Cet article expose une analyse sémique d’un ensemble de mots, diffusé par le biais du discours religieux, censé présenter une définition des « non-musulmans ». Il s’agit, essentiellement, de montrer en quoi des mots (polythéiste, idolâtre, mécréant, athée, protégé, Nazaréens, chrétiens, Juifs, égaré), figurant dans le discours d’un prédicateur musulman, façonnent, d’une manière systémique, des images, des imaginaires, et peuvent potentiellement véhiculer une représentation altérée de l’Autre. Ces occurrences, généralement spécifiques à un balisage exégétique ou canonique, débordent de leurs contextes (...) et s’utilisent comme concepts génériques dans la prédication contemporaine. En circulation sur le Web et employés hors de leur contexte historique, ces discours sur l’Altérité, révèlent l’ambiguïté qu’engendre une assimilation d’un ensemble de mots, sémantiquement différents, sous l’hyperonyme de « non-musulmans ». (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to articulate the possibility of semantic non-doxastic agnostic religious faith. Robin Le Poidevin, who introduced the idea of semantic religious agnosticism, defines it as being agnostic about which parts of religion to treat in realist terms and which parts to treat in fictionalist terms. I take Le Poidevin’s view and argue that it is consistent with a non-doxastic attitude toward the object of faith such as acceptance. I then explore the similarities and (...) differences between my account and a prominent version of non-doxastic faith found in the work of Daniel Howard-Snyder. One advantage of my theory of faith is that it allows a person to be even more sceptical about religion than other versions of agnosticism while simultaneously avoiding some of the problems frequently associated with religious fictionalism. (shrink)

This paper introduces a distinction between three different kinds of religious arguments. On the basis of a deliberative model of democracy, it is argued that autonomy and identity arguments should be acceptable in public debate, whereas authority arguments should be rejected. This deliberative approach is clarified by comparing it with the exclusionist position of John Rawls on the one hand and the inclusionist position of Nicholas Wolterstorff on the other. The paper concludes with some general remarks about the relation (...) between reason and religion that explain the sense in which a postsecular public sphere also remains a secular one. (shrink)

This research is aimed at explaining and analyzing the ontological status of semantical objects of religious language. This ontological status concern how every term in religious language refers to an object and how we interpret those terms, whether it represents the object itself or merely its sensual or constructive properties. This finding lies in the disputation between religious realism and non-realism. The results of this research are (1) every believer is exactly a realist because he or she (...) has the ontological commitment to the object of the utterance, but (2) God exists independently from human thought and consciousness, (3) it is possible to put God as the object of intentional and semantic but only represents sensible qualities of the real object, and (4) the meaning of religious language depends on believer's ontological commitment on God's existence. (shrink)

The widespread opinion among conceptual historians is that political concepts are always contested in their actual usage. Religious concepts in modernity are also not only contested; they are constructed on an ontological contradiction. They imply that the object to which they refer exists, and at the same time that it does not. I demonstrate this idea using four religious concepts: _religion, God,_ the _beyond,_ and _spirit._ I conclude with discussion on the reality status of religious concepts in (...) modern historiography and religious studies. (shrink)

Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spiritual”, “religious”, and “spiritual” persons regarding semantic attributes attached to the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in each research context. (...) Results show that ‘spirituality’ is used as a broader concept than ‘religion’. Regarding religion, semantics attributed by self-identified religious persons differ significantly from those of the spiritual persons. The ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’ groups agree on semantics attributed to spirituality but differ from the ‘neither spiritual nor religious’ group. Qualifications of differences and agreements become visible from the comparison between the United States and Germany. It is argued for the semantically sensitive study of culturally situated ‘spiritualities’. (shrink)

Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spiritual”, “religious”, and “spiritual” persons regarding semantic attributes attached to the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in each research context. (...) Results show that ‘spirituality’ is used as a broader concept than ‘religion’. Regarding religion, semantics attributed by self-identified religious persons differ significantly from those of the spiritual persons. The ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’ groups agree on semantics attributed to spirituality but differ from the ‘neither spiritual nor religious’ group. Qualifications of differences and agreements become visible from the comparison between the United States and Germany. It is argued for the semantically sensitive study of culturally situated ‘spiritualities’. (shrink)

The methodology implicit in empirically grounded social scientific studies of religion naturally allies with forms of semantic holism. However, a well known argument which questions whether holism in general is consistent with the fact that languages are learnable can be extended into an epistemological one which questions whether holism is consistent with an empirical methodology. In other words, there is question whether holism, in fact, makes social science possible. I diagnose the assumptions on which that objection rests, pointing out that (...) they are not necessary for semantic holism per se. I argue that a form of semantic holism along the lines advocated by W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson can avoid the objection. Moreover, when seen in this light, it has the resources to withstand an even deeper methodological problem. In so doing, though, several important but overlooked implications for the study of religion emerge. (shrink)

