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Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and remarkably complex form of human activity; this book opens with a discussion of the nature of liturgical activity and then explores ... More

Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and remarkably complex form of human activity; this book opens with a discussion of the nature of liturgical activity and then explores various dimensions of such activity. Over the past four or five decades there has been a remarkable surge of interest, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, in philosophy of religion. Most of what has been written by participants in this movement deals with one or another aspect of religious belief. Yet for most adherents of most religions, participation in the liturgies and rituals of their religion is at least as important as what they believe. One of the aims of this book is to call the attention of philosophers of religion to the importance of religious practice and to demonstrate how rich a topic this is for philosophical reflection. Insofar as philosophers have written about liturgy, they have focused almost exclusively on its formative and expressive functions. This book focuses instead on what liturgical agents do. What they do is basic; it is what they do that functions formatively or expressively.Less

Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II

Jean-Luc Nancy

This second volume in The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that ... More

This second volume in The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation—the salut!—that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens in the midst of the world. This book clarifies and builds upon not only dis-enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.Less

Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine

Andrei Buckareff and Yujin Nagasawa (eds)

The concept of God according to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism minimally includes the following theses: (i) There is one God; (ii) God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect ... More

The concept of God according to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism minimally includes the following theses: (i) There is one God; (ii) God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent; (iii) God is the creator ex nihilo of the universe and the sustainer of all that exists; and (iv) God is an immaterial substance that is ontologically distinct from the universe. Proponents of alternative concepts of God, such as pantheism, panentheism, religious anti-realism, developmental theism, and religious naturalism, exclude at least one of (i)–(iv). A number of prominent philosophers, theologians, and scientists have expressed sympathy with alternative concepts of the divine. However, voices raised in defense of these concepts tend not to be taken seriously in philosophy of religion. This book aims to shed light on alternative concepts of God and to thoroughly consider their merits and demerits.Less

Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds)

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new ... More

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much post-modern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The book rethinks the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. It further endeavors to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, the book engages and deploys the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism. The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.Less

Apparitions—Of Derrida's Other

Kas Saghafi

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive ... More

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive and responsible thinking about “the undeniable experience of the alterity of the other”, this book examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other, e.g. the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida's relation to a recently departed actress caught on video, to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be. For Derrida, the singularity of the other, always written in the lower case, includes not only the formal or logical sense of alterity, the otherness of the human other, but also the otherness of the nonliving, the no longer living, or the not yet alive. The book explores welcoming and hospitality, salutation and greeting, “approaching”, and mourning as constitutive facets of the relation to these others. Addressing Derrida's readings of Husserl, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, and Nancy, among other thinkers, and ranging across a number of disciplines, including art, literature, philosophy, and religion, this book explores the apparitions of the other by attending to the mode of appearing or coming on the scene, the phenomenality and visibility of the other. Analyzing some of Derrida's essays on the visual arts, the book also demonstrates that video and photography display an intimate relation to “spectrality”, as well as a structural relation to the absolute singularity of the other.Less

Aristotle's Physics Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum

Katerina Ierodiakonou, Paul Kalligas, and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds)

This volume of the ‘Symposium Aristotelicum’ constitutes a running commentary of the first book of Aristotle’s Physics, a central treatise of the Aristotelian corpus that aims at knowledge of the ... More

This volume of the ‘Symposium Aristotelicum’ constitutes a running commentary of the first book of Aristotle’s Physics, a central treatise of the Aristotelian corpus that aims at knowledge of the principles of physical change; it establishes that there are such principles and determines what they are and how many. After a general introduction, the ten chapters of the volume, written by distinguished scholars of ancient philosophy, comment on the entirety of the Aristotelian text and deal in detail with the philosophical issues raised in it. Aristotle is here in dialogue with the divergent doctrines of earlier philosophers, namely with the Eleatics’ monism, with Anaxagoras’ theory of mixture, and finally with the Platonist dyadism that posits the two principles of Form and the Great and Small. He employs the critical examination of his predecessors’ views in order to present and formulate his own theory of the principles of natural things, which are fundamental for the entire Aristotelian study of the natural world: form, privation and the substratum that underlies them. Moreover, Aristotle provides us with his own solution to the problem about coming to be and passing away, by distinguishing between coming to be in actuality and in potentiality. The exhaustive analysis of the Aristotelian doctrines as well as the critical discussion of the prevailing current views on their interpretation make this volume an obligatory reference work for Aristotle studies.Less

Augustine's Confessions: Philosophy in Autobiography

William E. Mann (ed.)

