthropocene, environmental justice, nature, ecosystem, ecology, posthuman, and non-human. Emerging theoretical areas such as critical animal and plant studies, gender and queer studies, Indigenous studies, and energy studies are also presented. Organized by discipline, the book explores the role that the arts and humanities play in the future of the planet. Including case studies, discussion questions, annotated bibliographies, and links to online resources, this book offers a comprehensive and engaging overview of the Environmental Humanities for introductory readers. For more advanced readers, it serves as a foundation for future study, projects, or professional development. (shrink)

Over the past twenty-five years, history of science has expanded into history of knowledge. Plurality has been the main message. Commonality, by contrast, is the main finding of the present study. It examines the knowledge practices of the full range of participants in cases of public inquiry—trials, tests, inspections—involving human bodies in contexts of criminal law, police, public health, marriage and family, claims to community aid, and regulation of trades. The cases come from the archives of three agencies of inquiry (...) and evaluation—a government, a university faculty, and a guild—in a variety of polities in the Holy Roman Empire between about 1500 and 1650. Participants of widely differing education, occupation, and experience—learned, artisanal, and domestic, as well as specialized versions of these—are found to have shared practices of observation, description, explanation, and argument. This finding opens the prospect of a history of shared empirical rationality, in contrast to the hegemony of difference, dialogue or transfer, and “expertise,” in how we understand knowing in modern as well as premodern Europe. (shrink)

This book asks what it means to be Muslim, yet not pious, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though Islam is often represented in terms of either daily devotion, such as prayer and fasting, or abandonment of faith, there are many who turn away from tradition without departing from Islam. J. Andrew Bush offers us a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, one that invites questions about divine texts and rejects easy answers about political or sectarian identities. Exploring the lives (...) of irreligious Muslims, Bush highlights the paradoxes of their ethical orientation. While profoundly averse to many aspects of Islamic traditions, irreligious Muslims nonetheless harbor attractions to other aspects--such as Sufi poetry. Exploring this complex weave of attraction and aversion, Relating to Islam in Kurdistan provides intimate portraits of irreligious Kurdish Muslims in everyday life and the historical conditions that have allowed such paradoxical religious orientations to appear very ordinary in contemporary Kurdistan. Whether readers approach the book as Muslims with a commitment to Islam, or as Muslims with ambivalence to Islam, or as non-Muslims who bear their own forms of certainty or ambivalence about Islam, the book will open to the door to thinking about the relationship between commitment and ambivalence in Islamic traditions. (shrink)

What is the relation between things and theories, the material world and its scientific representations? This is a staple philosophical problem that rarely counts as historically legitimate or fruitful. In the following dialogue, the interlocutors do not argue for or against realism. Instead, they explore changing relations between theories and things, between contested objects of knowledge and less contested, more everyday things. Widely seen as the life sciences' first general theory, the cell theory underwent dramatic changes during the nineteenth century. (...) The dialogue establishes that each successive version of the cell theory was formulated -- each identity of the object cell was formed -- around a different material : cork, cartilage, eggs in cleavage, muscle. Such things thus serve as exemplary materials, in ways not described by standard concepts like induction, theory -testing, theory -laden observation, and construction. Still, how can theories and perspective possibly be honed on things if these are apprehended differently by different observers according to their interests, training, culture, or indeed theories? The second part of the dialogue addresses this problem, partly through the verbal and visual schemata that were used by nineteenth-century microscopists and that are comparable to schemata in the visual arts. The third part of the dialogue considers the exemplary materials as a historical sequence, itself needing explanation. Theoretical change devolved partly from wider histories and geographies of the prevalence, availability, or scientific and cultural status of materials such as plants, animals, and muscle. (shrink)

This book brings together an international group of scholars to discuss the ramifications of Heidegger's Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself.

In many areas of the social and behavioral sciences, the nature of the experiments and theories that best capture the underlying constructs are themselves areas of active inquiry. Integrative experiment design risks being prematurely exploitative, hindering exploration of experimental paradigms and of diverse theoretical accounts for target phenomena.

Methods to facilitate co-production in mental health are important for engaging end users. As part of the Technology for Healthy Aging and Wellbeing initiative we organized two interactive co-production workshops, to bring together older adults, health and social care professionals, non-governmental organizations, and researchers. In the first workshop, we used two activities: Technology Interaction and Scavenger Hunt, to explore the potential for different stakeholders to discuss late life mental health and existing technology. In the second workshop, we used Vignettes, Scavenger (...) Hunt, and Invention Test to examine how older adults and other stakeholders might co-produce solutions to support mental wellbeing in later life using new and emerging technologies. In this paper, we share the interactive materials and activities and consider their value for co-production. Overall, the interactive methods were successful in engaging stakeholders with a broad range of technologies to support mental health and wellbeing and in co-producing ideas for how they could be leveraged and incorporated into older people’s lives and support services. We offer this example of using interactive methods to facilitate co-production to encourage greater involvement of older adults and other under-represented groups in co-producing mental health technologies and services. (shrink)

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an (...) organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

Heidegger's later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names "the fourfold"--a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals--and Mitchell's book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger's later thought. As such it provides entré to the full landscape of Heidegger's postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, weather, (...) time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us. (shrink)