In the present paper, I investigate the ways in which the grammar of God-talk in David B. Burrell’s philosophical theology comes to meet Muhammad Husiyn-i Tabatabai’s account of divine names, which has been developed in his theory of religious language. I begin the first part of the paper by introducing Tabatabai’s innovative articulation of the concept of Mental Construct and its relevance to his account of language and meaning. I, then, clarify how he proceeds to elucidate his conception of (...) religious language in terms of what he calls ‘focal meaning’, i.e. his idea of a true sense underlying the application of a word. In the second part of the article, Burrell’s methodology of God-talk is introduced and briefly discussed, before proceeding with interlocutory explanations as well as an examination of Tabatabai’s semantics of divine names. On the basis of Burrellian reading of via analogia, I propose a novel interpretation of the principle of focal meaning. This interpretation is particularly concerned with the most appropriate manner in which we can comprehend the literality of religious language. I conclude by explaining the way in which Burrell’s analysis is useful and elucidating for a contemporary interpretation of Tabatabai’s work. (shrink)

In The Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur'án Toshihiko Izutsu analyses the guiding spirit of the Islamic moral code, the basic ethical relationship of man to God. Izutsu asserts that, according to the Qur'anic conception, God is of an ethical nature and acts upon man in an ethical way. The resulting implications for man are enormous, requiring devotion not merely to God but to living one's life ethically.Izutsu shows that for the Qur'an our ethical response to God's actions is religion (...) itself; it is at the same time both ethics and religion. Izutsu explores these themes by employing ethnolinguistics, a theory of the interrelations between linguistic cultural patterns, to analyse the semantic structure of major concepts in the Quar'an. Islam, which arose in the seventh century, represents one of the most sweeping religious reforms ever to appear in the East.The Quar'an shows in vividly concrete terms how time-honoured tribal norms came into bloody conflict with new ideals of life, and finally yielded to the rising power. This transitional epoch is of particular importance in the whole of Islamic thought, a time during which the key terms of a traditionally fixed system of values were transformed in their connotative structure, modified in their combinations, and finally integrated into an entirely different system.Originally published in 1959 as The Structure of the Ethical Terms in the Koran and revised under the current title in 1966 this 2002 reprint makes this classic work of Islamic studies once again available. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, (...) we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities. (shrink)

This article argues that — despite the value of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders in a contingent and relative sense — there is no fundamental insider—outsider problem. We distinguish weak and strong versions of 'insiderism' (privileged versus monopolistic access to knowledge) and then sociological and religious versions of the latter. After reviewing critiques of the sociological version, we offer a holistic semantic critique of the religious version (i.e. the view that religious experience and/or language offers sui generis (...) access to knowledge). We argue that all evidence for mental states is overt, public, and observable, and, hence, that there can be no significant difference in the access to knowledge of insiders and outsiders. (shrink)

Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordingly, I will be concerned with (...) developing my empirical understanding of religious beliefs, and will show the consequences of such proposal on how to answer the problem of religious diversity. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a provisional analysis of the philosophical semantics of "wisdom" in the thought of the New Confucian thinker Tang Junyi. I begin by providing some pointers concerning the concept of wisdom in general and situating the discourse on wisdom in comparative philosophy in the context of the later Foucault's and Pierre Hadot's historical investigations into ancient Graeco-Roman philosophy as a mode of spiritual self-cultivation and self-transformation. In the remainder of the paper, I try to describe (...) and think through what Foucault identifies as a "Cartesian moment," in which self-knowledge becomes the ultimate precondition for the ethico-spiritual project of "caring for the self," in Tang's approach of wisdom. In the course of my argument, I outline the complex relation between his vision of a renewed Confucian mode of religious practice on the one hand and his philosophical presuppositions concerning the transcendental status of subjectivity and the reflexivity of consciousness on the other. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to reveal the role of religious, political and cultural factors on the way of understanding the concept of Ahl al-ḥaqq, one of the most important theopolitical concepts of Islamic thought, and to identify the projections of the semantic traansformatinon that concept of Ahl al-ḥaqq has experienced. In the comparative study with the group of "Ahl al-Shirk", "Ahl al-Kitāb", "Ahl al-Bid'at" and "Ahl al-Hawā", it has been determined that the concept of Ahl al-Haq has (...) a multi-layered spectrum of meaning. A number of critical periods can be mentioned in the formation of this multi-layered meaning structure. The first of these periods is the founding period in which a conception is constructed through the description of the superstitious actions of the "Ahl al-Shirk" and "Ahl al-Kitâb" groups in belief and practice, even though the term "Ahl al-haqq" is not mentioned in the Qur’ān. In this context, it can be said that all Muslims who confess and recite the shahada or the word tawhid with the intention of illa'l-haqq in faith and deeds are included in the category of Ahl al-haqq. After the first semantic period in which the opposition between Islam and un-Islam was decisive, the socio-political issues that emerged among Muslims moved the debate on who could be included in the scope of Ahl al-haqq to the intra-Islamic plane. In the second semantic period, in which every sect considered itself to be right, the scope of Ahl al-Haq was mostly described through the nass-centered references of the Salafiyya and the superstitious practices in belief and practice of Muslims included in the Ahl al-Bid'at category. The third semantic period was shaped relatively by the encounter with philosophical traditions. This is the period in which theologians defending the Islamic faith tried to keep dynamic the outward/objective epistemological aspect of the concept. In the fourth semantic period, which coincided with post-modernism, Ahl al-Haq returned to the socio-political meaning of the opposition between Islam and un-Islam in the founding period as an anti-imperial attitude against colonization activities. As a result, considering all these definitions, it is concluded at the present time that, it would be more accurate that the concept of Ahl al-Haq is better defined to include all Muslims who have accepted the principles of Islamic belief and declared their adherence to the Qur’ān and Sunna. (shrink)