Augustine’s Confessions is a masterpiece of world literature. Written by Augustine at the height of his philosophical and rhetorical skills, the Confessions is at once autobiographical, ... More

Augustine’s Confessions is a masterpiece of world literature. Written by Augustine at the height of his philosophical and rhetorical skills, the Confessions is at once autobiographical, philosophical, theological, and psychological. The aim of the eight essays commissioned for the present volume is to provide an examination and discussion of some of the philosophical issues raised by Augustine. What constitutes the happy or blessed life and what is required to achieve it? What role can philosophical perplexity play in the search for truth? What mental discipline is required for conducting the search? How does Augustine depict the acquisition of truth as a vision of God? What problems arise in the attempt to understand minds, both our own and others’? What is the interplay between what reason tells us is right and what we will to do? What are the impediments to an individual’s moral progress? What impediments to that progress are created by the temptations to indulge in such fictions as dramas and dreams? What is the nature of eternity, and how does eternity differ from time? How should Scripture be interpreted, especially the account of creation of the material world in Genesis? Readers who know only a bit about Augustine may think of him simply as a powerful definer and defender of religious orthodoxy, a figure who ranks behind only Jesus and Paul in the development of a distinctively Christian world view. For such readers the intellectual honesty and psychological candour of the Confessions should come as a pleasant surprise.Less

Being, Freedom, and Method: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter van Inwagen

John A. Keller (ed.)

In The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson wrote that Peter van Inwagen’s work is among the “liveliest, exactest, and most creative…of the final third of the 20th Century.” This collection ... More

In The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson wrote that Peter van Inwagen’s work is among the “liveliest, exactest, and most creative…of the final third of the 20th Century.” This collection of original essays addresses some of the most important and interesting themes from van Inwagen’s work, with selected replies by van Inwagen himself. It is no accident that the themes of this volume are also some of the most cutting-edge and important topics in philosophy today. The volume contains rigorous, original, but readable essays, by some of the most prominent living philosophers, on free will, the structure of ordinary objects, time travel, the problem of evil, God and evolution, and the nature of philosophical success. As such, it will be appealing to readers with diverse interests, and will be essential reading for those working on free will, relational vs constituent ontologies, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of philosophy.Less

Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief

John Bishop

Can it be justifiable to commit oneself ‘by faith’ to a religious claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total available evidence? After critiquing both Wittgensteinian and Reformed ... More

Can it be justifiable to commit oneself ‘by faith’ to a religious claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total available evidence? After critiquing both Wittgensteinian and Reformed epistemologies of religious belief, this book defends a modest fideism that understands theistic commitment as involving ‘doxastic venture’ in the face of evidential ambiguity: practical commitment to propositions held to be true through ‘passional’ causes (causes other than the recognition of evidence of or for their truth). It is argued that the justifiability of religious faith-ventures is ultimately a moral issue — although such ventures can be morally justifiable only if they accord with the proper exercise of our rational epistemic capacities. The book canvasses issues concerning the ethics of belief and doxastic voluntarism. William James's ‘justification of faith’ in The Will to Believe is extended by requiring that justifiable faith-ventures should be morally acceptable both in motivation and content. The book conducts an extended debate between fideists and ‘hard line’ evidentialists, who maintain that religious faith-ventures are never justifiable. It concludes that, although neither fideists nor evidentialists can succeed in establishing their opponents' irrationality, fideism may nevertheless be morally preferable, as a less dogmatic, more self-accepting, even a more loving, position than its evidentialist rival.Less

Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Charles P. Bigger

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar ... More

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar opposite; both are “beyond being” and the metaphors hitherto thought to disclose the transcendent. They underlie Plato's distinction of a procreative gap between being and becoming. The chiasmus between the Good and chora makes possible their mutual participation in one another. This gap makes possible both phenomenological and cosmological interpretations of Plato. Metaphor is restricted to beings as they appear in this gap through the crossing of metaphor's terms, terms that dwell with, rather than subulate, one another. Hermeneutically, through its“is”we can see something being engendered or determined by that crossing. The book's larger goal is to align the primacy of the Good in Plato and Christian Neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.Less

Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Disagreement and Evolution

Michael Bergmann and Patrick Kain (eds)

This volume contains fourteen original Chapters by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions ... More

This volume contains fourteen original Chapters by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions are addressed: Can one reasonably maintain one’s moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society’s moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? This volume places challenges to moral belief side-by-side with challenges to religious belief, sets evolution-based challenges alongside disagreement-based challenges, and includes philosophical perspectives together with theological and social science perspectives, with the aim of cultivating insights and lines of inquiry that are easily missed within a single discipline or when these topics are treated in isolation.Less

Chaturvedi Badrinath: Unity of Life and Other Essays

Tulsi Badrinath (ed.)

This book brings together a series of short essays by Chaturvedi Badrinath on diverse topics related to Indian philosophy and thought. Drawing mainly from the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, and the ... More

This book brings together a series of short essays by Chaturvedi Badrinath on diverse topics related to Indian philosophy and thought. Drawing mainly from the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, and the Yoga-vasishtha, Badrinath explores the concept of dharma, central to any understanding of the Indian civilization. The book engages the ordinary reader, who is perhaps unacquainted with formal philosophy, but is in search of meaning in the midst of the pressures of modern life. The moral dilemmas faced by human beings today are not new. In a world increasingly filled with fear, violence, and terrorism, ordinary people seek ways in which to order their lives. An understanding of the foundations of human liberty, happiness, self and the other, self-interest, the basis of fear, and a movement towards freedom or moksha are essential to that quest. Badrinath had an entirely original approach to the six darsanas or world views. In the essays, he has rendered the most sophisticated ideas in language that is simple and accessible. His thoughts were crystallized over a life spent in deep reflection and engagement with Eastern and Western philosophies. In his writing, the most ancient philosophy is shown to have immediate relevance to modern times.Less

