Religious naturalism is an emerging construct that relies greatly on science and yet affirms attitudes and practices that are distinctly religious in nature. This article explores the meaning of the term as it is used by various proponents, contrasts it to some similar constructs , and examines some objections andoutstanding issues from within the science‐religion community: postmodernist objections; whether religious naturalism is sufficiently respectful of traditional religious expression; and whether religious naturalism seeks to be a (...) descriptive or a prescriptive enterprise or both. Overall, religious naturalism is affirmed as a potentially productive new variant of naturaltheology, one that can preserve religious sensibilities without relying on supernatural constructs while maintaining a basic affirmation of other religious traditions. (shrink)

Schleiermacher is often credited with elevating the notion of ‘religious experience’ to prominence in theology and the study of religion. But his position on religious experience is poorly understood, largely because he is typically read through the lens of his later appropriators. In this essay I make a set of claims about what ‘religious experience’ amounts to in Schleiermacher’s mature dogmatics, _The Christian Faith_. What is noteworthy about Schleiermacher’s position is its calculated coherence with (...) class='Hi'>religious naturalism, understood as the position that religious phenomena have natural causes. I then argue that Schleiermacher’s understanding of religious experience is actually promising for contemporary discussions– partly because it allows for productive conversation with religious naturalists, and partly in virtue of the utility of Schleiermacher’s claim regarding the kind of religious experience at the heart of Christian religious identity. (shrink)

What is Religious Ethics? An Introduction is an accessible and informative overview to major themes and methods in religious ethics. This short and lively book demonstrates the relevance and importance of ethics based in religious traditions and describes how scholars of religious ethics think through moral problems. Combining an issues-based approach with a model of studying ethics religion-by-religion, this volume examines pressing topics through a variety of belief systems - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, (...) and Sikhism - while also importantly spotlighting indigenous communities. Engaging case studies invite readers to consider the role of religions with regard to issues such as: CRISPR Vegetarianism Nuclear weapons Women's leadership Reparations for slavery What is Religious Ethics? is a reliable and easily digestible introduction to the field. With chronologically structured chapters, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and interviews with scholars of religious ethics, this is an ideal guide to those approaching the study of religious ethics for the first time. (shrink)

What is beyond the pale of a pluralist society is a state-directed frontal attack on the evidence for religious beliefs considered as grounds for religious identity, rather than considered as grounds for scientific argument, for example. Religious commitment is not something which pupils should be expected to defend in terms of generally acceptable reasons for belief.

In what follows, I discuss the extent to which the epistemology of religious belief differs from the epistemology of other areas of our belief, as well as the extent to which it is similar. There will be important similarities: for example, the standards for the application of terms of epistemic assessment like ‘justified’, ‘warranted’,and ‘rational’. But in this essay, I concentrate on delineating some important differences between religious and non-religious epistemology.

One approach to the problem of differentiating a religious from a non- religious ethic would be to formulate a definition of religion that would clearly distinguish between religious and nonreligious traditions; however, a broad definition of religion would include some moral traditions, such as Marxism, commonly thought to be forms of secular humanism. A second approach would argue that some moral beliefs are independent, both in content and justification, of religious convictions; such a set of moral (...) beliefs could be described as a secular version of natural law. This approach would be rejected by those who argue that religious convictions go "all the way down." While the first can be debated by appealing to the heuristic value of various definitions of religion, the second involves familiar issues of moral epistemology. The author explores the consequences of holding a broad definition of religion and an "all the way down" epistemology. (shrink)

What is ‘counterintuitive’? There is general agreement that it refers to a violation of previously held knowledge, but the precise definition seems to vary with every author and study. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the notion of ‘counterintuitive’ and provide a more philosophically rigorous definition congruent with the history of psychology, recent experimental work in ‘minimally counterintuitive’ concepts, the science vs. religion debate, and the developmental and evolutionary background of human beings. We conclude that previous definitions (...) of counterintuitiveness have been flawed and did not resolve the conflict between a believer’s conception of the supernatural entity (an atypical “real kind”) and the non-believer’s conception (empty name/fictional). Furthermore, too much emphasis has been placed on the universality and (presumed) innateness of intuitive concepts (and hence the criteria for what is counterintuitive)—and far too little attention paid to learning and expertise. We argue that many putatively universal concepts are not innate, but mostly learned and defeasible—part of a religious believer’s repertoire of expert knowledge. Nonetheless, the results from empirical studies about the memorability of counterintuitive concepts have been convincing and it is difficult to improve on existing designs and methodologies. However, future studies in counterintuitive concepts need to embed their work in research about context effects, typicality, the psychology of learning and expertise (for example, the formation of expert templates and range defaults), with more attention to the sources of knowledge (direct and indirect knowledge) and a better idea of what ‘default’ knowledge really is. (shrink)

