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

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

The Descartes Dictionary is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought. The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discussing trends in research over the past four decades. The A-Z entries include clear (...) definitions of the key terms used in Descartes' writings and detailed synopses of his works. Also included are entries noting philosophical influences, of both figures that influenced Descartes and those that he in turn influenced. For anyone reading or studying Descartes, rationalism, or modern philosophy more generally, this original resource provides a wealth of useful information, analysis, and criticism. Including clear explanations of often complex terminology, The Descartes Dictionary covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Descartes' philosophy. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article examines Harold Ramis’s 2005 noir comedy The Ice Harvest as the critically dystopian counter-panel to his beloved 1993 film Groundhog Day, a film frequently discussed within the paradigm of utopia. While starkly different in genre, tone, and reception, the two films comprise a dialectical dyad that registers the historical transition from the utopian cultural effervescence of the early 1990s to the tragic foreclosure of imaginative horizons and the dystopian transformation of economic, political, and social landscapes in the new (...) millennium. In The Ice Harvest, the author argues, this is achieved through a strategic reactivation of film noir as a variant of the critical dystopia. (shrink)

This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.

The essay constructs an ontological theory designed to capture the categories instantiated in those portions or levels of reality which are captured in our common sense conceptual scheme. It takes as its starting point an Aristotelian ontology of “substances” and “accidents”, which are treated via the instruments of mereology and topology. The theory recognizes not only individual parts of substances and accidents, including the internal and external boundaries of these, but also universal parts, such as the “humanity” which is an (...) essential part of both Tom and Dick, and also “individual relations”, such as Tom’s promise to Dick, or their current handshake. (shrink)

The principal findings of experimental economics are that impersonal exchange in markets converges in repeated interaction to the equilibrium states implied by economic theory, under information conditions far weaker than specified in the theory. In personal, social, and economic exchange, as studied in two-person games, cooperation exceeds the prediction of traditional game theory. This book relates these two findings to field studies and applications and integrates them with the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the thoughts of F. (...) A. Hayek. (shrink)

International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist critique of international economic law. The disciplinary boundaries and operative logic normalised by its denizens corral us in a white, Eurocentric episteme. Ahistoricism, decontextualisation, (...) and externalisation are three epistemic devices at the forefront of the exclusionary discourse of IEL. In this space, the histories and epistemologies of Black peoples are ghettoised, treated as alien to the framework. After identifying this bias, we use the Black Radical Tradition to evaluate IEL’s amenability to the racial capitalism critique. (shrink)

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

This essay is a response to Luis M. Augusto’s intriguing paper on the rift between mainstream and formal ontology. I will show that there are in fact two questions at issue here: 1. concerning the links between mainstream and formal approaches within philosophy, and 2. concerning the application of philosophy (and especially philosophical ontology) in support of information-driven research for example in the life sciences.

That uses of language not only can, but even normally do, have the character of actions was a fact largely unrealised by those engaged in the study of language before the present century, at least in the sense that there was lacking any attempt to come to terms systematically with the action-theoretic peculiarities of language use. Where the action-character of linguistic phenomena was acknowledged, it was normally regarded as a peripheral matter, relating to derivative or nonstandard aspects of language which (...) could afford to be ignored. (shrink)