I shall propose that the unlearned motives of persons are primary emotions. I am not surprised that many informed readers will wonder where I have been for the last five decades when even the conception of unlearned motives (instincts, drives, urges) has been shown to be little more than the result of undisciplined investigation? And here I am proposing that in the nature and dynamics of some emotions that persons experience we can gain more adequate understanding of human motives at (...) the unlearned level. During the last five decades I have spent most of my time teaching the histlDry of philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics and theory of value, the psychology of personali ty, and th~ philosophy of personality. Increasingly I have paid special attention to the ways in which claims about ~the nature of man I influence the theory of motives, emotions, and feelings. What kept impressing me is the way in which the viii interpretation of the "findings" about motives, feelings, and emotion reflect unargued conceptions of human nature, or that the views of fundamental motives, feelings, and emotions unduly dominate the underlying conception of the person. In focusing attention first on the essential nature of a person I shall be discussing issues that are actually basic to our more analytical interpretation of the nature and dynamics of the primary motives or primary emotions. (shrink)

Since my childhood I have given up several conceptions of God. Each time there was quite a wrench, for, in my own limited way, I had been walking with my ‘living’ God. In my philosophical and theological studies, I have been impressed by the fact that one deep-souled thinker found the living God of another ‘dead’. And then I realised that a God is ‘living’ or ‘dead’ insofar as ‘He’ answers questions that are vital to the given believer.

Since my childhood I have given up several conceptions of God. Each time there was quite a wrench, for, in my own limited way, I had been walking with my ‘living’ God. In my philosophical and theological studies, I have been impressed by the fact that one deep-souled thinker found the living God of another ‘dead’. And then I realised that a God is ‘living’ or ‘dead’ insofar as ‘He’ answers questions that are vital to the given believer.

It was a little over ten years ago, 1967–8, that H. D. Lewis delivered the first series of Gifford lectures, The Elusive Mind, in the University of Edinburgh. It was my privilege that year to be an auditor in the Seminar at King's College that Professor Lewis was conducting with his students in the area of this topic. I had already read the works in which, in the midst of neo-orthodox and existentialist religious movements, he had devoted himself to critical (...) valuation of those doctrines - witness his Morals and the New Theology, and Morals and Revelation. This earlier work prepared for a comprehensive interpretation of religious experience in his book in 1960: Our Experience of God. (shrink)

Agreeing that being is becoming, that personal identity is noninstantaneous, the temporalistic personalist argues that the identity of the person is not, as hartshorne holds, linear, or a cumulative route of unit-occasions in which the past comes into the present. there cannot be a succession of experiences without a self-identifying active person able to maintain himself through change and interaction with his ambient, natural or divine.

I wish this essay to be a tribute to Edwin A. Burtt. He stands for a quality of intellectual and spiritual hospitality that is all the more inspiring because it stems from widespread scholarly analysis and a moral passion for catholicity and civility. Like Kant, he has given much of his acute philosophical ability to the task of understanding the foundations of scientific, moral, and religious beliefs. If anything, he goes a step further than Kant. Persons, he argues, win truth (...) only as love unifies all their efforts. (shrink)

I wish this essay to be a tribute to Edwin A. Burtt. He stands for a quality of intellectual and spiritual hospitality that is all the more inspiring because it stems from widespread scholarly analysis and a moral passion for catholicity and civility. Like Kant, he has given much of his acute philosophical ability to the task of understanding the foundations of scientific, moral, and religious beliefs. If anything, he goes a step further than Kant. Persons, he argues, win truth (...) only as love unifies all their efforts. (shrink)