Questions of nature’s role in politics — what constitutes a people, justice, necessity — thread together into a singular significant problem: what is religious? This essay begins with the aim of defining religiosity—to say what it is. Thucydides serves as an invaluable educator. With Thucydides’ History we can analyse human nature writ large: we see the rise of a people, observe their division, note the dissolution of their ‘ancestral’ and finally question the cancer of self-doubt that (...) sets in as to the justness of their Justice — that is to say: their crisis of faith. But how to question Thucydides? The questions Nietzsche raised in his ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’ aremost relevant and revealing to the topic at hand. What is Religious? examines the nascent emergence and mature decline of a people, it strives to grasp the modus operandi behind it, it seeks a forward philosophy. (shrink)

philosophers have always been attracted to disagreements, perhaps because they almost immediately lead to philosophically exciting questions about how to distinguish positions, theories, and so forth, that are right from those that are mistaken. Philosophy of religion is certainly no exception, and, here, focus has often been on disagreements over belief in the existence of the God of classical theism as manifested in the great Abrahamic traditions, on the one hand, and atheism, on the other—though disagreements between religious traditions (...) have also attracted attention. Particularly in Anglo-American philosophy of religion, these disagreements have generally been conceptualized in epistemological terms: Which (if.. (shrink)

This article is part II of a consideration of phenomenology of religion focusing in this part on the conversation in contemporary French phenomenology. It begins with a brief comment about Heidegger's phenomenology of religious life and then engages most heavily those thinkers who discuss the phenomenon of religion in the Francophone context: Jean Héring, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean‐Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean‐Yves Lacoste, Jean‐Louis Chrétien, and Emmanuel Falque. The article concludes with a brief consideration of the contemporary Anglophone conversation and (...) the ways in which these French thinkers are appropriated in the current discussion about the phenomenality of religion. (shrink)

Here I respond to four critics of my book, What Is a Person?, seeking to find areas of common ground and crucial disagreement. Most importantly, I explore the question of whether all human knowledge is conceptually mediated, acknowledging that, no, indeed, there are likely forms of experiential knowledge that are purely and directly acquired without conceptual mediation.

Phenomenology of religion can refer to three distinct groups of phenomenological projects reflecting on religion. The term is used in the field of religious studies to designate the search for patterns of religious experiences or practices across traditions and to the methodology that shows religion to be a unique human experience deserving its own field of study. Philosophical phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition also engages religious questions at times. Finally, there is a group of contemporary French philosophers (...) who advocate a phenomenology of religious experience. The first two groups are examined in this article and the third in the sequel. For the first group, the article briefly considers the projects of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, Brede Kristensen, and Gerardus van der Leeuw, as well as their contemporary interpreters in the field of religious studies. As representative of the second approach, the article considers Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Gerda Walther as well as commenting briefly on the contemporary work of Natalie Depraz and Anthony Steinbock. (shrink)

In this book, Phillip Wiebe examines religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, assessing how these experiences appear to implicate a spiritual order. Despite the current prevalence of naturalism and atheism, he argues that experiences purporting to have a religious or spiritual significance deserve close empirical investigation. Wiebe surveys the broad scope of religious experience and considers different types of evidence that might give rise to a belief in phenomena such as spirits, paranormal events, God, and an afterlife. He (...) demonstrates that there are different explanations and interpretations of religious experiences, both because they are typically personal accounts, and they suggest a reality that is often unobservable. Wiebe also addresses how to evaluate evidence for theories that postulate unobservables in general, and a Theory of Spirits in particular. Calling for more rigorous investigation of these phenomena, Wiebe frames the study of religious experience among other accepted social sciences that seek to understand religion. (shrink)

