The problem in the philosophy of science which interests me beyond all others is that of constructing an abstract deductive system isomorphic with the theory of the natural sciences. Clearly, this task must be the work of many years and many minds. Some portions of it have already been accomplished; but a great deal remains to be done, and the difficulties of the problems yet unsolved impress me as formidable. I believe, however, that it would be hard to overestimate the (...) benefits which might follow from the construction of such an abstract theory, always provided that that theory met certain conditions. Not only must the system in question measure up to the standards of rigor and precision set by the logicians, but it must also be cast in such form that a working scientist could learn to understand at least that part of it applicable to his own specialty without being forced to drop his professional work and devote the labor of years to mastering the subject. (shrink)

Of recent years there have appeared in the literature several attempts to apply to the subject matter of chemistry mathematical theories which had not thitherto found any use in that field. With the spirit and purpose of such attempts, the author of this paper is thoroughly in sympathy. But some of the investigators who have undertaken this kind of pioneer work in applied mathematics have apparently entered upon their tasks without appreciating the difficulties involved, and have hence produced results more (...) likely to obscure than to clarify their subjects. (shrink)

Informed by ABET accreditation criteria and broader societal needs, ethics has been emphasized as important for engineering professionals. Engineering students are thus exposed to professional ethics and related concerns throughout their college experiences both within and beyond the formal engineering curriculum, but little is known about what learning experiences and lessons engineering students view as most memorable and salient as they approach graduation. Therefore, this paper answers the following research questions: RQ1) What types of experiences do senior engineering students (...) report as salient learning experiences for their ethical and moral formation as they approach graduation? and RQ2) What do students learn from the most commonly discussed types of experiences? To address these questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with senior engineering students and performed inductive thematic analysis on the resulting transcripts. Among various types of experiences that students reported as influencing their ethical and moral perspectives, this paper highlights work experiences, formal education, and family environment as the most frequently mentioned. Our results suggest that work experiences were especially significant for students’ learning of engineering ethics in a professional context, followed by academic experiences as a source of both professional/ethical and more general moral lessons. Many students also described family and friends as influential, especially as related to their general perceptions of morality. Based on these findings, a variety of educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

In this, the first book to address the ongoing debate, Plantinga presents his influential thesis and responds to critiques by distinguished philosophers from a ...

This article revisits the hope of the First and Fourth Missiological Institute (MI) consultations in 1965 and 1967 regarding the survival of African Spirituality as relevant to the daily life of South African churches. African Spirituality has played a significant role in the cultural context of Africans. In the African context, African Spirituality is intertwined with life, death, and health, which co-exist with material aspects and the economy as gracious gifts from God. The churches in South Africa and elsewhere in (...) Africa have been challenged by the African worldview of healing and culture. Thus, Africans mostly prefer the African-centred church with more African Christianity, instead of Western Christianity. This has been a serious challenge in African church circles for centuries, even in the current 21st century. The question therefore arises whether this is a matter for the Africanisation, indigenisation, and decolonisation of the church in Africa. CONTRIBUTION: The article analyses the two MI consultations and whether the church in the 21st century has Africanised and decolonised itself in service of its African members. The study is a historical approach given the history of the MI's contribution in South Africa. The concept of African Spirituality is unpacked and contextualised within the African Independent Churches' (AIC) Zionist type churches such as the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), the St John's Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), and other Ethiopian type churches such as Lutheran Bapedi Church and others in South Africa and African Traditional Religions (ATR). The article engages the importance of how African Spirituality differs from other spiritualities within the context of Christian spirituality. (shrink)

The author examines the meaning that dogs have for people as friends and family members. This almost magical interspecies connection, which relates to philosophical concepts about the moral responsibility human beings have to dogs, can increase social conflict between people because of differences in how people care for their dogs.

Biologists, historians, lawyers, art historians, and literary critics all voice arguments in the critical dialogue about what constitutes evidence in research and scholarship. They examine not only the constitution and "blurring" of disciplinary boundaries, but also the configuration of the fact-evidence distinctions made in different disciplines and historical moments the relative function of such concepts as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in varied academic discourses and the way "rules of evidence" are themselves products of historical developments. The essays and (...) rejoinders are by Terry Castle, Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Ian Hacking, Mark Kelman, R. C. Lewontin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mary Poovey, Donald Preziosi, Simon Schaffer, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. The critical responses are by Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Jean Comaroff, Arnold I. Davidson, Harry D. harootunian, Elizabeth Helsinger, Thomas C. Holt, Francoise Meltzer, Robert J. Richards, Lawrence Rothfield, Joel Snyder, Cass R. Sunstein, and William Wimsatt. (shrink)