George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, then proceeds to develop (...) an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a guide. (shrink)

It has been shown that counterintuitive ideas from mythological and religious texts are more acceptable than other world knowledge violations. In the present experiment we explored whether this relates to the way they are interpreted. Participants were presented with verification questions that referred to either the literal or a metaphorical meaning of the sentence previously read, in a block-wise design. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results converged. At variance to the literal interpretation of the sentences, the induced metaphorical interpretation specifically (...) facilitated the integration of religious counterintuitions, whereas the semantic processing of non-religious counterintuitions was not affected by the interpretation mode. We suggest that religious ideas tend to operate like other instances of figurative language, such as metaphors, facilitating their acceptability despite their counterintuitive nature. (shrink)

The article considers Jürgen Habermas's views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas's shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though (...) translated into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to, it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to, it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a preliminary multidisciplinary research of the specificities of youth’s response to various descriptors. Using the semiotic, in-depth psychological, theological and mathematical analysis of the collected associative chains, the author compares the responses of youth representatives to religious and ethical terms with colloquial lexemes, as well as determines sensitivity to these terms and proclivity for their logical and sensory-emotional perception. Particularly, method of semantic multiplication allows identifying strong and weak descriptors of semiosis under consideration. (...) The author determines the trends that outline a number of structural and psychodynamic characteristics of psychic reality of modern Russian youth. The following conclusions were made in the course of this research: 1. Sensitivity (and corresponding awareness) to religious descriptors was demonstrated by less than half of the respondents, and a fifth of the entire sample of terms appeared to be unfamiliar to the respondents; 2. The analysis of ethical associative chains at the level of interpretation, indicated the existence of such a phenomenon as “indeterminate religiosity”, which implies a certain spiritual pursuit, which at the moment does not comply with the familiar to a respondent religions traditions; 3. The acquired data, on the one hand, correspond to the classic “Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs”, while on the other hand, spiritual pursuit of respondents and simultaneously scarce character of “existential” associations may testify in favor of the dominance of “ethical-spiritual” paradigm in psychic reality of respondents (which also complies with the Maslow’s research of later period in the area of “existential needs” and “peak experiences”; 4. All of the aforementioned means that the key to interaction with modern youth (including didactical and educational) is the paradigm of ethical values, which can also be connected with a latent spiritual pursuit. (shrink)

"First published 1957 " Campion Collection.

