Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Essays discuss active and passive euthanasia, the right to die, and the care of the terminally ill.

Essays cover the abortion situation before Roe v. Wade, Christians and abortion, abortion and the Constitution, abortion and moral philosophy, and the feminist perspective.

Intellectually stimulating articles, which grapple with the tough issues involving morality, justice, and the law. This balanced anthology will be of interest to philosophers, legal scholars, and anyone concerned about the relation of law to morality.

This book stands as a testimony to the creative impact of W J Kilgore's teaching on the minds of his students. The contributors were each once students of Dr. Kilgore, and this collection of essays is designed to contribute to scholarly work in philosophy, at the same time serving as a tribute to Dr Kilgore's intellectual depth, philosophical rigor, and steadfastness of character.

Self-identity, in the sense of who one now is or who one may become, is widely recognized as a matter of both discovery and creativity. This understanding of self-identity is reflected in the often repeated admonition of Friedrich Nietzsche to become who one is. Against the background of a brief discussion of Nietzsche's admonition, two claims are advance. First, noting the role others play in our becommg who we are helps explicate the notion that self-identity involves both discovery and creativity. (...) Second, emphasizing that self formation involves both discovery and creativity illummates several moral dimensions of the unfolding drama, perhaps the most important of which is the importance of creating a self which makes ongoing recreations of the self possible. (shrink)

Currently the Enlightenment tradition is under such intense attack that Richard Bernstein calls the present mood a “rage against the enlightenment.” The purpose of this essay is to defend the deep spirit of the Enlightenment, the position that no idea, proposition, or principle should be beyond critical assessment. The defense involves an examination of and a response to two criticisms of the Enlightenment: first that the Enlightenment disdainfully rejects religion, particularly Christianity, and second that Enlightenment thinkers had a misguided confidence (...) in the powers of a-historical reason, i. e. the notion that humans have a rational capacity, unaffected by context or historical circumstance, to arrive at truth. (shrink)

This work explores in an extended and illuminating way an issue Wertz has pursued in several articles over the years: Humes understanding of the methodological and epistemological ties between philosophy and history. It reflects a thorough knowledge of both the Hume corpus and the secondary literature on Hume. This familiarity with primary and secondary texts is evident both in the body of Wertzs book and in the extensive and informative footnotes. The footnotes alone are a rich source of guidance for (...) anyone interested in Hume scholarship. (shrink)

Struggle with self identity is a life-Iong moral undertaking, an essential dimension of which is connecting one’s past and future in a way that preserves integrity and wholeness. The argument of this paper is that one reading of Sartre’s understanding of bad faith and authenticity can illuminate this project. More specifically, the essay provides an interpretation of Sartre’s claim that “I am not what I am and I am what Iam not” that avoids understanding the self as an ontological nothingness (...) poised between past and future. Rather, Sartre’s phrase is interpreted as recognizing that we experience ourselves as a rich, complex continuum that connects past and future. This understanding of the self acknowledges the tension between past and future, but sees that tension as the matrix out of which a responsible self emerges. (shrink)

MORALITY, JUSTICE AND THE LAW is a co-edited volume pulling together selections on theories of the moral underpinnings of law, morality and lawyering (including the religious lawyering movement), civil disobedience, capital punishment and immigration. The book was published by Prometheus Books in 2007.

Brumbaugh divides Western philosophic systems into four families: Platonist, Aristotelian, Democritean, and Anaxagorean. He plots these on a graph with the X-axis designating the method of the system and the Y-axis the direction. Method refers to the system's tendency to employ either dialectical thinking in emphasizing the whole or analysis in emphasizing the parts out of which the whole is constructed. He uses Richard McKeon's terms "holoscopic" for the former, and "meroscopic" for the latter. Direction refers to the system's emphasis (...) on form or matter. The four possible combinations are graphed by Brumbaugh. Both axes are needed, "for the forms of the formalists may be hierarchical and continuous, as Plato's are, or actual only for a discrete set, as are Aristotle's. And the 'matter' of the y direction can be either the hard, insulated particles of Democritus' atomic theory or the continuous flow of Heraclitean process". (shrink)

The history of religions is divided into phenomenological and historical branches: the former has no definite interpretative categories but the latter does, namely the "religions" - Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and others. But the "religions" are misleading and preclude understanding, for these categories were imposed before historical research and are neither historical nor religious. A definition of religion is needed to. begin, and Tillich's suggestion - religion is ultimate concern -is functional, enables us to identify what we are looking for, and (...) is non-judgmental. The "religions," on the other hand ' imply an essence of each religion and preclude the examination of the religious experience of each individual in his own terms. The historical study of religion should be undertaken according to areas, not "religions," and the final step should be determination of the "types" of concern-the task of phenomenology. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues. Edited by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum.