In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christianity and Human Rights: Influences and IssuesJohn D’Arcy MayChristianity and human rights: Influences and issues. Edited by Frances S. AdeneyArvind Sharma. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xi + 228 pp.The existence of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions” (UDHRWR) deserves to be more widely known, and this book not only reproduces the text, drawn up for a conference in Montreal to (...) mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNUDHR, 1948), but offers a point-by-point comparison of the two documents by Frances Adeney and a series of papers that illuminate the issues raised by such declarations from very different points of view. The premise of the whole undertaking is that religious perspectives were not adequately represented in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though even this is questioned by some of the contributors. The UDHRWR explicitly mentions the right to change one’s religion, asserting in article 18 (1): “There shall be no compulsion in religion. It is a matter of choice,” and it includes “the rights of nature and the earth” (art. 29 [1]; see also 24 [2]). Article 12 (4 and 5) also asserts the duty and the corresponding right of not denigrating the religions of others. Article 16 (5) mentions monasticism as an institution worthy of protection alongside marriage. [End Page 172]In an extremely detailed examination of the work of the Third Committee, which brought the original UN document to the floor of the General Assembly, Sumner B. Twiss finds abundant evidence that religious issues were debated at great length, with great respect, and from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds. The committee included representatives of Christian, Confucian, Marxist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions, and Twiss claims that it is a mistake to regard the document they produced as either Western or secular in intent. The question of the relationship between rights and duties was thoroughly debated, as were the social dimensions of both and the underlying theological and ideological issues. Although religious terminology was eventually omitted, this was agreed in an atmosphere of exemplary tolerance and mutual understanding. Twiss concludes: “The UDHRWR is redressing a nonexistent problem presumably posed by the UDHR” (p. 69).Nevertheless, in the present context of the desecularization or resacralization of the world, a more explicit treatment of religious aspects of human rights seems appropriate, and the papers collected here raise problems that are still with us. Frances Adeney introduces several of them: the distinction between public and private spheres, the relative weighting given to creation and sin, and the relationship between rights and duties. The specifically Christian contribution to the debate, in her view, is the insistence on the universality of human rights derived from the biblical conception of the human as the “image of God,” so that “Christians through the ages have assigned a transcendent worth to human beings” (p. 20). The dimension of community is signaled by the extension of the covenant from ethnic group to faith community, thus linking the covenant family of God to the unity of humankind. Whether this link is strong enough to secure the universality of human rights, however, remains an open question.The Christian ethicist Max Stackhouse counterposes to this the “profound individualism” implicit in human rights thinking: it is this, rather than abstract or absolute universals, that lays the basis for civil society and, in its Christian variants, “provides the safest havens for non-Christian religions to flourish without political control” (p. 49). It is the rights of each individual, not of communitarian entities, that are to be respected. The religions tend to be particularistic, but this does not mean that the sources of human rights thinking are necessarily secular humanist. Stackhouse leaves us with two very significant questions: “... whether we can form a global civil society that does not have a theologically based inner moral architecture,” and whether “human rights principles become more effective without attention to their roots and justifying ultimate legitimations” (p. 50). Terry Muck also confronts us with the tensions between universality and cultural specificity, the individual and the communal, arguing that religions all... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 116-118 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics Richard Bett. Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 264. Cloth, $60.00. Charles Brittain. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xii (...) + 406. Cloth, $60.00. These two books demonstrate once again that the ancient skeptics could indeed live their skepticism. In recent decades Myles Burnyeat, Benson Mates, and too many others have retailed the old canard that the skeptic cannot live his skepticism, but here we have two branches of ancient skepticism that sound quite liveable. Both books are subtle and brilliant examples of the genre of reconstructing philosophy from meager and fragmentary evidence.Bett's book follows up on the case he made in his 1997 translation of Sextus Empiricus's Against the Ethicists for three stages in ancient Pyrrhonism. The first is that of Pyrrho (ca. 360-ca. 270 B.C.), a dogmatist who held what Bett labels the indeterminacy thesis: we do not know anything because the world is indeterminate and thus we cannot know it. The second is a similarly dogmatic stage under Aenesidemus (first century B.C.), also followed by Sextus in Against the Ethicists. The third is the more thoroughly skeptical suspension of judgment of the mature Sextus of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (second century A.D.). Bett points out that it would indeed be odd if Pyrrhonism had not evolved in any way in five hundred years. What was unique throughout the tradition was the connection drawn between indeterminacy or suspension of judgment and the goal of ataraxia or tranquility (179, 220).Bett tries to avoid reading later concerns back into the earlier materials, and reevaluates the later materials based on his new reading of the earlier. He argues that Pyrrho's indeterminacy thesis was a metaphysical claim, not an epistemological one. One benefit of [End Page 116] understanding Pyrrho this way is that he does not make a self-refuting exception to his epistemological skepticism for his own claims. Rather, he can just admit to being a kind of dogmatist. Then, Pyrrho's ethical dogmatism is also perfectly consistent. Bett draws a picture of Pyrrho's practical life that rejects the walking-off-of-cliffs apocrypha, but accepts evidence of a quasi-Cynic, anti-theoretical lifestyle. Pyrrho's rejection of social norms puts him at odds with Sextus's later use of laws and customs as guides to behavior. There are still further questions here: why was Pyrrho in particular such a hero to philosophers, if most (or at least many) people are resolutely non-theoretical?Bett points out that Pyrrho gives us no reason to think that the abandonment of theories and opinions must always lead to tranquility (81). But in another connection, he recognizes that temperament may be decisive (111), and that may be the deciding factor here, too. There is no answer to people who say that abandoning theories makes them nervous: the Pyrrhonians simply say that it makes them tranquil. Irreducible differences in temperament may also explain why Pyrrho did not bother with theoretical controversy and Sextus revelled in it.Among other points, Bett discourages all but the most general case for an influence from India on Pyrrho. Bett's thumbnail comparisons between Pyrrho and each of Aristotle, Plato, the Eleatics, Xenophanes, and others show that Pyrrho's philosophy was not at all extraordinary for its time and place. Most philosophers expected claims about nature to be invariable and without qualification (118). Bett says this is odd by modern standards (197), but even today scientific laws are said to apply to all times and all places.The title of Bett's book will mislead some readers. If you are a specialist and your world revolves around ancient philosophy, you will be satisfied that Pyrrho's "legacy" includes Aenesidemus and ends... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading BayleJohn Christian LaursenThomas M. Lennon. Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 202. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95.One of the more philosophically interesting things about Pierre Bayle is the difficulty of interpreting his work. A myriad of interpretations have been advanced, but "the whole is [still] a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery"—to apply David Hume's famous judgment about religion to Bayle's work. (...) This book proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Bayle's philosophical activity, which means that Bayle is understood as letting his interlocutors speak for themselves in an ongoing dialogue over which he does not have full control and in which no one "wins." Bakhtin thought that Dostoevsky was the first major author to do this, but Lennon shows that he was anticipated by Bayle.The discussion is broken up into sections on Bayle's views of integrity, authority, toleration, idolatry, and providence. Integrity turns out to be largely a matter of honesty and fairness in dialogue, and at times it sounds like Bayle is prefiguring Habermas and discourse ethics or recent Anglo-American theories of deliberative democracy.Bayle's view of authority emerges from his analysis of the fact/law (fait/droit) distinction. [End Page 278] This was part of larger debates among Jansenists, Jesuits, and other philosophers such as Arnauld and Malebranche. Here, Lennon's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century philosophy is put to good use. He shows that in Bayle's hands the distinction cannot hold up, as questions of fact and law are always mutually dependent and each can undermine the other. The upshot is that in the absence of truths of fact or law, dialogue is all that we have. That is good, because history cannot be used as a tool of oppression or homogenization if dialogue must go on forever.Some of the claims about Bayle that are advanced here are debatable. That Bayle "treated everyone with dignity" (44) is simply not true of his treatment of millenarians and others that he thought were fanatics. Rather than extending "toleration almost without limit" (74), he was downright intolerant of such folks. Lennon suggests that Bayle may not have fully thought through the question of the conscientious persecutor (85n.). It would have been appropriate to mention Bayle's reflections on this matter in his last work, the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial.The book contains valuable accounts of aspects of Bayle's debates with Pierre Jurieu, in which it often emerges that there was no great gulf of principle between the two arch-enemies. Disagreements with Ruth Whelan and Elisabeth Labrousse add to the interest of Lennon's discussion.Idolatry is one of Bayle's chief targets, and he finds it above all in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Lennon nicely shows how this amounts to Spinozism, which in turn explains Bayle's hostility to both Spinoza and Rome. Both stifle Bakhtinian dialogue.One very interesting section of the book is on lotteries, which have important theological and philosophical significance. Often-forgotten authors like Barbeyrac, Ricotier, and Leti are discussed on this issue. Insights here include the observation that "it is hard to imagine Bayle praying" (146). Indeed it is. Mention of work by I. Hont, T. Hochstrasser, and others on Barbeyrac would have made Lennon's case stronger.One major conclusion is that Bayle's notion of providence and the problem of evil comes down to dialogue as well: evil emerges because God prefers to engage in open-ended dialogue with his creatures, which allows evil even if that is not God's intention (167). On this reading, we have a Kantian Bayle: autonomy is Bayle's most cherished value (182).Lennon's final evaluation of Bayle's fideism is that it is philosophically unsatisfactory. Blind and nonrational reliance on Scripture is, to say the least, undermined by Bayle's inability to establish that God is its author or to found his own beliefs in any way other than education. But if anybody still thinks that Pierre Bayle was merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right, this book and a lot of the other recent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading BayleJohn Christian LaursenThomas M. Lennon. Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 202. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95.One of the more philosophically interesting things about Pierre Bayle is the difficulty of interpreting his work. A myriad of interpretations have been advanced, but "the whole is [still] a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery"—to apply David Hume's famous judgment about religion to Bayle's work. (...) This book proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Bayle's philosophical activity, which means that Bayle is understood as letting his interlocutors speak for themselves in an ongoing dialogue over which he does not have full control and in which no one "wins." Bakhtin thought that Dostoevsky was the first major author to do this, but Lennon shows that he was anticipated by Bayle.The discussion is broken up into sections on Bayle's views of integrity, authority, toleration, idolatry, and providence. Integrity turns out to be largely a matter of honesty and fairness in dialogue, and at times it sounds like Bayle is prefiguring Habermas and discourse ethics or recent Anglo-American theories of deliberative democracy.Bayle's view of authority emerges from his analysis of the fact/law (fait/droit) distinction. [End Page 278] This was part of larger debates among Jansenists, Jesuits, and other philosophers such as Arnauld and Malebranche. Here, Lennon's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century philosophy is put to good use. He shows that in Bayle's hands the distinction cannot hold up, as questions of fact and law are always mutually dependent and each can undermine the other. The upshot is that in the absence of truths of fact or law, dialogue is all that we have. That is good, because history cannot be used as a tool of oppression or homogenization if dialogue must go on forever.Some of the claims about Bayle that are advanced here are debatable. That Bayle "treated everyone with dignity" (44) is simply not true of his treatment of millenarians and others that he thought were fanatics. Rather than extending "toleration almost without limit" (74), he was downright intolerant of such folks. Lennon suggests that Bayle may not have fully thought through the question of the conscientious persecutor (85n.). It would have been appropriate to mention Bayle's reflections on this matter in his last work, the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial.The book contains valuable accounts of aspects of Bayle's debates with Pierre Jurieu, in which it often emerges that there was no great gulf of principle between the two arch-enemies. Disagreements with Ruth Whelan and Elisabeth Labrousse add to the interest of Lennon's discussion.Idolatry is one of Bayle's chief targets, and he finds it above all in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Lennon nicely shows how this amounts to Spinozism, which in turn explains Bayle's hostility to both Spinoza and Rome. Both stifle Bakhtinian dialogue.One very interesting section of the book is on lotteries, which have important theological and philosophical significance. Often-forgotten authors like Barbeyrac, Ricotier, and Leti are discussed on this issue. Insights here include the observation that "it is hard to imagine Bayle praying" (146). Indeed it is. Mention of work by I. Hont, T. Hochstrasser, and others on Barbeyrac would have made Lennon's case stronger.One major conclusion is that Bayle's notion of providence and the problem of evil comes down to dialogue as well: evil emerges because God prefers to engage in open-ended dialogue with his creatures, which allows evil even if that is not God's intention (167). On this reading, we have a Kantian Bayle: autonomy is Bayle's most cherished value (182).Lennon's final evaluation of Bayle's fideism is that it is philosophically unsatisfactory. Blind and nonrational reliance on Scripture is, to say the least, undermined by Bayle's inability to establish that God is its author or to found his own beliefs in any way other than education. But if anybody still thinks that Pierre Bayle was merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right, this book and a lot of the other recent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the BuddhaAlon Goshen-GottsteinBeside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha. Edited by Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. 284 pp.Religion,Wilfred Cantwell Smith teaches us, is about people, not about ideas. This remarkable collection of essays provides us with a glimpse into people, their spiritual aspirations, and their life journeys. (...) This collection of narratives of Jews and Christians, who recount the story of their involvement with Buddhism, turns out to be a powerful spiritual medium. It allows us to get to know, at times in a very intimate and revealing manner, the stories, struggles, and processes that have shaped participants in this enterprise. Many of the participants are well-known figures in academia and in religious or interfaith circles. Getting to know the person behind the idea, or the book, is always a valuable means of grounding and contextualizing what might otherwise be disembodied ideas or concepts. But the volume does much more than introduce us to an impressive array of sensitive and thoughtful personalities. Through the life stories told in this volume, key elements of the relationship between the three religions—theological, philosophical, and ritual—are confronted. The flow of the book moves in interesting ways between the personal, philosophical, theological, experiential, and mystical, as the various life stories weave the greater whole of this book. The sum total of the fourteen stories of Jews and Christians and their encounter with Buddhism provides an interesting vantage point on the Jewish-Buddhist and the Christian-Buddhist encounters. (I use the term "encounter," as opposed to "dialogue," following the distinction made in this volume byE.Burke Rochford Jr.; "encounter" involves personal change and transformation, something shared by nearly all participants in this volume.) From this perspective, interesting observations emerge regarding the ways in which the encounter impacts and interfaces with both Judaism and Christianity, on the