This study examines developments in Karl Barth's early theology (to 1932) and Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy (as far as Otherwise than Being) to show how the concept of the Totally Other addresses the most radical problem of justification for theological and philosophical thought.

A concept of merit is used for spiritual accounting in many religious traditions, seemingly a substantial point of connection between religion and ordinary morality. Teachings of “merit transfer” might make us doubt this connection since they violate the principle that merit must be earned. If we examine the structure of ordinary schemes of desert, however, we find that personal worth is posited for a variety of reasons; the basic requirement in this realm is not earning by individuals but rather a (...) community’s program for cultivating desirable collaboration among its members. There are strong enough parallels between religiously envisioned merit transfer and socially normal conferrals and sharings of worth that we can conclude that the religious posits of transferred merit are indeed comprehensible as merit, whatever other problems of comprehensibility they pose. (shrink)

Buber's assertions about the relation between the self (I) and God (the Eternal You) amount to an "argument" which means reasonably to bring its audience to awareness of God. This reasoning is better understood and evaluated if it is presented in a more conventionally argumentative form than Buber gave it. The key premises are: 1) Buber's account of I-You saying as a general theory of meaning and criterion of reality, and 2) Buber's claim that You-saying in encounters with finite beings (...) does not exhaust the I's capacity to say You. Thus 1) whenever I say You, I meet reality; and 2) I can say You infinitely. Both in its premises and in its non-coercive way of soliciting assent, this Buberian argument exhibits the actual valid appeal of all the best-known arguments to God. (shrink)

The development of a metaphysics of actuality is reconstructed from Plato through Bergson to capitalize on Bergson's suggestion that mind and matter can be understood as inversions of each other, or as respectively a centering and an extending of forms. This view avoids the pitfalls of reductive monism and disjunctive dualism: it is dyadic (cognizant at once of mind-matter difference and of the unity of reality), symmetrical (not apt to close off prematurely our reckoning with complexity and change, on either (...) side), and correlational (able to track relations of form, energy, and sequence between mental and material items). (shrink)

This book develops the idea that meaningfulness is specified as a relation between an acknowledged appeal and an adopted attitude. In the Axial Age classics and again in modern refoundings of philosophy and theology, ideals of a fully commanding supreme appeal and a fully adequate orientation to the world in cognizance of that appeal--a sovereign attitude--are intellectually and spiritually central. Some of the most fundamental challenges of pluralism stem from differences in appeal and attitude ideals.

In this book, Steven G. Smith focuses on the guidance function in language and scripture and evaluates the assumptions and ideals of scriptural religion in global perspective. He brings to language studies a new pragmatic emphasis on the shared modeling of life-in-the-world by communicators constantly depending on each other's guidance. Using concepts of axiality and axialization derived from Jaspers' description of the 'Axial Age', he shows the essential role of scripture in the historical progress of communicative action. This volume clarifies (...) the formative power of scriptures in religions of the 'world religion' type and brings scripture into philosophy of religion as a major cross-cultural category of study, thereby helping philosophy of religion find a needed cross-cultural footing. (shrink)

Beginning with Anaximenes, philosophers have adopted spirit-words to identify that which is of commanding significance for understanding and living human life. So again here. To be a spiritual being is to be one for whom the first and final determiner of meaning is the question of how best to live in relationship with other beings, preeminently other intenders. Since parties to relationship transcend comprehension, the spirit-as-mind (nous) tradition rests on a fundamental mistake. Validity structures like rationality and culture function as (...) provisional answers to the essentially open question of relationship and are misunderstood if abstracted from it. (shrink)

A comprehensive look at how we rely on ideals of worthy action in the pursuit of moral happiness.