The efforts to prove God's existence in the history of thought have been one of the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology, and even the most important one. The evidences put furword to prove the existence of God constitute the center of philosophy of religion’s problems not only philosophy of religion, but also the disciplines such as theology-kalam and Islamic philosophy are also seriously concerned. When we look at the history of philosophy, it is clear that almost all philosophers are (...) interested in the evidence in favour of and against the existence of God. Especially in recent times, religious experience has often been regarded as evidence of the existence of God. Studies in the field of religious and mystical experience have put forward many arguments concerning the use of religious experience as evidence. However, this study has been limited to experience of sense and pure consciousness claims rather than examining all of these arguments. In this study firstly, the analogy between experience of sense and religious experience will be deal with, and then claims that conciousness can be emptied by a number of methods which are defended by mystics. In addition, it will be tried to defend the opinion that the mystical experiences which are the common point of the two approaches are valid. The main emphasis of the article will be that these arguments can be used as evidence for the existence of God.Summary: Religious experience - which has not been considered as one of the classical evidences regarding the existence of God before being popular by recent studies – is started to be called one of the arguments. The most important reason for not arguing religious experience among the evidences of God’s existence is that it is a personal experience and therefore contains subjective perspectives. However, many researchers, who refuse to accept the criticism raised against religious experience with restricting to subjectivity, emphasized the importance of religious experience by highlighting the objective aspects of such experiences. This emphasis was not only on its significance, but also on the fact that it had a cognitive feature and thus it could provide evidence for the existence of God. The argument of religious experience is generally defined as an effort for demonstrating to existence of God with reference to several feelings such as spiritual experiences of human in face of creator and sacred Being, encounter with God, uniting, and annihilating selfness in Him. The emergence of such efforts, especially after the XVIIIth century, indicates that the history of the evidence does not go back much earlier. However, even if notas evidence, it is possible to extend the traces of religious and mystical experience to the history of religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Considering a great amount of the previous literature focused on religious experience in the West, It is easily seen that such research is still new. The main purpose in addressing such a controversial issue is to make the argument on the religious experience more current and to show whether the religious experience would be able to use as evidence for the existence of God.First title of this study comprises many different claims such as Walter T. Stace’s The Argument from Unanimity Richard Swinburne’s The Principle of Credulity, William P. Alston’s Perceiving God, John Hick’s Experience-as. However, instead of briefly giving out very different claims, the study chooses to focus on two arguments which are less discussed and can be given in more detail. The first is the argument based on the analogy between the religious experience and the sense experience. The fundamental point of this argument is sense experience. With reference to the similarities between the sense experience and the religious experience, it can be argued that religious experience is also cognitive and may function as an evidence for the existence of God. In other words, being perceptual and noetic, namely cognitive, of sense experience is addressed as a similar side of religious experience. Whether it is imaginary or real, eventually, it is necessary for an experience to have an object and being experience of something. Therefore, the religious experience includes the perception of a Transcendent Being that is beyond and in excess of the individual who experiences. Perception of the sense experience will definitely be different from the perception of religious experience. Researchers who think that the five sense organs do not run the perception of Sacred Beings, identified broader and various meanings for the perception. Thereby, in this approach, where the semantic field of perception is expanded, it was contended that human beings were able to perceive the transcendent, eternal, and unlimited God, and this can be explained in the epistemological sense. In order to use religious experiences as an evidence for the existence of God, it is necessary to determine whether such experiences are caused by God rather than something else. This raises the issue of the validity of religious experience. The researchers in this area have propounded various criteria to identify whether religious experience is existed or not. Experiences, which do not meet the criteria, are not considered existed even if they claim to be religious experience.The second is the argument that discusses whether it is possible to suggest an evidence for the existence of God by utilizing pure consciousness events. In general, this argument claims that the consciousness gets clear, and thus, mystic or Sufi experiences the Divine One with pure consciousness by discharging consciousness from all sensual contents and removing it from secular desire and wishes. The argument, which claims the experience of Divine One is direct, therefore uninterpretable, and experienced by pure consciousness, believes clearing the consciousness of mystics from sensual qualities such as seeing, hearing, and tasting. It is stated that it is possible for mystics to empty their sensory images and get rid of them, and thus, their desires and wishes could be lost. Especially, the thinkers who are connected with the philosophy of perennialism and defend this approach, thought that people, who have distinct religion, culture, and beliefs in different parts of the world and in various time periods, had the same experience and considered such experiences were universal by suggesting that this similarity could be called as common essence.Even though the claim which offers that the events of pure consciousness are the same everywhere have been criticized in many respects, the advocates of this approach have argued that the experience has the common essence, but the interpretation is different. This relationship, which was tried to be established between experience and commentary, caused a lot of work for both the thinkers who put forward the claims of pure consciousness and the researchers who opposed it. However, examining the relationship between experience and interpretation requires serious studies in socio-psychological, cultural and religious fields. Therefore, in order not to exceed the limits of the article, the relationship between experience and interpretation is briefly mentioned.While discussing two arguments, the main claims of the arguments were addressed, and the criticisms directed to this argument were not discussed as much as possible. However, some fundamental criticisms have been mentioned shortly for a better understanding of the discussion. Since such western-oriented claims mostly were deployed in a western context, the study excluded the comparison of the claims across different cultures. (shrink)

The emotion of admiration and the semantic theory of natural kinds and direct reference are foundational for Linda Zagzebski's exemplarist moral theory and divine motivation theory. Many have examined difficulties that arise from the central role of admiration, while others have engaged her account of the incarnation. Little attention has been given to her semantic theory or philosophy of language. This essay demonstrates the difficulties and problems that arise from this theory, problems that could be avoided with a sociopractical account (...) of language and exemplarity. One set of problems pertain to the “principle of the division of linguistic labor.” Related problems come to light in Zagzebski's attempt to account for radical changes in perceptions of exemplars through social, political, and ethical revolutions. In the end, her semantic theory creates the very epistemological uncertainties that it is meant to forestall. It also fails to account for radical disagreements about exemplars and the role moral exemplars play in sociopolitical and ethical revolutions. (shrink)

Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordingly, I will be concerned with (...) developing my empirical understanding of religious beliefs, and will show the consequences of such proposal on how to answer the problem of religious diversity. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s writings on religious and magical beliefs, especially the “Lectures on Religious Belief” and “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” are taken to imply semantic incommensurability and inaccessibility by the Wittgensteinian Fideism and, in part, the expressivist interpretation. According to these interpretations, religious and non-religious discourses are self-contained, closed, and not intertranslatable. Wittgenstein is taken to deny mutual understanding between believers and non-believers with respect to religious and magical discourse. I argue against such interpretations and support (...) readings by Kusch, Schroeder, and Tripodi that are optimistic of the possibility of mutual understanding. Nevertheless, there is a danger of scepticism for such optimistic readings when they refer to a special attitude that is needed to understand religious belief and speech. I offer a reply to this problem and suggest to see Wittgenstein’s stance on understanding religious discourse in a greater proximity to his general views about language in his later writings. Then, however, any fideist view of the religious form of life as self-contained and isolated from the non-religious has to be repudiated. (shrink)

Interactionism holds that explanatory and interpretive projects are mutually enriching. If so, then the evolutionary and cognitive science of religions’ explanatory theories should aid interpretive projects concerning religious meaning. Although interpretive accounts typically focus on the local and the particular, interpreters over the past century have construed Freud and Marx as offering general interpretive theories. So, precedent for general interpretive theorizing exists. 4E cognitive science, which champions how cognition is embedded in natural and cultural settings, extended into external structures, (...) enacted via motor routines, and embodied via representations rooted in human bodily form, has encouraged interpretive researchers. Theories of embodied cognition especially have embraced a sweeping view of meaning that attends to the emotions’ role and to their evolutionary origins. That inspires a 6E cognitive science that attends to the emotional and evolved dimensions of cognition too and opens up the possibility of general interpretive theories of broadly Darwinian character. Evolved cognitive systems qualify as maturationally natural cognition, which exhibits a distinctive constellation of features. The by-product theory holds that religious representations’ engagement of maturationally natural cognition fosters religions’ success. Representations with some minimal violation of intuitive expectations concerning some ontological category grab attention, stick in memory, and preserve the many automatic inferences accompanying the category. The empirical evidence for this and other elaborations of the by-product view suggests that it discloses dynamics of evolved cognition and associated emotions that tend to guide the pursuit of religious meanings systematically toward well-worn grooves in the semantic landscape. (shrink)

Religion can bring about social harmony as well as social conflict. Religious law is a key element in both cases. Scholars can explain how religious law changes according to historical and socio-cultural context. They can also help reengineering prescriptions that cause social conflict. Changes in religious law can be explained according to a chronological rhetoric (certain agents cause certain changes) or according to a logical rhetoric (a change acquires its meaning in opposition to other possible changes). The (...) two approaches are complementary, but the semiotics of religious law predominantly adopts the second one. In both cases, the explanation of how a religious law changes and the reengineering of a religious prescription are related activities. The semiotics of religious law is particularly equipped to propose alternatives for conflicting prescriptions. However, there is a difference between showing that some alternatives exist and advocating which alternatives should be taken. Whilst the latter position is similar to that of semiotic guerrilla warfare, the former rather configures the semiotics of religious law as a therapy. Semiotic guerrilla warfare stresses the need to demystify the discourse of power that subjugates individuals or groups to a certain religious law. Semiotic therapy does not focus on demystification but on reconciliation. The task of the semiotic therapy of religious law is to show that situations of social conflict generated by certain prescriptions can be decreased or eliminated by adopting alternative paths of meaning. The semiotic therapist of religious law can be effective in showing these alternatives only if some pragmatic and semantic preconditions are met: a correct involvement with the sets of religious core values at stake and an articulated analysis of the paths of meaning to which these values give rise. (shrink)

This study considered representations of divine and human others in the self-understanding of monotheists from three religions. Self-understanding was conceptualized on the basis of semantic and episodic knowledge in narrative response data. Given the importance of social context in the formation of cognitive schemas, the project emphasized self-understanding in a comparative religious design. The sample included sixty nominated religious exemplars who responded to a structured interview. Schemas were subsequently mapped for Jews, Muslims, and Christians by comparison of self (...) and other representations in a computational model known as latent semantic analysis (LSA). Findings indicated that representation of the divine is far removed from parents in cognitive schemas for all participants. Unlike Jews and Christians, Muslims appear to represent human others on the basis of self-understanding which principally references the divine. When considered in a computational semantic space, exemplars generally represent the self in a manner corresponding with divine and peer figures. (shrink)