sociological, ritual, theological, and experiential levels. The juxtaposition of two sets of stories, Jewish and Christian, allows us, finally, to make some interesting observations on the difference between these two parallel sets of encounters with Buddhism. [End Page 259]The concept underlying this volume—sharing stories, short spiritual biographies —suggests the growing importance of biography or autobiography and narrative in the study of religion. This collection of short contemporary spiritual biographies makes us aware of the importance of narrative as part of spiritual process, and of its sharing. As the reader discovers, storytelling is a very powerful medium for conveying ideas and sharing processes. Something of the transformative nature of the very enterprise of encounter is thus communicated through the medium of this book. There is no doubt that every reader of this book who is sympathetic to the sensibilities of interreligious encounter will be moved and inspired by some of the stories and testimonies here collected.The strengths of Beside Still Waters are also its weaknesses. The medium of storytelling calls for particular literary skills quite distinct from the spiritual and intellectual qualities that have rightly earned participants in this volume their place in it. Moreover, not all participants are able to share a personal, let alone a spiritual, process. Some of the writers (Cobb, Lubarsky) share an intellectual journey, couched in the appropriate autobiographical context. Others (notably Muck) offer theological insight. At the other extreme, a significant group of Christian contributors shares with us some of the most intimate mystical moments of their spiritual odyssey. The uniform assignment that contributors were asked to fulfill has thus been variously interpreted. This makes the book both highly interesting and, in some sense, weak. The lack of consistent focus takes the reader on a ride between a range of dimensions and experiences—intellectual, experiential, mystical, sociological, and more. With the exception of the mystical-experiential dimension that looms large in some of thepresentations, none of the substantive issues is ever fully developed. The cross between autobiography and religious reflection whets one's reflective appetite, offering tantalizing theological insight, only to fade into one of the dimensions of narrative through which the individual contributors address their task. The sum total of the... (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” argues, on the basis of recent research, that religious polemic is a phenomenon closely associated only with monotheist traditions. Focusing on religious polemics in medieval and early modern Islamic and Christian Spain, it analyzes polemical texts of diverse natures and from different centuries to see how their authors, by attacking both dogmatic and legal opinion, aimed to harden the amorphous boundaries between groups. On the Christian side, polemicists argued (...) for the restriction of the rights of Muslims and Jews in Christian territories, or for the outright expulsion or conversion of these groups. On the Islamic side, a number of Muslim authors voiced the claim that Muslims should emigrate from Christian territories. The article seeks to show how these polemical voices argued against known opponents but also against anonymous Christians, Muslims, and Jews who, untouched by such polemics, had lived close to one another and, without conflict, had accepted the undefined character of their daily life together. In support of this argument, the author makes use of hitherto unknown archival documents regarding how adherents of the three religions interacted in medieval Christian Spain. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed a dramatic revival of interest in Hellenistic philosophy. No longer can one complain that scholars pitch their tents on Aristotelian turf and refuse to move beyond it. Indeed, the burgeoning literature on Hellenistic philosophy might now raise doubts about whether an author breaks any new ground. Sorabji's latest book analyzes many of the same texts and issues explored in Martha Nussbaum's The Therapy of Desire ; and he, too, argues that ancient philosophical therapy can be (...) useful to ordinary people in our own overstressed, post-industrial age. Emotions and Peace of Mind nonetheless has its own fascinating story to tell. Roughly the first two thirds of the book, devoted to the Stoics and their pagan critics, set the stage for an account of how early Christians revised Stoic teachings. Central to the tale is an aspect of Stoicism probably unfamiliar to most readers: the theory of “pre-passions” or “first movements”. According to Sorabji, the distinction between these involuntary movements and genuine emotions was muddied by Origen and other Christian thinkers, who reshaped the Stoic theory of how to avoid agitation into a theory of how to avoid temptation. The first movements so important to Seneca's thought became in the fourth-century hermit Evagrius the eight bad thoughts that monks must work especially hard to vanquish. With some modest transformations, these eight bad thoughts ultimately emerged as the seven deadly sins of Dante's Purgatorio. (shrink)

Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period. Edited by Mark Beaumont. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv + 216. $120, €104.

Within a German sample, the current cross-sectional questionnaire study conducts interreligious and interdenominational comparisons between Catholics, Protestants, free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Spiritualists, i.e., religiously unaffiliated persons who label themselves as “spiritual,” and religious/spiritual “nones.” The comparisons refer to self-ratings of religiosity and spirituality, centrality of religiosity, as assessed by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, and God concepts. The study is largely exploratory in nature, but also aims at identifying contexts of faith in which the term “spiritual” is typically used (...) as a self-description. The results show that only Spiritualists and free-church Protestants substantially label themselves as “spiritual.” However, they differ in many respects from each other, thus representing two distinct contexts of faith. The results further reveal a medium position of Catholics and Protestants in between the other subgroups, commonalities as well as specific differences between free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, and Muslims, and some religious/spiritual approaches even within the “nones.”. (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a cognitive-computational model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization (...) class='Hi'>between two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Against the Ethicists (Adversus Mathematicos XI) by Sextus EmpiricusJohn Christian LaursenSextus Empiricus. Against the Ethicists (Adversus Mathematicos XI). Translation, Commentary, and Introduction by Richard Bett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xxxiv + 302. NP.Sesto Empirico. Contro gli etici. Introduction, Editing, Translation, and Commentary by Emidio Spinelli. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995. Pp. 450. NP.Joining the rising tide of scholarly literature that says that skeptics can indeed live their skepticism, (...) and that it is not necessarily a bad life, are these two fine translations of Book XI of Sextus Empiricus’s Against the Mathematicians (known as MXI), the most important for ethics and politics. Considering that the length of Sextus’s text is only 39 pages (in the English version), the length of these two volumes alone indicates that a great deal of philosophical and philological scholarship will be found in them. Both authors do an excellent job of tracking down Sextus’s sources and his targets.Spinelli accepts the traditional position (Janacek’s) that MXI was written after Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, although he is aware of the minority position that it was the other way around. Bett makes a convincing case for the minority position, including a substantial appendix comparing passages from the two works which suggest that Outlines polishes MXI. This has the merit of explaining Sextus’s apparent “negative dogmatism” in MXI as part of early skepticism and a phase on the way to the more refined and more thoroughly undogmatic skepticism of the Outlines. However, Bett himself mentions counterevidence to his thesis, so it cannot be considered decisively established. Spinelli explains the apparent dogmatism on the assumption that Outlines came first: the usual skeptical reservations set forth in that book should be understood as implied (165–66, 169). Other explanations are that apparent affirmations are ad hominem polemic “inside” Stoic theory (240ff.) or merely relative and with no ontological status (291).Bett divides the text into part A (1–167) and part B (168–end), arguing for compilation of the two parts of the book from different sources with different purposes. Spinelli writes that the often-denigrated 168–end “has a precise function in the internal compositional strategy” of the book (339).English speakers have had to rely too long on the Loeb translation by” B. Bury. Bett questions many of his renderings. For example, Bury translated kakon and kakia as “evil,” with connotations of intentionality, and at MXI 121 even supplied a footnote to Genesis! Bett prefers the