Discussable issues lurk amidst the sprawling variety of "heaven" conceptions in different traditions. To advance reflection on heaven thinking, this paper concentrates on the question of what makes for a best world and orders possible heavens according to alternative resolutions of space, time and causality. Some apparent strengths and weaknesses of each type are examined. It is suggested that the proposed heavens of most durable interest will be those representing the most amazing combinations of possibilities, while the most productive discussions (...) of heaven-related issues will be those best able to refer to conditions of goodness in the actual world. (shrink)

A historically responsible agent is willing to be somehow in practical solidarity with all other actors with whom action is shared over time. The responsible idea of a most-inclusive history encompasses future occurrence together with all that has happened already. Despite our lack of control over future developments, we assess possible future ages as bright or dark and position ourselves as contributors to multigenerational endeavors that we hope will be long-term successes in themselves and part of a larger historical optimality. (...) Informed by the evolutionary sciences, a plausible modern envisioning of the future must include evolutionary innovations and surprises on a very long time scale. The historically responsible agent will therefore take seriously efforts like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men to imagine the new powers and goals of our distantly posthuman future sharers in history. (shrink)

Understanding “responsibility” in its normal sense of freely fulfilling a role in a collaborative scheme, rather than as a basic agent integrity or prosocial disposition, I argue that the desirability of responsibility is one of the main supporting and constraining factors in the formation of religious thought and practice, with diversely typical manifestations. For those who are disposed to assume responsibility and to be religious, religious beliefs and practices offer a way of maximally enlarging one’s responsibility, an intrinsically appealing prospect. (...) The global relevance of religious responsibility is shown by comparing exemplars in a wide range of cultures. Aeneas, Kongzi, Dharmakara, and Miaoshan each embody maximal responsibility in a distinct way that motivates and sets standards for a religiosity. (shrink)

For perspicuous comparison and evaluation of moral positions on life-and-death issues, it is necessary to take into account the different meanings that killing and getting killed can bear in the two dimensions of dealing with persons (intention meeting intention) and handling them. A homicidal scenario in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows the possibility of courteous dealing coinciding with lethal handling. The extreme possibility of lovingly affirming persons while killing them, suggested by the Augustinian “kindly severity” ideal for state-sponsored (...) punitive killing, requires the killers’ affirmation of a fleshliness and fallibility shared with their victims; but love can accept killing only provisionally, since it postulates freedom from the constraints that are felt to require killing. (shrink)

Hooks are the particular elements in works of art that are in fact specially compelling for individual subjects. Hooks have their own kind of aesthetic meaningfulness that is obscured by the calculations of cultural manipulators, on the one hand, and by leading aesthetic theories’ insistence upon subordinating parts of a work to the whole, on the other. Hook appreciation inspires desirable adjustments in those theories.

Trying, a central human concern, is actualized and beheld in rather pure form in athletic endeavor, where successful trying interests us as a revelation of a waxing kind of human being, full of promise. In the moral life trying is not so openly displayed, yet one’s standing in the moral system of evaluation is determined by it. The honor attaching to athletic success models the moral community’s confirmation of individuals’ commitment to it.

This paper uses the humor of Road Runner cartoons as a test of our intuitions about causality as these intuitions are appealed to by the rival theories of Hume and Kant. I argue that Road Runner cartoons are funnier to Kantians, with their stronger presumption of necessary causal regularity, and therefore supportive of Kantianism to the degree that we find this humor compelling.

Chowers provides a clear, useful discussion of an important strand of European thinking about selfhood and modernity. The issue of “entrapment” arises in this way: Our civilization-creating powers begin to be seen in the Enlightenment as threatening as well as promising. We can trap ourselves with unintended effects like pervasive social hypocrisy and oppressive industrialization, or we can trap ourselves precisely by controlling our circumstances too well and producing a disorienting sameness in replicating ourselves. “Proto-entrapment” thinkers in the nineteenth century (...) project opposite ways of overcoming the problem, either through a comprehensive humanization of society or by cultivating a personal authenticity detached from society. But the true “entrapment” thinkers of the twentieth century conclude that the problem is constitutive of our selfhood and so can at best be coped with but never solved. (shrink)

God’s revelation is not uncommonly represented as a past speaking---“God has spoken,” “We have heard.” In order to study how the possibilities of reasoning are affected when the crucial evidence to which reasoning may appeal is a remembered speaking, a parableis offered in which three young brothers dispute whether their mother has called them home. Their arguments necessarily take an ad hominem tum. It is found that the claims of the brother who remembers hearing are provisionally, partially, and prescriptively reasonable. (...) This brother’s position resembles that of St. Paul at Romans 1 :18-32 (“So they are without excuse” ). (shrink)