We live in a world of social, political, economic, and religious rupture. Ideologies polarise to fuel confrontation within communities, nations and regions of the world. At this point in the twenty-first century, humanism's focus on reason, ethics and justice offers the potential to rethink and re-engage in new ways. What Is Humanism, and Why Does It Matter? brings together leading humanist thinkers and activists to examine humanism and how it can work in the world. Humanism is often misunderstood. (...) The movement includes both atheists and agnostics, who seek to make ethical sense of the world based on shared human values and a concern for human welfare, happiness and fulfillment. What Is Humanism, and Why Does It Matter? presents an overview and exploration of the meaning and nature of humanism, both as a philosophy and as a way of engaging with the challenges of the world. (shrink)

Mehmet Karabela draws upon Carl Schmitt’s analysis more explicitly to interrogate and understand how Islamic and Western scholars have conceptualized an “apolitical” Islam that could then be politicized. He applies Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction as characteristic of the political to the study of Islam and shows how Islam has always been political and religious at the same time in this context. Liberalism posits a separate realm of religion and politics that it charges Islam and other political religions wrongly mix, but (...) there is no intrinsic separation of politics from religion in a post-secular context, and we have many lessons to learn of and from Islam. Rather than the modern nation-state, which is the locus for Schmitt, the polity of Islam is more situated on the Muslim community, which is less determinate and defined. Every community, particularly every religious community, is potentially political in the Schmittian context. (shrink)

This is an edited transcript of a lecture given at the LSE in March 2023. The lecture introduces the “meaning of life” question via Tolstoy’s Confession, then considers the strengths and limitations of religious and secular answers to the question.

What is this thing called Philosophy of Religion? grapples with the core topics studied on philosophy of religion undergraduate courses including God as personal, divine omnipotence, divine omniscience, the problem of evil, religious diversity, cosmological arguments, design arguments, moral arguments, and ontological arguments. In addition to the in-depth coverage of the key themes within the subject area Elizabeth Burns explores the topics from the perspectives of the five main world religions, introducing students to the work of scholars from (...) a variety of religious traditions and interpretations of belief. (shrink)

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This book is a debate between two philosophers who are united in their rejection of this kind of "standard" physicalism - but who differ sharply in what lesson to draw from this. Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, a thoroughly modern version (...) of dualism (the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: those that are physical and those that are mental) decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations. Daniel Stoljar defends non-standard physicalism, a kind of physicalism different from both the standard version and dualism 2.0. The book presents a cutting-edge assessment of the philosophy of consciousness and provides a glimpse at what the future study of this area might bring. (shrink)

The volume includes Mark Twain's previously published philosophical writing. Fictional pieces are ordinarily excluded, as are other works appropriate to different volumes in this edition. However, "Letter from the Recording Angel," "The Five Boons of Life," and "Letters from the Earth," although they are in a strict sense fictional, have been judged more relevant to the present volume that to the volumes of short fiction. "Things a Scotsman Wants to Know," previously unpublished, is included by agreement with the editor of (...) The Mark Twain Papers, as being especially relevant to themes of this volume. Other unpublished items appear as supplements because of their close relation to What Is Man?, Christian Science, and " 'The Turning Point of My Life.' " The two works that break off with unfinished sentences, "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice" and the introductory section of "Letters from the Earth," were abandoned by the author or else their endings have been lost. The order of works in this volume is according to date of publication or, for those unpublished during the author's lifetime, date of composition. For works published during his lifetime, dates of first publication appear in roman type below titles; for works first published after his death, date are in italics and indicate time of composition. (shrink)

Violence in the name of God is a complex phenomenon and oversimplification further jeopardizes peace because it obscures many of the causal factors. This paper categorizes three hundred scholarly claimed causes of religious violence and then offers thirteen guidelines for navigating the complicated relationship between religion and violence. Understanding this complexity is an important step towards diagnosing the problem and moving towards reconciliation.

Kant’s enigmatic term, “Gesinnung”, baffles many readers of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Detailed analysis of Kant’s theory of Gesinnung, covering all 169 occurrences of cognate words in Religion, clarifies its role in his theories of both general moral decision-making and specifically religious conversion. Whereas the convention of translating “Gesinnung” as “disposition” reinforces a tendency to interpret key Kantian theories metaphysically, and Pluhar’s translation as “attitude” has psychological connotations, this study demonstrates that Kantian Gesinnung is volitional, referring (...) to a person’s principle-based choice to live a certain way. Interpreted as principled “conviction”, Kantian Gesinnung is a religiously-manifested, moral form of Überzeugung (“convincing”). (shrink)

What Is Man? is Mark Twain's skeptical assessment of free will, and determinism, religious belief, and the nature of humanity. He put off publishing it for 25 years, and then released it anonymously in a limited edition of 250 copies. The book takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic, who debate such issues as whether man is a machine or a free actor, whether personal merit is meaningless given how (...) our environment shapes who we are, and whether man has any impulse other than pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. As readers "we listen attentively, leaning forward in our chairs," Charles Johnson writes in his introduction, weighing on our own such statements as the Old Man's claim that "No man ever originates anything.... Men observe and combine, that is all. So does a rat." Linda Wagner-Martin, in the afterword, sees the ideas expressed in this volume as "a thread that runs through even the lightest of Mark Twain's fiction, the calmest of his memoirs; and as the questioning hook that may provide a rationale for his becoming a writer in the first place.". (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis chapter looks briefly at the religious roots of the notion of ‘conscience’ in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, before examining the rise in the early-modern period of a ‘naturalizing’ approach that tries to explain our moral capacities in purely empirical terms, by reference to our natural inclinations and drives. The problem with this approach, highlighted by Joseph Butler, is that it fails to account for the authority or ‘normativity’ of the deliverances of conscience. An examination of the naturalistic approaches of (...) J.S. Mill, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud shows that none of them manages to escape the difficulty. It is suggested in conclusion that only a traditional theistic framework may be adequate for doing justice to the role of conscience in our lives. (shrink)

Kants theories of both general moral decision-making and specifically religious conversion. It is argued that Kantian Gesinnung is volitional, referring to a personconvictionberzeugung (). This is confirmed by a detailed analysis of the 169 occurrences of Gesinnung and cognate words in Religion. It contrasts with what is suggested by translating Gesinnung as, which reinforces a tendency to interpret the notion more metaphysically, and also with Pluharattitude’, which has too strongly psychological connotations.

In this paper, we aim to complement and extend Cécile Laborde’s argument against the Swiss minaret ban, which emphasizes the exclusion of Muslim citizens from equal national belonging. We argue that if we take seriously the normativity that is embedded in the Swiss direct democratic context (Carens 2004), especially in its ability to determine the substance of national belonging, then the symbolic exclusion of Muslims from political belonging is more relevant than the former with regard to democratic justice. Section 1 (...) defines basic notions and presents some arguments that were circulated in Swiss public political debate during the referendum campaign. Section 2 will present extant arguments in normative political philosophy about the ban. Section 3 expands our argument, which can be summarized as follows: the double absence of recognition of Muslims as (i) equal autonomous subjects and (ii) as political agents calls into question the legitimacy of the direct democratic process that led to the ban, making it unjust by the standards implicit within democratic practices in Switzerland. (shrink)

In conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description has been a recurrent topic of commentary in a wide array of literature -- including religious doctrine, meditation guides, and contextual accounts written by historians and social scientists. Yet, to date, this question has not significantly informed neuroscientific studies on the effects of meditation on brain and behaviour, in large part -- but not wholly -- because of the disregard for first-person accounts of experience (...) that still characterizes neuroscience in general. By juxtaposing perspectives from non-neuroscientific accounts on the tensions and questions raised by what is and is not expressed or expressible in words, this article paves the way for a new set of possibilities in experimental contemplative neuroscience. (shrink)

I want to put forward a certain view of the logical foundation of religious belief. It is, in a sentence, the view that religious belief is constituted by the concept of god. This view will be discussed under three headings. First, I shall explain as clearly as I can what I mean by it. Secondly, I shall indicate what seem to me to be interesting parallels, both with regard to universes of discourse in general and to (...) religious belief in particular, between my idea of a constitutive concept and Wittgenstein's ideas of a fundamental proposition and a religious ‘picture’. Thirdly, I shall try to substantiate the view I take of the logical foundation of religious belief by rebutting three conceivable objections to it: namely, that it rests on an illegitimate craving for generality, that it is at variance with common usage, and that it consigns religious belief to an intellectual ghetto. (shrink)