This article focuses on the response of Africanisation to Western theological education in Africa, which has for centuries become a theological problem for the African context. In this 21st century, Africanisation is at the centre of the African discourse and focuses on the realities of our African context. Therefore, theological education in Africa should be Africanised in order to seriously engage the aspects of Africanisation. The struggle against colonial education was to ensure that Africa is liberated from unjust educational oppression, (...) socio-economic oppression, poverty, racism, political oppression and gender injustice. In this regard, Africanisation is an agent to address the introduced Western theological education in Africa. Yet the two concepts, namely commercialisation and commodification, have an influence on theological education in Africa. (shrink)

The religiously inclined have always rejected materialism. The thesis of this study is that there may have been good reasons for them to do so until comparatively recent times but that the same reasons no longer exist. Our knowledge of matter has not only increased, it has also been altered so completely that there is no more justification for disapproving of materialism on religious grounds.

The past several decades have seen a renaissance in Christian philosophy, led by the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, and others. In the spirit of Plantinga s famous manifesto, Advice to Christian Philosophers, James K. A. Smith here offers not only advice to Pentecostal philosophers but also some Pentecostal advice to Christian philosophers. In this inaugural Pentecostal Manifestos volume Smith begins from the conviction that implicit in Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality is a tacit worldview (...) or social imaginary. Thinking in Tongues unpacks and articulates the key elements of this Pentecostal worldview and then explores their implications for philosophical reflection on ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, language, science, and philosophy of religion. In each case, Smith demonstrates how the implicit wisdom of Pentecostal spirituality makes unique contributions to current conversations in Christian philosophy. (shrink)

2013 Word Guild Award (Academic) How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the (...) world. Worship "works" by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation. Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook. (shrink)

★ Publishers Weekly starred review One of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers Weekly Christianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation) Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth) Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for Religion This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time (...) on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect. Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. "What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way." Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes. (shrink)

Researchers studying primate brain allometry often focus on departures from allometry more than the allometric relationships themselves because only the former reveal what brain regions and behavioral-cognitive abilities were the focus of selection. Allometric departures for the human brain provide insights into hominid brain evolution and cast doubt on the suggestion that the large human cerebral cortex is a.

This important contribution to the ground-breaking Radical Orthodoxy series revisits the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Augustine and Derrida to reconsider the challenge of speaking of God through predication, silence, confession and praise. James K. A. Smith argues for God's own refusal to avoid speaking as well as for our urgent need of words to make Him visible to us. This leads to a radical new "incarnational phenomenology" in which God's love endows imperfect signs with the means to indicate true (...) states of infinitude, and in which we may ultimately discover a new theology of the arts. (shrink)

Given the enchanted worldview of pentecost-alism, what possibility is there for a uniquely pentecostal intervention in the science-theology dialogue? By asserting the centrality of the miraculous and the fantastic, and being fundamentally committed to a universe open to surprise, does not pentecostalism forfeit admission to the conversation? I argue for a distinctly pentecostal contribution to the dialogue that is critical of regnant naturalistic paradigms but also of a naive supernaturalism. I argue that implicit in the pentecostal social imaginary is a (...) distinct conception of nature that is amenable to science but in conflict with naturalism. (shrink)

What does it mean to know something? Epistemology, the study of knowledge, can often seem like a daunting subject. And yet few topics are more basic to human life. In this primer on epistemology, now in a second edition, James Dew and Mark Foreman provide an accessible entry into one of the most important disciplines within contemporary philosophy.

Two experienced educators offer an up-to-date introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective that covers the four major areas of philosophical thought: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Written from an analytic perspective, the book introduces key concepts and issues within the main areas of philosophical inquiry in a comprehensive yet accessible way, inviting readers on a quest for goodness, truth, and beauty that ultimately points to Jesus as the source of all.

This review essay assesses Michael Jackson’s ongoing project of staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy in two books: Lifeworlds (2013) and As Wide as the World Is Wise (2016). Considering his philosophical enrichment of ethnographic theory and method, this essay addresses foundational questions about the prospects and practices of interdisciplinary engagement. It also suggests future avenues for continued dialogue between philosophy and anthropology.

After identifying points of agreement between Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar on topics raised by Dr. Sain’s essay, this response raises questions about the deeper foundations of the substantial differences between them. It suggests that the appeal to contrast in their starting-points (Goethe versus Kant) as an explanation is not adequate and suggests lines of further inquiry which might be pursued further.

After identifying points of agreement between Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar on topics raised by Dr. Sain’s essay, this response raises questions about the deeper foundations of the substantial differences between them. It suggests that the appeal to contrast in their starting-points (Goethe versus Kant) as an explanation is not adequate and suggests lines of further inquiry which might be pursued further.