Critical insights into Kierkegaard's influence on Barth's theology. Karl Barth was often critical of Søren Kierkegaard's ideas as he understood them. But close reading of the two corpora reveals that Barth owes a lot to the melancholy Dane. Both conceive of God as infinitely qualitatively different from humans, and both emphasize the shocking nearness of God in the incarnation. As public intellectuals, they used this theological vision to protect Christocentric faith from political manipulation and compromise. For Kierkegaard, this meant criticizing (...) the state church; for Barth, this entailed resisting Nazism. Meticulously crafted by a father-son team of renowned systematic theologians, Beyond Immanence demonstrates that Kierkegaard and Barth share a theological trajectory--one that resists cynical manipulation of Christianity for political purposes in favor of uncompromising devotion to a God who is radically transcendent yet established kinship with humanity in time. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

In the Summer of 2015 Sotiris Mitralexis and Andrew T. J. Kaethler organized a conference held in Delphi, Greece, titled “Ontology and History: A Challenging and Auspicious Dialogue for Philosophy and Theology.” The conference brought together over sixty scholars from various parts of the globe, representing Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism—truly an ecumenical affair. The topic of the conference, which is well represented in this volume of Forum Philosophicum, was purposefully broad because it is a question that remains open and (...) which sits at the centre of the Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Joseph Ratzinger posited in several works that the interplay between salvation history and ontology is the most pressing concern for modern theology. In Introduction to Christianity—a modest title for a robust piece of theology—Ratzinger notes that early in the Christian tradition a division arose between theological metaphysics and theology of history, each seen as two different things; “people indulge either in ontological speculation or anti-philosophical theology of salvation history, thus losing in a really tragic way the original unity of Christian thought. At the start Christian thinking is neither merely ‘soteriological’ nor merely ‘metaphysical’ but molded by the unity of history and being. Here lies an important task for modern theological work, which is torn once again by this dilemma.”. (shrink)

-- A ground-breaking exploration of Steiner's thought-- One of the most important philosophers of the last 150 years-- Vast legacy of practical work with world-wide supportersThe Austrian-born philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) created a vast legacy of practical work in Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, Camphill communities for adults and children with special needs, as well as in many other artistic and scientific areas.The foundation of all these approaches is a highly developed system of thought with which Steiner addressed philosophical issues. Many (...) of these issues were also tackled by a number of contemporaries, notably the phenomenological school represented by Edmund Husserl and others.Seeking to clarify his moral thinking which he termed 'ethical individualism', Steiner offered a challenging view of knowledge, not as an abstract and objectified reality, but as a form of relationship between the knower and the known. By this measure, all genuine knowledge is experiential and thus intimately involved with, and capable of changing, the world. Equally, there is no world 'out there', since every individual is a participant in reality, and there are no morally neutral acts or thoughts.Andrew Welburn presents a fascinating insight into the radical nature of Steiner's thinking. Welburn examines his inheritance of ideas from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his attempt to break out of Cartesian dualism and Kantian idealism, and his challenge to the conventional framework of European philosophy. (shrink)

We explore the role of episodic imagining in explaining why people both differentially report that it seems to them in experience as though time robustly passes, and why they differentially report that they believe that time does in fact robustly pass. We empirically investigate two hypotheses, the differential vividness hypothesis, and the mental time travel hypothesis. According to each of these, the degree to which people vividly episodically imagine past/future states of affairs influences their tendency to report that it seems (...) to them as though time robustly passes and to judge that time does robustly pass. According to the former, a greater degree of vividness will tend to increase the extent to which people make such reports, while according to the latter, it will tend to decrease the extent to which people make such reports. We found weak evidence in favour of the former hypothesis. We reflect on the implications of this finding for theorising about such reports. (shrink)

Philosophers have proposed many accounts of biological function. A coarse-grained distinction can be made between backward-looking views, which emphasise historical contributions to fitness, and forward-looking views, which emphasise the current contribution to fitness or role of a biological component within some larger system. These two views are often framed as being incompatible and conflicting with one another. The emerging field of synthetic biology, which involves applying engineering principles to the design and construction of biological systems, complicates things further by adding (...) intentional design as a source of function. In the current study we explored how biology experts and novices think about function in the context of single-celled, multi-celled, and synthetic organisms. We also explored the extent to which each group were function pluralists, and if they were function pluralists, which accounts of function tended to be endorsed together. The results showed a surprising degree of similarity between experts and novices in most contexts, although certain differences were apparent. Most surprisingly, we found evidence not only of function pluralism in both groups, but pluralism between backward-looking and forward-looking accounts. We discuss these findings in the context of the philosophical debate on function and consider the practical implications for public acceptance of synthetic biology. First, we argue that philosophers of biology should re-examine the purported incompatibility between accounts of function. Second, we argue that due to the introduction of an intentional aetiology in synthetic biology, there may be an inherent conflict between the views of experts and novices when thinking about synthetic biology. (shrink)

Introduction -- Systems of evidence -- Science in practice -- Risk -- Pesticides -- Genetic engineering in agriculture -- Climate change -- Nuclear power -- The intersection of policy, science and risk.

We investigated, experimentally, the contention that the folk view, or naïve theory, of time, amongst the population we investigated is dynamical. We found that amongst that population, ~ 70% have an extant theory of time that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory, and ~ 70% of those who deploy a naïve theory of time deploy a naïve theory that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory. Interestingly, while we found stable results across our (...) two experiments regarding the percentage of participants that have a dynamical or non-dynamical extant theory of time, we did not find such stability regarding which particular dynamical or non-dynamical theory of time they take to be most similar to our world. This suggests that there might be two extant theories in the population—a broadly dynamical one and a broadly non-dynamical one—but that those theories are sufficiently incomplete that participants do not stably choose the same dynamical theory as being most similar to our world. This suggests that while appeals to the ordinary view of time may do some work in the context of adjudicating disputes between dynamists and non-dynamists, they likely cannot do any such work adjudicating disputes between particular brands of dynamism. (shrink)