“Intrinsic value” is a perplexing notion in that it purports to establish a relationship with a thing that cannot in fact be established by the valuing subject butcan only be welcomed. An important sense of “good” expresses the non-axiological side of shared flourishing. We do need the concept of intrinsic value to put our different kinds of value in order, but we can also recognize that the positing of intrinsic value is grounded on events of appeal wherein perceived beings promise (...) distinctive forms of benign partnership with their perceivers. The ideal of appeal maximalism can displace the problematic ideal of unrestricted intrinsic value as a basis for expanding the circle of moral consideration. (shrink)

The notion of a “daimon” or compellingly life-commanding being represents a certain stage in the historical articulation of conceptions of spiritual power, in the perspective of a general phenomenology of spiritual life like van der Leeuw’s, but also a certain relationship with spiritual power that remains meaningful at any time, as Plato and Neoplatonists theorized. Focusing on normative rather than psychological issues, I propose several topics and tasks for a renewed agenda for reflective daimon thinking.

What is the relation between the thought of exteriority (that is, of an intellectually unencompassable Other taken to be a supreme source or condition of meaning) and the idealism, subjective or objective, that it reacts against? Eberhard Grisebach makes a good case study because his exteriority statement (Gegenwart, 1928) is unsurpassably extreme yet evolves in discernible stages from an idealist starting-point. After considering parallels with Buber and Levinas and criticisms from several sources, I argue that the exteriority strategy for thinking (...) about community is indispensable even if its dedication to negating comprehension renders it sterile for many philosophical purposes. (shrink)

Some of kant's rationales for conceiving the highest good of morality as virtue rewarded with happiness rest on the subject's "necessary" natural desire for happiness, While others appeal to a still-Obscure principle of moral desert. The principle, I argue, Is that the moral agent qua moral necessarily hopes for the "approval" of fellow moral legislators and god, Who "would" (did they exist, And if they could) signify their approval by bestowing the means of happiness.

Considering the profoundly collaborative nature of human communication, the notion of guidance needs more careful consideration and foregrounding in the philosophy of language. The practically cruc...

The First Person is ambitious, scholarly, clear, and worth close attention. Chisholm puts two momentous philosophical commitments to the proof by adhering to them in his handling of a wide range of problems in the theory of objective reference. The commitments are a “Platonic” ontology admitting no property that is conceivable only with reference to a contingently existing thing, and the logical principle of the primacy of the intentional, which means that linguistic facts must be explicated with reference to intentional (...) facts instead of the other way around. The two commitments are linked, inasmuch as the singular propositions that are commonly invoked to make sense of beliefs with respect to individuals presuppose non-Platonic entities such as times, possible worlds, indexical properties, and individual essences or haecceities. If we can get along without such entities, then we can dismiss singular propositions and account for demonstrative beliefs and locutions in terms of attribution. (shrink)

This new edition of Filosofie van de geest by René Marres is expanded at some points as well as translated into very readable English. Its purpose is not to analyze mind, intention, or action as such, but rather to collect and weigh the main arguments for and against the existence of irreducibly "mental" phenomena on a commonsense understanding of the "mental." This it does lucidly. Marres' mentalism varies from the Cartesian prototype in two chief respects: by affirming that the mind's (...) awareness of its own contents is often fallible and corrigible, and by denying that the mind is ontologically or causally independent from the body. (shrink)

A Lens Problem arises when a movie viewer is dissatisfied with the physical information provided by shots taken with non-normal lenses. Experiences will vary, but the real possibility of the Lens Problem points to an important dimension of movie experience that is neglected by theories oriented to realistic seeing or imaginative seeing-as. Before we construe a presentation as documentary or fictional, we are in the first place watchers: our more or less constant watchful interest in gleaning useful information about position (...) and movement in a world is a basis for the immediate and constant engagement of our attention by a movie and for an experience of progress or disappointment in learning from it. (shrink)