"Have the courage to use your own understanding! - that is the motto of enlightenment." - Immanuel Kant The Enlightenment is one of the most important and contested periods in the history of philosophy. The problems it addressed, such as the proper extent of individual freedom and the challenging of tradition, resonate as much today as when they were first debated. Of all philosophers, it is arguably Kant who took such questions most seriously, addressing them above all in his celebrated (...) short essay, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? In this engaging and lucid book, Samuel Fleischacker first explains and assesses Kant’s philosophy of Enlightenment. He then considers critics of Kant’s views - from Burke and Hegel to Horkheimer and Adorno - and figures he regards as having extended Kant’s notion of enlightenment, such as Feuerbach, Marx, Habermas, Foucault, and Rawls. Throughout, he demonstrates how Kant holds two distinct theories of enlightenment. On the one hand, Kant proposes a ‘minimal’ view, where to be enlightened is simply to engage in critical public discussion, allowing diversity of opinion to flourish. On the other, he argues that Kant elsewhere calls for a ‘maximal’ view of enlightenment, where, for example, an enlightened person cannot believe in a traditional religion. With great skill Fleischacker shows how these two views are taken in a multitude of directions by both critics and advocates of Kant’s philosophy. Arguing that Kant’s minimal enlightenment is a precondition for a healthy proliferation of cultures, religious faiths and political movements, What is Enlightenment? is a fascinating introduction to a key aspect of Kant’s thought and a compelling analysis of philosophical thinking about the Enlightenment. Including helpful chapter summaries and guides to further reading, it is ideal for anyone studying Kant or the philosophy of the Enlightenment, as well as those in related disciplines such as politics, history and religious studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Deviated Transcendency? Woolf's The Waves as a Textbook CaseSimon De Keukelaere (bio)The Waves, more than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, conveys the complexities of human experience.—Kate FlintHumankind—according to mimetic theory—is not (as Marx thought) homo economicus but rather homo religiosus. Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Girard's first essay (1961), evocatively opens with a saying by Max Scheler: "L'homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole" (...) (Man has either a God or an idol). If we may believe Girard, the Enlightenment profoundly misunderstood human beings because it naively assumed that doing away with "ancient superstitions" would fully liberate them: "denial of God does not eliminate transcendency but diverts it from the au-delà to the endeçà " (Girard 1965, 59).What has all this to do with Virginia Woolf's secular art? René Girard's "transcendance déviée," the diverted or deviated transcendency––which we may also want to term idolatry––is beautifully and transparently depicted in one of Woolf's most enigmatic and experimental novels. In The Waves, the portrayal of human desire as mimetic, imitated, is so crystal clear that––once noticed—it can hardly be overlooked any longer. Perhaps even more interesting for mimetic theory is the fact that Woolf (just as Proust did before her) brings into play the language of the sacred when rendering the mimetic nature of human longing. Neither of these two aspects of The Waves (the obsessively mimetic nature of desire and the use of the religious metaphor) have been fully unraveled by Woolf's critics.The purpose of this article is to make obvious the value of Virginia Woolf's (poetic) language for mimetic scholars and to show how deviated transcendency can be made visible and (above all) intelligible through great secular literature. The study of literature is vital to the humanities, not for some frivolous, outdated reasons, but because great literature can, sometimes [End Page 195] more effectively than many erudite studies, convey the complexities of human experience.It would no doubt be unjustifiable to foist Girard's mimetic thesis on Woolf's novel without clear support from the text, but I believe The Waves provides such backing. The outline of the present article is as follows. I first argue that the characters in Woolf's novel really are interdividuals rather than individuals, since mimetic desire plays an important role in them. I subsequently focus on a typically metaphysical illusion that goes along with mimetic desire, that is, the apparent self-sufficiency or divine autonomy of the Other. Then I show how the religious metaphor is consistently linked with the first-mentioned issue and that a form of distorted mysticism is to be recognized throughout the novel. Finally I examine how in The Waves deviated transcendency is depicted as a road toward Death in exactly the same way as Girard does in his Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (1961).The Interdividual and Her Mimetic DesireMimetic theory is deeply involved with the problem of selfhood, the paradoxical nature of subjectivity. According to René Girard we are not individuals but interdividuals. The ambiguous nature of the Self is a recurrent theme in Woolf's novels too, and especially in The Waves, it seems. As Lisa Marie Lucenti remarks: "Many critics seem to agree that subjectivity, for Woolf, is no simple matter, but they disagree on the significance, expression and forms of its intricacies. The most productive theories for reading Woolf are those which allow for a large measure of variation and ambiguity both between and within individual subjects" (1998, 34). The problematic nature of the Self challenges the critic, since the very concept of character is turned into a conundrum, rather than a useful instrument with which to analyze the novel. To speak of separated characters, of individuals (in-divisus) with regard to The Waves is particularly difficult. So, for example, at the end of the novel Bernard (one of the six "voices" or "characters" whose lives are recounted) states: "I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs... (shrink)