The growing cultural complexity in the face of new immigration waves influences the public understanding of religious diversity. The two central questions of this article are as follows: first, ‘how much religious difference and of what kind is compatible within Europe?’ and second, ‘to what extent can Muslim diversity be integrated into Europe?’. This article undertakes an investigation of these questions and explores the extent to which discourses on religious diversity imply boundary making and aim at limiting (...) the religious freedom of Muslims. Empirically, I scrutinize press coverage between 2009 and 2010, the years in which the minarets ban entered the sociopolitical arena of European public debate. The methodology adopts a social network analysis to uncover semantic macro-structures and elicit common discourses in the press of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. Subsequently, discourse analysis of relevant samples is applied to examine textual strategies used to legitimate inclusion or exclusion of religious difference. (shrink)

The majority of world religions have developed in the course of overcoming tribal and clan identity. The idea of "One God" carries the implication, overtly or not, of uniting mankind on basis of religious belief. The rise of world religions was associated with rise of huge empires and states where various ethnic groups coexisted, not only on the basis of force alone, but also on basis of common religious belief and value systems imposed by religious ideology. Governing (...) polyethnic territories, developments in economy and trade and consistent humanization of human spirit resulted in the development of common human values.Mankind started perceiving itself as a single species sharing a common world history. The concept of 'mankind' came to unite people irrespective of their race, religion and nationality. Objective of our study was cross-confessional investigation of value systems in religions spread in Russia and establishing to what extent they are spiritually acceptable to Russians. We used the semantic space technique for the analysis of religious mentalities. (shrink)

Accounts of religion, like almost all influential academic and intellectual exercises, as indeed much else, in the last two or three centuries, have generally been the work of Western scholars and intellectuals, often less familiar with, but sometimes simply disinclined to take seriously, non-Western religious traditions. Consequently most of these accounts have tended to be parochial, failing to apply to, say, Eastern religions, not to mention so-called ‘primitive’ religions; and have often given to what should only have been ‘local (...) squabbles’ the appearance of universal religious concern. As a result, even philosophers of religion have largely explicated what might be called the ‘prescriptive grammar’ of religion. With a view to rectifying the situation, I intend to outline what I hope will be a ‘ descriptive ’ account, i.e. one which will be true of at least the major living religions of the world, e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and their main schools or sects. Inevitably, such a general account will fail to incorporate the unique features of any one religion; but it should have the advantage of restoring the proper perspective in debates concerning religion and religious issues, including those relating to the semantic and/or logical features of religious belief and so-called ‘religious language’. (shrink)

Religion and violence are related in an ambivalent, paradoxical way, for the systems of religious knowledge tend to prohibit violence and to motivate it at the same time. This paper looks for the roots of that ambivalence and reveals particular mechanisms that generate violence within religious systems and their associated practices. It argues that violence in religious systems is present in at least three forms: It is inherent to communication with the “sacred,” it is generated by processes (...) of inclusion and exclusion, shaping religiously interpreted lifeworlds, and it is motivated or moderated by the respective semantics of religious narratives. The paper concludes that violence as a moment of hierophany is constitutive for the living experience in religious systems and cannot be eliminated entirely by moderating semantics. (shrink)

Weber’s concept of rationalization internally relies on an opposition that is borrowed from a religious semantics: the opposition between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Taking as point of departure the expression ‘the disenchantment of the world’ I argue that this expression, and the concept of rationalization, which is connected with it, have to be understood as elements of a categorical field of tension that is dominated precisely by the mentioned opposition. Referring to the sociology of religion, in which (...) Weber for the first time developed and deployed this opposition as an analytical tool, it appears that 1) the concept of rationalization in Weber is multivocal; 2) that the extraordinary and the ordinary relate to one another as do charisma and institution; and finally 3) that the description of the western rationalization process in terms of ‘disenchantment of the world’ by no means signifies that modern society is no longer characterized by the relationship between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Weber, for that matter, indeed attaches great importance to the extraordinary as a factor of revolutionary change, both in modern history and in modern politics. (shrink)