Although Emmanuel Levinas later expressed regret that he sided with Martin Heidegger rather than the more “ideal”-minded Ernst Cassirer in their 1929 Davos encounter, Cassirer’s philosophy of culture would never have been an apt framework for Levinas’s own project, which was always directed more to fundamental orientation than to formative activities or achievements. In “Meaning and Sense” (1964), Levinas conceived a totalizing cultural “meaning” as a foil to transcendent ethical “sense.” In a 1983 paper, however, he proposed an ethical conception (...) of culture. He could have developed this further using another element from “Meaning and Sense,” an ethical conception of work as service of the Other. The work-in-progress of culture combines pure ethics and implemented morality, pure command and consistent style, infinite vulnerability and actual power. (shrink)

Our moral valuation of nonhuman and human beings alike may arise in sympathy, the realization in feeling of a significant commonality between self and others; in scrupulous observance of policy, the affirmation in practical consistency of a system of relations with others; and in piety, the attitude of boundless appreciation and absolute scruple with respect to objects as sacred - that is, as valued for the sake of adequate valuation of the holy. Differences between the moral status of humans and (...) that of nonhumans are to be explained not by any single criterion such as the capacity to suffer or to make contracts, but rather by finding the relative positions of humans and nonhumans on continua of feelable commonality, policy considerateness, and sacredness. Investigation of these differences must take into account the way basic religious apprehensions (or the absence thereof) organize these frames of reference. (shrink)

Some of the most significant religious appeals can be taken as reasons of a distinctively religious kind. But many popular ways of interpreting religious reasoning pose obstacles to appreciating religious reasons as such. To avoid binding the concept of religious reason to an intellectual programme that requires a disjunction between the religious and the rational or that dissolves all tension between religious claims and general rational standards of validity and normativity, religious reasons can be defined for purposes of liberal study (...) by their challenging yet rationally appreciable transvalid claims and transnormative implications. Examples from the book of Amos and the Chandogya Upanishad are discussed. (shrink)

The sense of a religious life ideal typically depends on an ordinary practical understanding of selfhood and success (worthiness) that it both departs from (toward a higher excellence) and trades on. Serenity and passion are examined as ways of transmuting ordinary trying and worth.

Anselmian theism and Feuerbachian atheism are in deep conversation with each other in insisting in their respective ways upon extramental reality. In analyzing the relation between existence and properties, each uses a criterion of greatness to place actual encounter ahead of ideal conceptions.

This paper revives the idea of final cause as a way of considering how the meaning of occurrences--what they have permitted in our lives, as opposed to what produced them or how they fit into a prior plan--is essential to our understanding them.

Kant’s central notion of a “causality of freedom” seems inconsistent with his theoretical analysis of causation. Because of its detachment from any reference to time, it is also seriously in tension with ordinary moral ideals of individuality, efficacy, responsiveness, and personal growth in the exercise of freedom. I suggest a way of conceiving moral freedom that avoids the absurdity of practical timelessness while preserving the main strengths of Kant’s theories of theoretical and practical meaning, including his refusal to specify the (...) content of human fulfillment. Much as Kant’s ideal of the highest good combines the supreme good of moral virtue with its necessarily desired complement of worthy happiness, a Kantian ideal of the fullest freedom can combine the transcendental freedom of the moral disposition with individual exercises of freedom in the dramatic interaction of actual moral community. (shrink)

Religious positions can differ more deeply in asking rival questions than in offering rival answers to a common question. What is the logic of basic question rivalry? Questions are rivals when they make incompatible assumptions and one has to choose between them. The more basic the questions the greater the discontinuity that switching between them might bring to one's life. Choice of questions must fit the overall aim of whichever question is taken to be least avoidable. Avoidableness depends partly on (...) the subject's attitude; for a subject with pious scruples, a religious question shift entails a revolution of loyalty that a "paradigm shift" does not. (shrink)