less-loaded “bad” and “vice.” Spinelli usually translates kakon with “mali” but uses the loaded “malvagità” for kakia at MXI 121, where Bett would have suggested “vizio.” Bury translated alogon and alogois with “irrational” which Bett corrects to “non-rational” at MXI 143, 148, and 161 to capture the point that what is in question is neither rational nor irrational, but rather “sensory happenings” which have [End Page 313] nothing to do with reasoning (161). Spinelli renders alogon as “irrazionale” at MXI 143 and alogois as “sottrati al ragionamento” at MXI 148 and 161.Spinelli’s is a much more useful and substantial volume than the previous Italian translation. The only thing that might keep Bett’s volume from replacing the Loeb edition is that it does not supply the Greek text on facing pages. Spinelli does.The exhaustive and careful analyses of Spinelli and Bett allow them to disagree in important ways with parts of the substantial recent work on ancient skepticism by Hankinson, McPherran, Annas, Nussbaum, Striker, and Decleva Caizzi (cited as Caizzi by Bett), not to mention the older work of Janacek and the debates from the early 1980s (now dated) among Frede, Burnyeat, and Barnes. Although they do not find Sextus’s work to be flawless by any means, it is clear that we are long past the point at which his work could be dismissed as silly or merely derivative.On the test case of the treatment of Sextus’s example of the tyrant (MXI 166), both Spinelli and Bett point in the right direction. Spinelli sees that “the Pyrrhonist can live easily” (330) and that MXI 165–67 provides “a new key to understanding the ‘moral skepticism... (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a model of language and conceptual knowledge within thePredictive Processing(PP) framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between two (...) ways of generating the liar situation in two different (idealized) PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates thePrinciple of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between (...) two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

In the context of climate change and its accompanying impact on stress and mental health, we argue that positive psychology may benefit from an integration of spirituality to better support people’s wellbeing. Starting with an overview of climate change’s impact on wellbeing and health, we explore the paradoxical and complex relationship between humans and nature. Following which, we will briefly define spirituality and present an evocative metaphor of the wave to portray the evolution of the field of PP. In (...) our conclusive remarks, we argue that the field of PP has gradually become more open to integrate spirituality, as it evolves towards greater complexity. In addition to meaning, some spiritual perspectives potentially relevant to positive psychology facilitate an ecocentric view which allow for a better understanding of the paradoxical human-nature relationship, as we struggle to deal with the complex issues related to climate change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa MonasticismChristian P. B. HaskettIdentity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism. By Martin A. Mills. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 404 + xxi pp. with 12 black and white plates.In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a type of teaching called a dmar khrid, a "red instruction," wherein the lama brings students through (...) a teaching as a physician might dissect a corpse, pointing out and explaining the various parts and organs and their places and functions. In Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism, Martin Mills has done very much the same thing, with the exception that the body he examines is still very much alive, and emerges, to my eyes at least, as a new and wholly vital entity. Mills exposes the subcutaneous and sanguine body of Tibetan Buddhism, the bones and muscles that make up its structure, the blood that flows through it, and the organs that keep it alive, in "a plain and open manner," just as in a dmar khrid.1 The value of such a presentation truly cannot be overstated. An attempt to catalog the contents of each chapter would be both impossible and counterproductive, as the wealth of theoretical material and ethnographic detail is a large part of what makes this book so powerful. Instead, I will identify several topics, several of the vital organs alluded to, that are either not commonly noticed in the academic study of Buddhism, or that are given fresh perspective by Mills's anthropological and sociological methodology, and that are so crucial to understanding how it is that Buddhism lives in a typical Himalayan village. The latter portion of this review explains why I place such high value on this book and its potential place in Buddhist-Christian studies.Identity, Ritual and State is an ethnography of Kumbum Monastery in Lingshed, Ladakh (the eastern half of the Kashmir valley, located in Jammu and Kashmir, India), but its concerns are much more far-reaching than a single remote Himalayan village. The central question of the work is "how we are to understand the nature of religious authority in Tibetan Buddhist monasticism" (p. xiii), although it might more properly be the religious authority of Tibetan [End Page 187] Buddhist monastics. This answer is worked out in three overlapping areas of analysis: local ritual activity, ecclesiastical structure of the monastery, and the ritual foundations of Tibetan political thought (p. xvii).Mills convincingly asserts that there is a framework within which Buddhism happens in the Himalayas. The starting point of this framework is birth itself, which establishes the embodied person. The very physicality of personhood has several implications. First, the body is embedded in a very specific local space and place, and personhood is thus not only embodied, but also chthonic—intimately bound up with the earth or soil onto which it is born. At birth, persons are injected into a complex matrix of relations between people and various spirits, such as household gods and protectors, nāga, and itinerant demons. For example, Lingshed is divided into seven subterritories, each under the jurisdiction of a local deity whose physical abode and reign are well known to all in the village.2 These deities are associated with features of the local geography, and they regulate and influence local agricultural and social production, so birth in one area or another signifies a relation with the deity presiding over it. The land itself is imbued with a notion of personhood and agency. The human body is also the repository for pollution (sgrib), which comes about as a result of violating the established hierarchy of space and place and from bringing about changes to the local matrix of embodied persons. Both bodily pollution concerns and the need for proper relations with local spirit numina mandate definite, ongoing ritual attention. Rituals are occasioned in response to births, deaths, spirit possession, unintentional pollution of places or household objects, and movements within the monastic ecclesiastical structure, or happen regularly according to an astrologically and agriculturally influenced calendar.Rituals are performed by monks not only because they are trained specialists, but because... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Configured to Christ: On Spiritual Direction and Clergy Formation by James KeatingChristian Raab O.S.B.Configured to Christ: On Spiritual Direction and Clergy Formation by James Keating (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2021), xxix + 312 pp.Deacon James Keating has served the Church by forming her clergy for thirty years. While he has been a seminary professor and a director of deacon formation at the diocesan level, his prolific scholarship as (...) well as his time as director of theological formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation in Creighton, NE, made him a national figure. Configured to Christ is a collection of Keating's most important essays.While this book is a retrospective, it couldn't be more timely. In 2016 (on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8), the Congregation for Catholic Education issued The Gift of the Priestly Vocation—Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, a text which provides guidelines for the whole Church concerning priestly formation. In the fall of 2021, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops completed their revision of the sixth edition of the Program of Priestly Formation (PPF), which translates the principles of the Ratio for the American context. With these two documents in place, it now falls upon seminaries to examine their programs in light of the vision provided by the magisterium. The next five to ten years promise to be a time of reform and renewal in seminary formation. Institutions will be looking for fresh and orienting ideas. Keating's book can be recommended as among the best resources for the venture that awaits.One reason Keating's book is so valuable is its focus on the "perichoresis" of the various aspects of formation (107). This emphasis is consonant with the terminological change found in the new PPF from the language of formational "pillars" to the language of formational "dimensions" (see the USCCB's 5th edition of the PPF, §28). The thinking behind this change seems to have been that it was too easy to imagine "pillars" as separate from [End Page 1110] one another. The human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral dimensions of formation are in fact interwoven, interdependent, and interpenetrating. While they can be distinguished, they cannot be divided. Growth in one fosters growth in the other. Keating has long understood this, as his various essays show.The book is divided into three parts and eighteen chapters. Part 1 is entitled "The Interior Life of the Cleric." Here, readers are introduced to the integral relationship between the spiritual and intellectual formational dimensions. For example, Keating provides, in chapter 1, a sustained theoretical reflection on the relationship between academic theology and spirituality, and, in chapter 2, he examines John Henry Newman's writings as a concretized test case for the right relationship of prayer, study, and thought. Authors such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean Leclercq have investigated this relationship in classic works, but Keating's presentation is notable for its accessibility, coherence, and concision. The remaining chapters of part 1 address the topics of silence and spiritual direction. Emerging from these analyses are the insights that interiority expands through discovery of Christ within. We participate in Christ as we behold, wonder, think, theologize, and pray. Keating's plea that we introduce ministerial candidates to the romance of silence is most welcome.The second part of the book is entitled "The Formation of the Cleric." It brings together nine essays which explicitly explore the art of formation. The key to this section, and maybe to the whole book, is chapter 7, "Christ is the Sure Foundation: Priestly Human Formation Completed in and by Spiritual Formation." This chapter makes the case not only for the perichoresis of formational dimensions but also for a much stronger emphasis on spiritual formation than is often the case. Of special note is Keating's observation that spiritual formation can truly support human formation. This is an important insight. In his 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (on the formation of priests), John Paul II had articulated that human formation was "the basis of all priestly formation" (§43).Unfortunately, this line could be (and has been) interpreted problematically to mean human formation... (shrink)

In Book 8 of his Geographike Hyphegesis Ptolemy gives coordinates for ca. 360 so-called noteworthy cities. These coordinates are the time difference to Alexandria, the length of the longest day, and partly the ecliptic distance from the summer solstice. The supposable original conversions between the coordinates in Book 8 and the geographical coordinates in the location catalogue of Books 2–7 including the underlying parameters and tabulations are here reconstructed. The results document the differences between the \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} (...) \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Omega}$$\end{document} - and \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Xi}$$\end{document} -recension. The known difference in the longitude of Alexandria underlying the conversion of the longitudes is examined more closely. For the ecliptic distances from the summer solstice of the \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Omega}$$\end{document} -recension, it is revealed that they were originally computed by means of a so far undiscovered approximate, linear conversion. Further it is shown that the lengths of the longest day could be based on a linear interpolation of the data in the Mathematike Syntaxis 2.6. (shrink)

In recent years a principle for responsible risk-taking called "The Precautionarity Principle" (PP) has been put forward in several policy documents regarding risk-management of technological and environmental issues. PP involves two claims: 1. An ethical claim according to which it is irresponsible to, for example, use new technologies, regdless of how large benefits these are known to bring, unless it has been proven that they will not give rise to unacceptable long term risks. 2. An administrative/political claim according to which (...) the burden of supplying the proof spoken of in claim 1 is to be laid on the supplier of the new technology. This paper deals only with claim 1, which is the real "precautionarity claim". PP has produced much enthusiasm in different political circles, where it is often held out as a landmark for a new thinking in risk-management. However, while claim 2 is clear enough, it is rather obscure how the precautionarity claim is to be understood. In particular, it is not clear to what extent (if any) this claim implies anything new for risk-analysis. This is so since the precautionarity claim does not say anything about what is to be counted as a proof, or what constitutes an unacceptable risk. The paper explores different conlicting interpretations of the precautionarity claim and demonstrates how the choice between these actualise hard ethical issues. In particular, the issue of how much damage we are allowed to cause in order to pursue safety and certainty is discussed. This issue is actualized when new technologies with known beneficiary effects cannot be proven to be "safe enough" according to some interpretations of the precautionarity claim unless investigated for a rather long period of time, during which the technology is not allowed to be used to produce the beneficiary effects it can produce. This problem is structurally similar to a well known issue in medical ethics regarding the rsponsibility of continuing a controlled clinical trial of a drug known to cure when this means that half of the patients suffers extra agony and earlier death because they get a placebo instead of the new drug.. (shrink)

Antisemitism is on the rise. Recently, discussions have considered so-called “no-go zones for Jews” (city areas Jews should avoid to reduce the likelihood of being attacked). In this context and drawing from attribution theory, we examined if news consumers perceive a Jewish hate crime victim as partly responsible for being attacked when news coverage explicitly emphasizes that the victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) in a certain inner-city location. We conducted a quota-based survey experiment (N = 392) in Germany (4 groups, (...) between-subjects design) and randomly exposed participants to news coverage about an anti-Semitic attack. The article either emphasized that the Jewish victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) or not, and highlighted the specific location of the attack (Berlin synagogue vs. deprived inner-city district of Berlin). Moderated mediation analysis suggested that participants perceived the victim’s behavior to be more provocative when the news article highlighted that the victim displayed religious symbols and when the attack occurred in a deprived Berlin district. Yet, effects were only detected for individuals with low (vs. high) levels of education. Perceived provocativeness in turn increased victim blaming indicating that some individuals indirectly regarded the Jewish victim to be partly responsible for being attacked. (shrink)

In recent years, the educational-system development specialization of the MA program in the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Education has held an annual seminar on Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC). Under my guidance, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Circassian students have formed a group embodying a living and breathing dialogical space. Despite the global spread of P4wC principles following the emergence of the P4C movement promoted by the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry and its practice in dozens of national and (...) regional centers, neither approach is formally taught in Israeli universities and colleges. Both thus remain outside the pedagogical mainstream, the University of Haifa—where I teach—being the only institution at which they can be studied at an MA level. I have also established the Israeli Academic Forum for Philosophy with Children, which conducts seminars and offers professional development, etc. (shrink)

Today's conflicts between religions are grounded largely in historical injustices and grievances but partly in serious conceptual disagreements. This essay agrees with Miroslav Volf that a nontritheistic Christian account of the Trinity is highly desirable. Three traditional models of the Trinity are examined. In their pure, unmixed form, two of them should logically be acceptable to Jews, Muslims, and strict monotheists who regard Christianity as inherently tritheistic, despite lip service to one God. In the social model, three distinct (...) self-aware subjects are unified by being in perfect harmony with each other. Despite Volf's best defense of this, to conceive of three gods, this is how one would go about it. In the psychological model, one divine subject has three psychological capacities—memory, understanding, and will. In the functional model, one subject relates to the world in three different ways—as creator, redeemer, and companion. These two are genuinely monotheistic. Finally, a monotheistic account of the unity of Jesus with God is proposed for consideration. (shrink)