This body of work is motivated by an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, Darwin’s testimony in his autobiographical text about a supposed perceptual colour blindness before the aesthetic magnificence of natural landscapes, and, on the other hand, the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, where he claims to perceive the forms of nature as beautiful and wonderful. My aim is to delve into the essence of the Darwinian perception of beauty in the context of the Weberian (...) concept of “disenchantment of the world”, assumed as a possible conceptual axis that enables the unravelling of the core of this contrast of perceptions. In acknowledging the theory of evolution as one of the most prominent scientific theories likely to have contributed to disenchantment, a number of questions arise: Is disenchantment compatible with aesthetic experience and sensibility before natural beauty? Was it Darwin’s disenchanted conception of the world that led him to believe he was colour blind? To answer these questions, a computer-assisted semantic analysis of lexical frequency and variability, most especially focused on aesthetic-emotional and religious or spiritual adverbs and adjectives, has been undertaken across the six editions of The Origin. The semantic analysis demonstrates that, although disenchanted, Darwin’s descriptions of, mainly, the adaptational excellence of living beings, reflect an aesthetically enriched perception of nature. It is concluded that Darwin’s perceptual colour blindness, then, might be based on a confusion rooted in the equation of equality between aesthetic sensibility in nature and the perception of its beauty as part of the vestigia Dei. (shrink)

This paper aims to recover the ideas about semantics that are contained in Yāska’s _Nirukta_ (c. 6–3 century BCE), the seminal work of the Indian tradition of _nirvacana_ or etymology. It argues that, within the framework of his etymological project, Yāska developed consistent and sophisticated ideas relating to semantics—what I call his theory of meaning. It shows that this theory assumes the form of explicit and implicit reflections pertaining to the relation between three categories: denoting names (_nāman_/_nāmadheya_), denoted (...) objects (_sattva_/_artha_), and name-giving action expressed by verbal roots (_ākhyāta_). A typology of Yāska’s etymologies for what they reveal about semantics will be proposed and investigated. In doing so, attention will be paid to how Yāska’s ideas resemble and anticipate ideas concerning the difference between polysemy and homonymity, metaphoric transfer, and synecdoche. It is hoped that attending to Yāska’s thus-far largely overlooked ideas will help us better appreciate the _Nirukta_’s role in the history of early Indian engagements with semantics. (shrink)

There is no consensus among scholars of myth as to how the central concept of their field should be defined. What is a ‘myth’ and how does it differ from a ‘belief’? Moreover, scholars have argued for a homological relationship between myth and ritual. Semantically, the word ‘myth’ has a connotation of disbelief in ‘superstition’, and the word ‘belief’ should be substituted when talking about religious practices. Likewise, the word ‘ritual’ may be substituted with ‘ceremonial’, which has connotations that (...) are more positive. Earlier publications that associate ancestral veneration with the words ‘myth’ or ‘superstition’ display a judgemental view of the beliefs of other cultures. In this article, the author attempts, via recourse to the use of the word ‘myth’, to describe and interpret traditional and cultural belief systems among the Bapedi people of Limpopo Province in South Africa. It is argued that myth should not be reduced to ritual nor ritual to myth. Belief and ritual, in Bapedi religion and belief systems, complete and complement each other, thus allowing the harmonious unison of meta and paralinguistic elements in religiocultural discourse. The focus of this study is to explore and document these links within the context of the Bapedi culture. (shrink)

This volume represents the majority of papers delivered at the 1966 Workshop of Christian Philosophy and Religious Renewal held at the Catholic University of America. The Workshop's main task was to re-evaluate Christian philosophy in the light of contemporary phenomenological and analytic philosophy. Dietrich von Hildebrand's paper on the "Phenomenology of Values in a Christian Philosophy" urges a "rehabilitation" of ethics through an existential "value response." Ethical values are rescued from the "laboratory" of abstract study and returned to the (...) world where they belong. In "Analytic Philosophy and Language about God," W. Norris Clarke cites four basic challenges that analytic philosophy offers a philosophy of God: that theism has not unravelled the confusion concerning the use of "God" as naming or describing; that it is a "category mistake" to state "God is a necessary Being" since "necessary" is a term meaningful only in propositions and not about things; that according to the falsification theory of meaning there is no way to check the validity of statements about God, such as "God is providential and loving," since anything that happens would be providential and loving in a strange and hidden way; that there can be no meaningful predication of God since language would then refer to a realm that transcends experience. Father Clarke sees these challenges as forcing a re-evaluation of a philosophy of God and holds that only by using all the philosophical resources at hand, e.g., phenomenological, semantic, symbolic, metaphysical, will one be able to work out real positive meaning concerning God. Some other themes discussed are "Person," "Freedom," and "Love," written by Mother Mary Clark, L. B. Geiger, and Robert O. Johann respectively.—J. J. R. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo tiene por finalidad indagar sobre las representaciones sociales que se tejen en torno de la educación religiosa escolar (ERE). Para ello, se empleó una investigación cualitativa amparada en una perspectiva hermenéutica y un método narrativo desarrollado a través de redes semánticas naturales y análisis de contenido. El trabajo de campo se realizó con una población de estudiantes de dos instituciones educativas de carácter privado, en la ciudad de Popayán. El análisis permitió identificar los aportes de la ERE (...) a los sujetos abordados, la descripción de sinónimos con los cuales se asocia la ERE y algunas temáticas que se deberían abordar en esta área. Estos tránsitos permitieron analizar las variaciones y tendencias que posibilitan la inferencia de su articulación con la dimensión espiritual. Abstract: The purpose of this article is to investigate the social representations that are woven around school religious education (SRE). To do this, the researchers developed a qualitative research based on a hermeneutical perspective and a narrative method developed through natural semantic networks and content analysis. The fieldwork was carried out with a population of students from two private educational institutions in the city of Popayán, Colombia. The analysis made it possible to identify the contributions of the SRE to the subjects approached, the description of synonyms with which the SRE is associated, and some issues that should be addressed in this area. These transits allowed us to analyze the variations and tendencies that make possible the inference of its articulation with the spiritual dimension. (shrink)

