The papers in this collection present a diversity of views on the epistemology of religious belief. There is a diversity of views about the intelligibility of particular religious beliefs: for example, about the reality of God's existence and of miracles. There is further disagreement concerning the reasonableness of religious belief itself. Some contributors argue that locating grounds for believing in God is still a fruitful undertaking. Both issues raise the problem of the philosopher's position vis-a-vis religious belief. Are philosophers in (...) a privileged position to determine either the reasonableness or the intelligibility of religious belief? Or is philosophy, properly understood, a descriptive task? The papers in this collection present a diversity of views on this issue, too. Drawing on the works of Kierkegaard, a few of the contributors argue that philosophical description cannot be neatly divorced from religious persuasion. Whatever their views on these issues, however, the contributors accept that philosophical discussion cannot proceed very far without attention to what religious believers say about their beliefs and the practices in which they take part. (shrink)

Simone Weil's influence has been enormous and in this age of doubt and uncertainty there is something particularly appealing about this French Jewish writer, for Weil lived out her beliefs. From an early age she was attracted to Bolshevism, became an anarchist and helped Trotsky. She joined the International Red Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War. An agnostic, she experienced a profound religious conversion, yet never converted to the Christian faith to which she was so deeply attracted. (...) This clear lucid exposition of her life and work shows how Weil is truly a prophet for our age and an indispensable source of encouragement to all those at the frontiers of religion, both within and without. (shrink)

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little (...) to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself: I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have. (shrink)

In this collection, distinguished theologians and philosophers of religion explore the relation of key Biblical concepts to our world. They examine a range of concepts, including authority, faith and history, the historical Jesus, the resurrection and miracles.

God is said to be Spirit, but the language of spirit is ignored in contemporary philosophy of religion. As well as exploring the notion of spirit in Hegel, Romanticism and Kierkegaard, participants explore the view that God is a spirit without a body, and the relations between "spirit" and "truth.".

This article provides a sociological explanation for urban “greening,” the normative practice of using everyday signifiers of nature to fix problems with urbanism. Although greening is commonly understood as a reaction against the pathologies of the industrial metropolis, such explanations cannot account for greening’s recurrence across varied social and historical contexts. Through a study of greening in Germany’s Ruhr region, a polycentric urban region that has repeatedly greened in the absence of a traditional city, I argue that greening is (...) made possible by a social imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, which I call urbanized nature, that is an outcome of, and subsequently becomes a variable in, urbanization. I draw on processual accounts of urbanization and the sociology of morality to explain urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its use to fulfill two competing visions of urban democracy in the postwar period. I find that rather than an ideological reaction against cities, greening is an aspirational practice that can be mobilized by a range of actors in a variety of places and times. By showing how a new social imaginary made new forms of moral action possible and how those ideals were then materialized in urban space, this article draws attention to the role of cultural imaginaries in urban change and to the material consequences of moral beliefs. (shrink)

The author's Habilitationsschrift--Ruhr-Universit'at Bochum.

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika Fiebich is PhD (...) student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

The following paper, by Dr. Walter Jaeschke, of the Hegel-Archiv, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, was discussed during the course of the meeting of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion which was held in New York City, November 15–17, 1979. It has been translated by Peter C. Hodgson, Chairman, Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University. The concluding sections of Dr. Jaeschke’s study, along with a proposal by Professor Hodgson for the completion of an English study edition of (...) Hegel’s lectures on religion, will appear in the next issue of the OWL. (shrink)

In June 2012, the conference Trends in Logic XI, whose main theme was Advances in Philosophical Logic, took place at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Eight of the invited papers were published in a special issue of the journal Studia Logica. The present volume contains fourteen papers, which the editors selected out of the contributed papers presented at the conference, in order to offer a panorama of the themes developed in philosophical logic in the last two decades or so, (...) as well as to indicate some promising directions for further research. In what follows, we give a brief description of each contribution, following the order in the list of contents.In the first paper, B. Armour-Garb and J.A. Woodbridge discuss a manner in which one can treat semantic pathologies, such as the Liar Paradox. According to their approach, semantically pathological sentences are s-defective, i.e. they can be understood in a sense, but they bear no content, which we can accept or reject. The a .. (shrink)

In this study, we explored the academic acquis in the field of Islamic studies produced in the last twenty-plus years in the Netherlands. We examined Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies to determine the most important Dutch institutions in the field of Islamic studies, their history, foundation objectives, research areas, education policies, publications, the most qualified researchers and original work in the field. NISIS, which solely covers Islam and Muslim societies in its broadest dimension, was established in 2010 as the (...) official national research school in the Netherlands. The research school was first attended by eight universities, each represented by a board member: Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leiden University, Radboud University, Tilburg University, Amsterdam University, Groningen University, Utrecht University, and VU University Amsterdam. With the participation of Maastricht University in 2013, NISIS constitutes the first collaboration in the history of Dutch scholarship, an academic platform of all universities that has a significant contribution to the field of Islamic studies, bringing together nine Dutch universities, their faculties, Ph.D. candidates, and master’s students. NISIS provides Ph.D. candidates and master's students in the Netherlands and Belgium with a number of opportunities: seasonal schools, network days, and other educational activities. NISIS strives to strengthen its existing ties with academic institutions around the globe, focusing mainly on Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey. NISIS managed to cross the borders of the Netherlands and has successfully partnered with KU Leuven and Ghent University from Belgium and Ruhr University Bochum from Germany. The International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World (ISIM) and later NISIS, were founded on a fundamental principle "For the Netherlands to develop a truly balanced, multicultural society, it is essential to know the cultures and societies that contribute to it". In our research, we discussed the academic efforts before NISIS; the establishment, activities, and publications of ISIM in detail. We shed light on the establishment of NISIS, its purpose, objectives, research areas, educational program, seasonal schools, Islamic research network days, other educational activities, interdisciplinarity principle, relations with other institutions, and efforts to reach various segments of Dutch society. (shrink)

Monograph describing the theoretical basis and curriculum development of the hibernia experimental school, combining vocational education with general education and located in the ruhr region of Germany, Federal Republic - in light of rudolf steiner's integrated approach to education, traces its evolution from factory training unit to an integrated comprehensive school, reviews the structure of practical education, and applies pedagogics of steiner's "study of man" to the process of learning. Bibliography pp. 191 to 196 and diagrams.