Learning from the past prepares one for being able to cope with the future. History is made up of strings of relationships. This article follows a historical line from colonialism, through apartheid to post-colonialism in order to illustrate inter-religious relations in South-Africa and how each context determines these relations. Social cohesion is enhanced by a post-colonial theology of religions based on the current context. By describing the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the 17th–18th centuries in the Cape Colony, (...) lessons can be deduced to guide inter-religious relations in a post-colonial era in South Africa. One of the most prominent Muslim leaders during the 17th century in the Cape Colony was Sheik Yusuf al-Makassari. His influence determined the future face of Islam in the Cape Colony and here, during the 18th century, ethics started playing a crucial role in determining the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The ethical guidance of the Imams formed the Muslim communities whilst ethical decline was apparent amongst the Christian colonists during the same period. The place of ethics as determinative of future inter-religious dialogue is emphasised. Denial and exclusion characterised relationships between Christians and Muslims. According to a post-colonial understanding of inter-religious contact the equality and dignity of non-Christian religions are to be acknowledged. In the postcolonial and postapartheid struggle for equality, also of religions, prof Graham Duncan, to whom this article is dedicated, contributed to the process of acknowledging the plurality of the religious reality in South Africa. (shrink)

There are several approaches implementing reasoning based on conditional knowledge bases, one of the most popular being System Z (Pearl, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge, TARK ’90, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, pp. 121–135, 1990). We look at ranking functions (Spohn, The Laws of Belief: Ranking Theory and Its Philosophical Applications, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) in general, conditional structures and c-representations (Kern-Isberner, Conditionals in Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Belief Revision: Considering (...) Conditionals as Agents, vol. 2087 of LNCS, Springer, Berlin, 2001) in order to examine the reasoning strength of the different approaches by learning which of the known calculi of nonmonotonic reasoning (System P and R) and Direct Inference are applicable to these inference relations. Furthermore we use the recently proposed Enforcement-postulate (Kern-Isberner and Krümpelmann, Proceedings of the 22nd international joint conference on artificial intelligence, vol. 2, IJCAI’11, AAAI Press, pp. 937–942, 2011) to show dependencies between these approaches. (shrink)

Muslim women often come to mind when we think of women and their lives between the sharp borders of sun and shadow, male/female, private/public, veiled/naked, imprisoned/liberated. However, women exposed to patriarchal patterns within different faith traditions, and within many secular contexts, have some similarities even if no group is monolithic or can be compared with other groups as if there were easy analogies. In recent years there have been strong forces in Europe, and elsewhere, that seem to have as (...) their goal to antagonize groups against each other. Jews are set up against Muslims, Christians against Muslims and vice versa. In such a situation, secularism seems to be the only positive alternative. However, the sharp border between secularism and religious traditions has also been criticized for being simplistic. The notion of intersectionality has created an awareness of the interrelatedness of multiple layers of oppression and the need to be whole as a person. This article warns against falling into simplistic categories such as those used by neo-nationalists as well as of ultraliberal neo-atheists. Secularism, culture and religion, and thus multiculturalism, need be seen in nonessential terms that honour fluidity, process, ambivalence and hybridity. In this article I want to argue that women’s religious agency intersects with education, health, economy and moral autonomy based on an affirmation of multi-layered, fluid identities. (shrink)

Irven Michael Resnick - Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 257-258 Book Review Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, editors. Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 380. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. This volume, a collection of conference papers presented at Notre Dame in 1996, draws attention to the (...) twelfth-century renaissance for the evolution of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. Rather than treating the anti-Jewish violence of the first Crusade as a decisive break leading directly to Jewish isolation and, finally, expulsion from medieval Christendom, the editors have selected papers that seek "to integrate the Jewish and Jewish-Christian stories into a larger European story" focusing.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 146-149 [Access article in PDF] Gianluca Mori. Bayle philosophe. Paris: Champion, 1999. Pp. 416. Paper, N.P. Stefano Brogi. Teologia senza verità: Bayle contro i "rationaux." Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998. Pp. 306. Paper, N.P. Why do professional philosophers spend so much time on Descartes and so little time on Pierre Bayle, when Bayle was clearly the better philosopher? I hope that the real (...) answer is not that Bayle wrote too much that is too hard to survey and synthesize, whereas Descartes wrote short works that are easy to teach to undergraduates. Of course, part of any answer will turn on what is meant by "the better philosopher," and [End Page 146] we will return to this issue. If the two books reviewed here get the attention they deserve, Bayle may begin to get more of the attention he deserves.Bayle is well-known for his attacks on Pierre Jurieu, but less well-known are his fights with the 'rationalist' theologian-philosophers Jean LeClerc, Jacques Bernard, and Isaac Jaquelot. They reveal that Bayle was not the automatic supporter of "Enlightenment" of later legend. Stefano Brogi explores these attacks in three of Bayle's last works, the Continuation of the Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1705; very different from the Diverse Thoughts on the Comet of 1683), Response to Questions of a Provincial (1704-1707), and Conversations between Maxime and Thémiste (1707). Regrettably, none of these—nor any of the works of LeClerc, Bernard, and Jaquelot—have been translated. Greater attention to Descartes may derive from the excellent translations of his work, contrasted with the absence of translations of much of Bayle.Brogi begins with Bayle's reconstruction of "Pyrrho's theology." Faith, in Bayle's hands, is almost completely non-cognitive, accepting the Scripture without understanding it. Rationality, to Bayle, is a second Penelope, unraveling all that it makes. Then Brogi explores what Bayle could have meant by praising Simonides, the ancient Greek who, asked to define God, always asked for more time. He also reviews Bayle's views on euhemerism and the theory of impostorship, and cannot believe Bayle's pretended unawareness of some of the implications of his arguments.The third section, "Ethics against religion," tackles the paradox that Bayle fiercely attacked reason and the argument from consensus for the existence of God, but then invoked reason and consensus as proof of moral claims. In ethics, Bayle's skepticism evaporates. That leads to the further paradox that his rigorous moral evaluation of religion leads to atheism. The ostensible argument is that pagan religions have such immoral gods that it is better not to believe in them; the implication is that the same goes for Judeo-Christianity.It all comes together in Brogi's discussion of "Theology without morality." In his controversies with LeClerc about Origenism (universal salvation) and evil, Bayle brings out the dubious moral consequences of both Origenism and Augustinianism. There is no rational way of saving God's goodness. Then Bayle simply declares his faith in revelation. LeClerc thinks this is bad faith, but he ends up relying on blind faith. Jaquelot argues that God's glory requires the world as it is, but when Bayle asks what glory could come from human suffering, Jaquelot also takes refuge in the inscrutability of God. If anyone thinks these were insignificant controversies, remember that they provoked Leibniz's Theodicy (1710). Austin Farrar once pronounced, exignorantia, that Bayle was "hopelessly confused" ("Introduction," Routledge edition of Leibniz's Theodicy, 1951; now Open Court edition, 35), but Leibniz knew better.Gianluca Mori's book ranges far more widely than Brogi's. It is the best all-around book on Bayle's philosophy in twenty years. Mori begins with a chapter on interpretation, pointing out that everything that Leo Strauss said about encoded language can be found in Bayle. Using Bayle's own claims about such artifices to interpret his work, he explores the writer's ironies, dissimulation, self-censorship, and implied meanings. The interior thoughts of Bayle are unreachable... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transcendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian, and Primal TraditionsSarah K. PinnockTranscendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian, and Primal Traditions. By John D'Arcy May. New York: Continuum, 2003. 