General semantics reveals ambiguities in the Bible.

Group slurs are applied to a whole category of people. Whereas slurs like jerk, creep, and hag are generally directed at individuals because of the personal traits (behavior, personality, looks, etc.), group slurs, like spic, commie, and infidel, are applied across the board to members of a category. Even when directed at a particular individual, ethnic, religious, and political slurs are applied on the basis of group membership rather than anything about the person in particular. Before asking about the (...) meanings of such terms, let’s consider their uses and effects. In general they. (shrink)

In psycho-clinical research the notion of spirituality acquires a semantic plurality. This equivocal and ambiguous connotation that characterizes this term represents an obstacle to the epistemic and methodological validity of research designs, recognized as the threat to construct validity. In order to overcome this difficulty, we introduce, from Dietrich von Hildebrand's phenomenology, the notions of intentionality and transcendence insofar as these are capable of accounting for the specific element of the spiritual-religious phenomenon and discriminating it from the other phenomena (...) or variables that may be included under the notion of spirituality. This conceptual elucidation task allows evaluating the legitimacy of the variable selection process and establishing why they are or are not representatives of the phenomenon of spiritual-religious experience. (shrink)

The early Sino-Western contact was through the way in which religion and language interact to produce language contact. However, research on this contact is relatively limited to date, particularly in the realm of English language materials. In fact, there is a paucity of research on Western religions in English Language Teaching textbooks. By applying corpus linguistics as a tool and the Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework, this manuscript critically investigates the significant semantic domains in ten English language textbook (...) series that are officially approved and are widely used in Chinese universities. The findings suggest that various Western religious beliefs, which are the highly unusual topics in previous Chinese ELT textbooks, are represented in the textbook corpus. The results also show that when presenting the views and attitudes toward Western religious beliefs, these textbooks have adopted an eclectic approach to the material selection. Surprisingly, positive semantic prosody surrounding the concept of religion is evident and no consistent negative authorial stance toward religion is captured. Atheism has been assumed to be in the center of Chinese intellectual traditions and the essence of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly, the findings from this study provide a new understanding of Chinese foreign language textbooks in the new era, and its addition to the literature on the study of ELT textbooks, as well as its development worldwide. (shrink)

In this study, it is aimed to determine the perceptions of high school students about the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course and their teachers through metaphors. In the study, which was designed in a phenomenological (factual) design, one of the qualitative research designs, the participants were determined by the criterion sampling method, one of the purposive sampling methods. The data were collected from 262 students studying in 4 different high school institutions in the 2021-2022 academic year. The research (...) data were obtained by completing the sentences “Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge teacher…like/because…and Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge lesson…-similar/ because……like” in the form given to them. The metaphors obtained at this stage were categorized according to their semantic content, divided into sections, expressed numerically and tabulated, and interpreted in a way that the reader can understand. As a result of the research in which the students' perceptions of the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course were gathered under three themes as positive, neutral and negative, it was determined that the majority of the students produced positive metaphors for the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge Lesson and teacher. (shrink)

Publication date: 26 January 2017 Source: Author: Mihaela Mocanu The instrument of knowledge and communication of religious essence, the religious language is based upon the recognition of a world of sacredness, which is defined by reference to the religious dimension of the human being. From the semantic perspective, the religious language is rooted in a preexisting extra-linguistic referent, which eludes historic space-time categories, in an attempt to build a world of transcendental essence and establish a relationship (...) between man and the sacred. In this view, the word is invested with magical powers, playing the role of a mediator between the human being living in the world of the profane and the sacred world of the Divinity. Since the word embraces the essence of the named element with the power to shape reality, the religious man pays special attention to the verbal expression not only from the desire to adapt to reality, but especially out of the care not to cause adverse changes amidst it. We propose in this paper to review the main religious taboos specific to the religious language and the description of the pragmatic valences that the euphemistic expression manifests in the religious communication. (shrink)