Concrete worthy actions have not been aterminus of discernment for moral theory in theway that they often are for the deliberatingmoral agent. Some ordinary hallmarks of worthyactions challenge the unworldly and impersonalways of envisioning life that dominatephilosophical ethics. I discuss six: a worthyaction (1) improves the world in moralperspective, (2) discloses the agent''s power,(3) is personally rewarding, (4) unites virtue,justice, and happiness, (5) is a prime objectof moral choice, and (6) belongs to a practicalgenre (such as work or love). Appreciatingworthy (...) actions leads to a less abstract andconformist view of ethical standards and moreattention to individual portfolio-buildingaccording to diverse practical opportunities. (shrink)

Why should past occurrences matter to us as such? Are they in fact meaningful in a specifically historical way, or do they only become meaningful in being connected to other sorts of meaning—political or speculative, for example—as many notable theorists imply? Ranke and Oakeshott affirmed a purely historical meaningfulness but left its nature unclear. The purpose of this essay is to confirm historical meaningfulness by arguing that our commanding practical interest in how we share action with other actors is distinctively (...) engaged by presumed information about past occurrences. We recognize that past occurrences have determined the conditions of action sharing, constraining our practice with regard to which actors we share practical reality with and which compounding actions we may or must join in progress. (shrink)

Attitude is an important criterion and cause of religiousness, though it is commonly mishandled in religious reflection by (1) skewing the anthropologically central variable of attitude toward “feeling,” on the side of affect, or toward “disposition,” on the side of will, and (2) obscuring different basic forms and validities of religious attitude by insisting on one overly narrow or misleadingly rounded-out conception of devoutness (most often, “faith”). This paper develops a more adequate conception of attitude in general and of the (...) generic religious attitude of devoutness as branching into three principal, sometimes divergent religious attitudes: faith, oriented to the realizable; piety, oriented to the realized; and submission, oriented to realizing. (shrink)

Our actions, if we care about them positively, assume judgments of worthwhileness that have been made or could be made in their favor. But a huge proportion of humanity makes a point of engaging in two kinds of action that are (are are meant to be) specially difficult to justify as worthwhile: getting intoxicated and worshiping. Drawing comparisons with worth forms associated with play and work, I ask how intoxication and worship can be seen as worthwhile and conclude that each (...) involves a deeply encouraging critique of ordinary forms of personal identity. (shrink)

Elucidation of the epistemic fulfillment of "realizing" in imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual modes.

Although Emmanuel Levinas later expressed regret that he sided with Martin Heidegger rather than the more “ideal”-minded Ernst Cassirer in their 1929 Davos encounter, Cassirer’s philosophy of culture would never have been an apt framework for Levinas’s own project, which was always directed more to fundamental orientation than to formative activities or achievements. In “Meaning and Sense” (1964), Levinas conceived a totalizing cultural “meaning” as a foil to transcendent ethical “sense.” In a 1983 paper, however, he proposed an ethical conception (...) of culture. He could have developed this further using another element from “Meaning and Sense,” an ethical conception of work as service of the Other. The work-in-progress of culture combines pure ethics and implemented morality, pure command and consistent style, infinite vulnerability and actual power. (shrink)

Argues against a consumption-oriented vision of agents' relation with material things that there are worthy, morally happy kinds of owner-partnership with things and that expansion of access to owner worth should be among the goals of moral, political, and economic policy.

This paper presents three theses on the kind of human kinds represented by masculinity and femininity: (1) Genders are taken to be generic realities, (2) complementary kinds of a kind, and (3) normative and valid organizations of intention in community. Analogies are considered between gender and temperament, culture, race, age, and sexual orientation.

General intelligence is success in comprehensive life- and world-modelling. What counts as intelligent will depend on what an individual or society thinks about life, world, and success. Yet intelligence comparisons have a basis in direct experience of mental encounter; they arise in sensed resemblances among subjects (liable, like other human-kinds perceptions, to stereotyping). Intelligence is assessed differently according to different scenarios of encounter, as for example among workers, traders, lovers, philosophers, or friends. An IQ score could not define a personal (...) intelligence kind, but it could reasonably affect one subject's approach to another in standardized and time-limited situations. (shrink)