225 + xi pp.In popular media, religion appears as a dangerous social phenomenon with explosive potential. The investigation of transcendence as a source of violence is particularly timely in light of America's war on terrorism (...) targeting extremist Islam. However, this negative dimension of religion is nothing new. Over the course of history, hostility [End Page 231] and killing are intimately connected with religious divisions. The irony of religious violence as a betrayal of religious ethical ideals is both obvious and inescapable.Approaching this hot topic from the perspective of religious imperialism, John D'Arcy May examines violence perpetrated by the Christian and Buddhist traditions against indigenous religions. His investigation covers damaging evidence against these two universalizing traditions using geographically specific case studies in Asia and the Pacific Rim. Situating Christianity and Buddhism in parallel as religions of transcendence, he compares how indigenous localized religions were overpowered by expansionist universalizing religions, although not eradicated. Into his historical narrative, he weaves his personal encounters with otherness growing up in Australia while virtually oblivious to the oppression of Aboriginals by white settlers, and as a Roman Catholic doing ecumenical work in Papua New Guinea for four years.May opens the book with bold admission of the failures of European Christianity, evidenced in anti-Judaism and Holocaust genocide, and Theravada Buddhism's violent involvement in Sri Lanka's civil conflict between Singhalese nationalists and Hindu Tamils. The reader is led to expect elaboration on the moral failings of Christianity, and this proves true; however, May's examination of the Buddhism's expansion and endorsement of violence tempers the tendency to single out Christianity as uniquely imperialist. He suggests that transcendence itself can cause hierarchy and oppression.Part I of the book focuses on Christianity and violence. Chapter 1 studies how European Protestant and Catholic settlers to Australia treated the Aboriginal peoples. The story is grim. Using a psychoanalytic framework, May interprets the European vilification of Aboriginals as stemming from the repression of the primal other, and the repression of bio-cosmic religion in favor of transcendence. Constructively, he proposes that Aboriginal peoples can offer theological insights about the ontology of sacred space. Christians should not only seek reconciliation in society, but also consider new perspectives on the sacred in nature drawn from the dreaming of Aboriginal religious lore.In chapter 2, May deals with colonization in the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific Ocean, concentrating on Papua New Guinea. In the indigenous religions of Melanesia, the prosperous community is the measure of religious rectitude, while misfortune is explained by the breaking of taboos and the revenge of enemies or evil spirits. After European colonization, "cargo cults" arose among the islands that promised abundant material goods possessed by European settlers by means of religious rituals and magic. Surprisingly, May points out the positive impulses at the root of these cargo cults that are typically viewed as detrimental and even outlawed outright by local governments for their harmful social impact. At bottom, he argues, cargo cults reflect a positive religious aspiration for wholeness and healing in this life that is a counterpoint to the spiritualization of salvation by European Christianity.May tries to avoid idealizing these primal cultures and their religious insights; nevertheless, he finds them instructive for Christian theology. Native religions in both Australia and Papua New Guinea offer models of immanence that emphasize the religious value of nature and just relationships. It should be mentioned that [End Page 232] there is some nuance to this conclusion. For instance, Melanesian religion is portrayed as less exemplary than Australian aboriginal religion. But May's main point is that violence on a global scale is validated by Christian notions of transcendence that deny the material aspirations of the indigenous community, and promote a superiority that wreaks violence among indigenous peoples. Hopefully, intercultural theology will allow Christians to appreciate the Aboriginal respect for sacred geography and the Melanesian quest for the flourishing of one's local community.Christianity and Buddhism are treated... (shrink)

Religion's historical mistrust of sexuality shapes people's behavior by inhibiting liberal sexuality. Still, it is unclear whether this inhibitive role also includes common, normative sexual behavior, particularly in secularized contexts. Moreover, the possible mediating effects emotions, affects, and thoughts have on the association between religiosity and restricted sexuality have never been integrated into a single model. Finally, cross-religious differences in common sexual behavior have still yet to be documented. We addressed these three issues in two studies, with samples of (...) Catholic and Muslim tradition. Consistently across samples, religiosity predicted, either directly or indirectly, less frequent common heterosexual behaviors and masturbation, partly through sexual guilt and inhibition, and/or decreased sexual fantasy and the search for sexual pleasure. However, married Muslims’ religiosity, unlike Catholics’, did not directly undermine fertility-oriented sexuality and the search for pleasure. Religion's role in restricting sexuality seems to be rooted in deep psychological rationale. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Does It Mean to "Speak Truth to Power"?Christian UhlPolitical Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity. By Christopher S. Goto-Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. 192.Ever since the end of the "Great East Asian War" in Japan a debate has been smoldering over the contamination of philosophy by politics. This debate was sparked by a series of writings through which the "father of (...) Japanese philosophy," Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), and some thinkers affiliated with him—the so-called Kyoto School—became involved in the politics connected with the war to establish a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." The debate over Nishida and the Kyoto School has repeatedly been overshadowed by the debate over Heidegger. Aside from the strategic considerations of those engaged in the prosecution of the Kyoto School, one reason for the "Heidegger factor"1 may have something to do with the fact that philosophical parallels can indeed be drawn between Nishida and Heidegger, and that there are also direct links between Nishida and some of his disciples who studied in Germany. Questions concerning Heidegger's political engagement are still explosive, even twenty years after Farias' attempt to prove Heidegger's entanglement with National Socialism. The publication of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger—L'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie has fired up the debate in French philosophical circles.2 And in the debate concerning Nishida and the Kyoto School there is also recent news: the publication of Christopher S. Goto-Jones' ambitious study Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co Prosperity."Every inquiry," Heidegger says, "is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought for."3 Goto-Jones' inquiry seeks to explain the nature of Nishida's political engagement in the 1930s and 1940s, and his inquiry is guided by the conviction that Nishida should be exonerated from the charges regarding his alleged complicity with a Japanese wartime regime that was at least militarist if not "fascist." However, the declared intention of Goto-Jones' study is not just another exoneration of Nishida. Goto-Jones contends that Nishida, influenced "particularly [by] Kant" (p. 7), has left behind a still relevant political philosophy that, as some other authors have argued,4 is not only not tainted by any form of narrow-minded nationalism but also provides a philosophical framework for a theory of a globalizing, multicentered, intercultural world:Hence, for Nishida, the nation should not be a rigid institutional structure or an artificially... constructed culture, but rather a moral personality formed through the mutual self-determination [End Page 469] determination of its constituents and in a dynamic relationship with other nations. International relations should be characterized by the development of greater levels of unity, as nations creatively interact with each other, producing public goods and increasing the similarities in their personalities, thus decreasing the salience of their national boundaries. In this model, nationalism, like egoism, becomes a nonsense.(p. 134 n)This political model is what Goto-Jones seeks to recover in Nishida, and this recovery is "what is really intended" (Heidegger) by his book.5Nishida's political philosophy needs to be recovered, because it is buried under false accusations and misunderstandings, produced primarily by Nishida's detractors, whose criticism, as Goto-Jones suggests, is in most cases at best based on a rough selection of citations, torn out of the coherence of their original context. Nishida's defenders, on the other hand, have attempted to safeguard the philosopher against the arguments of his critics by simply calling him a "liberal," a seemingly agreeable but in fact rather misleading label. Furthermore, Nishida's defenders have based their arguments only on biographical material, diary entries, letters, and so on. While the apologists "are right to observe a contradiction between... [Nishida's] private condemnation of the regime and his apparent public complicity, this is not in itself enough to conclude that his public writings meant the opposite of what they seem to say" (p. 4).In fact, this conclusion by Nishida's apologists does raise certain questions. Why did Nishida never give vent to his divergent opinions? Should he not rather have remained... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Does It Mean to "Speak Truth to Power"?Christian UhlPolitical Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity. By Christopher S. Goto-Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. 192.Ever since the end of the "Great East Asian War" in Japan a debate has been smoldering over the contamination of philosophy by politics. This debate was sparked by a series of writings through which the "father of (...) Japanese philosophy," Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), and some thinkers affiliated with him—the so-called Kyoto School—became involved in the politics connected with the war to establish a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." The debate over Nishida and the Kyoto School has repeatedly been overshadowed by the debate over Heidegger. Aside from the strategic considerations of those engaged in the prosecution of the Kyoto School, one reason for the "Heidegger factor"1 may have something to do with the fact that philosophical parallels can indeed be drawn between Nishida and Heidegger, and that there are also direct links between Nishida and some of his disciples who studied in Germany. Questions concerning Heidegger's political engagement are still explosive, even twenty years after Farias' attempt to prove Heidegger's entanglement with National Socialism. The publication of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger—L'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie has fired up the debate in French philosophical circles.2 And in the debate concerning Nishida and the Kyoto School there is also recent news: the publication of Christopher S. Goto-Jones' ambitious study Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co Prosperity."Every inquiry," Heidegger says, "is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought for."3 Goto-Jones' inquiry seeks to explain the nature of Nishida's political engagement in the 1930s and 1940s, and his inquiry is guided by the conviction that Nishida should be exonerated from the charges regarding his alleged complicity with a Japanese wartime regime that was at least militarist if not "fascist." However, the declared intention of Goto-Jones' study is not just another exoneration of Nishida. Goto-Jones contends that Nishida, influenced "particularly [by] Kant" (p. 7), has left behind a still relevant political philosophy that, as some other authors have argued,4 is not only not tainted by any form of narrow-minded nationalism but also provides a philosophical framework for a theory of a globalizing, multicentered, intercultural world:Hence, for Nishida, the nation should not be a rigid institutional structure or an artificially... constructed culture, but rather a moral personality formed through the mutual self-determination [End Page 469] determination of its constituents and in a dynamic relationship with other nations. International relations should be characterized by the development of greater levels of unity, as nations creatively interact with each other, producing public goods and increasing the similarities in their personalities, thus decreasing the salience of their national boundaries. In this model, nationalism, like egoism, becomes a nonsense.(p. 134 n)This political model is what Goto-Jones seeks to recover in Nishida, and this recovery is "what is really intended" (Heidegger) by his book.5Nishida's political philosophy needs to be recovered, because it is buried under false accusations and misunderstandings, produced primarily by Nishida's detractors, whose criticism, as Goto-Jones suggests, is in most cases at best based on a rough selection of citations, torn out of the coherence of their original context. Nishida's defenders, on the other hand, have attempted to safeguard the philosopher against the arguments of his critics by simply calling him a "liberal," a seemingly agreeable but in fact rather misleading label. Furthermore, Nishida's defenders have based their arguments only on biographical material, diary entries, letters, and so on. While the apologists "are right to observe a contradiction between... [Nishida's] private condemnation of the regime and his apparent public complicity, this is not in itself enough to conclude that his public writings meant the opposite of what they seem to say" (p. 4).In fact, this conclusion by Nishida's apologists does raise certain questions. Why did Nishida never give vent to his divergent opinions? Should he not rather have remained... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 160-161 [Access article in PDF] Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl. Edmund Husserl. Zeitlichkeit und Intentionalität. Freiburg: Alber Verlag, 2000. Pp. 828. DM 178.00. Husserl himself understood the principle of a further development in phenomenology as a process of "critique of critique." One can find a realization of this principle in this impressive study by Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (University of Graz, Austria). Through the title Edmund (...) Husserl.Zeitlichkeit und Intentionalität the author announces her project to be an immanent analysis of central themes in transcendental phenomenology. The study concerns not only an interpretation of the whole published corpus, but also methodological problems and problems of the theory of subjectivity. Phenomenological topics like the lived body or psychology are exlcluded, which is a great advantage of the study. The themes are presented by critical analysis, and with systematic perspicacity in order to give new insights into traditional problems of research in Husserlian phenomenology. The author introduces her main points in three steps. In part one she deals with the "basis of phenomenology" and the "model of intentionality," which are presented in the first chapter through a commentary on the doctrine of intentionality in the Logical Investigations and the Noesis-Noema-correlation in Ideas I. Questions of method such as eidetic intuition and reduction are discussed in the second chapter. Overall, the study tries to understand Husserl's theory as an "intentional neutralism" (684) in which problems of a theory of knowledge are "bracketed." In the two chapters of the second part, the author connects Husserl's theory of subjectivity, the I-problematic and the problem of self-awareness, with his phenomenology of time consciousness. The I-problematic and the different concepts of consciousness in transcendental phenomenology are not only presented through an analysis of the Logical Investigations and Ideas I, but also an explanation of Husserl's later monadology. Rinofner-Kreidl shows convincingly that Husserl's position has to be understood as a non-egological theory of self-awareness.In the third part, the author demonstrates the limits of transcendental phenomenology within metaphysics by critisizing Husserl's thesis of a thinkable "world annihilation" [Weltvernichtung]. The investigation is finished by a chapter on the connection between phenomenology and science.Against the background of such questions, Rinofner-Kreidl develops her main argument against Husserl's phenomenology, namely, that it is able to solve neither the problem of the original temporal constitution of consciousness nor that of the pure I, because of certain methodological preconditions, e.g., intuition and the pure givenness of the phenomena to be described. Both threads are linked together in an impressive discussion of the often discussed reflective problematic. According to Rinofner-Kreidl, the heart of the matter is the question whether acts of reflection have to be understood as inner perception or as re-presentification [Vergegenwärtigung]. By preferring the first option one encounters difficulties by considering the act of reflection as occurring at the same time as the retentional constitution of the lived present. However, on the basis of Husserl's time phenomenology, the latter seems to be impossible. Non-intentional original constitution of time and intentional acts cannot be together at the same "objective" time. Thus, the author speaks about the "neuralgic problem" (511) of Husserl's phenomenology. Further, by preferring the second case one must give up the Cartesian [End Page 160] thread of phenomenology, because a representing reflection must "thematize" its objects, namely the experiences [Erlebnisse] themselves, as an object like any other object. However, this means that phenomenology, which is itself constituted by reflection, is unable "to refer to past objects without errors" (377). Consequently, The Cartesian ideal of an absolute apodicticity has to be given up.The author argues for the second option. She writes: "If a phenomenological philosophy is to keep itself clear of all constitution and speculation by strictly confining itself to the given, then precisely the time analysis comes into conflict with the basic principle, since it wants to describe what never can be an object" (499). Not only the analysis of time consciousness... (shrink)