The Christian God

Richard Swinburne

This book is about what it is for there to be a God, and what reason there is to suppose that God to be the traditional Christian God. Part 1 (Chs.1 to 5) analyses the metaphysical categories needed ... More

This book is about what it is for there to be a God, and what reason there is to suppose that God to be the traditional Christian God. Part 1 (Chs.1 to 5) analyses the metaphysical categories needed for this purpose – substance, cause, time, and necessity. Part 2 (Ch. 6 to 10) begins by setting out some of the different ways in which the doctrine that there is a divine individual (an individual with the traditional divine properties) can be developed. There can be more than one divine individual so long as a first such individual is necessarily the cause of the existence of the others. Given the supreme moral goodness of cooperating with one individual in sharing everything with a third individual, it follows that if there is one divine individual, there will be three and only three such individuals; hence the necessity of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – that there is one God consisting of three divine persons. One of these persons may choose to become incarnate, i.e. human, and there are reasons why he would do so.Less

Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem

François Laruelle

This book targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and explores the radical potential of Christ, whose “crossing” disrupts their circular ... More

This book targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and explores the radical potential of Christ, whose “crossing” disrupts their circular discourse. It is built upon the idea of “nonphilosophy,” or “nonstandard philosophy.” This is a way of thinking that goes past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations among religion, science, politics, and art. The book describes a Christ who is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles or the Catholic Church. Instead He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. The book inserts quantum science into religion and recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so that equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, the book is a heretical experiment that ties religion tightly to the human experience and the lived world.Less

The Coherence of Theism

Richard Swinburne

Investigates whether the claim that there is a God can be spelt out in a coherent way. Part 1 analyses how we can show some claim to be coherent or incoherent. God is supposed to be a personal being, ... More

Investigates whether the claim that there is a God can be spelt out in a coherent way. Part 1 analyses how we can show some claim to be coherent or incoherent. God is supposed to be a personal being, omnipresent, perfectly free and creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, a source of moral obligation, and eternal. Part 2 analyses how these divine properties can be understood in a coherent and mutually consistent way. Part 3 considers divine necessity and claims that God's existence necessarily must be understood as this being the ultimate brute fact on which all else depends, but his having the divine properties necessarily must be understood as his having these properties being logically necessary for his existence. The final chapter argues that, if a God of the kind analysed in earlier chapters exists, he is worthy of worship.Less

The Coherence of Theism: Second Edition

Richard Swinburne

This book investigates on which understandings of the nature of God, it is coherent to hold, that is it is metaphysically possible, that God exists. Part I analyses what it is for a proposition to be ... More

This book investigates on which understandings of the nature of God, it is coherent to hold, that is it is metaphysically possible, that God exists. Part I analyses what it is for a proposition to be metaphysically possible, and shows how this normally reduces it to being logically possible; and then analyses how we can show a proposition to be logically possible. Part II analyses what it is for God to be a person, omnipresent, perfectly free, creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and eternal. It claims that it is metaphysically possible that there exists a being with all these properties—given certain definitions of ‘omniscient’ and eternal’. Part III considers whether that being could have these properties essentially, and exist (in some sense) necessarily; and argues that this is possible only if some of the predicates discussed in Part II are understood in analogical senses.Less

Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Edith Wyschogrod

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, this book brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most ... More

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, this book brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers. Ranging from 20th-century European philosophy—the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others—to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and Buddhist metaphysics, this book opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative. Rather than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, the book treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. It probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, it exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negations of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, it shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.Less

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction

Jacques Derrida

John D. Caputo (ed.)

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to ... More

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. The new Introduction discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, the book will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.Less

Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State

Robert Audi

Democratic states must protect the liberty of citizens and must accommodate both religious liberty and cultural diversity. This democratic imperative is one reason for the increasing secularity of ... More

Democratic states must protect the liberty of citizens and must accommodate both religious liberty and cultural diversity. This democratic imperative is one reason for the increasing secularity of most modern democracies. Religious citizens, however, commonly see a secular state as unfriendly toward religion. This book articulates principles that enable secular governments to protect liberty in a way that judiciously separates church and state and fully respects religious citizens. After presenting a brief account of the relation between religion and ethics, the book shows how ethics can be independent of religion—evidentially autonomous in a way that makes moral knowledge possible for secular citizens—without denying religious sources a moral authority of their own. With this account in view, it portrays a church-state separation that requires governments not only to avoid religious establishment but also to maintain religious neutrality. The book shows how religious neutrality is related to such issues as teaching evolutionary biology in public schools, the legitimacy of vouchers to fund private schooling, and governmental support of “faith-based initiatives.” The final chapter shows how the proposed theory of religion and politics incorporates toleration and forgiveness as elements in flourishing democracies. Tolerance and forgiveness are described; their role in democratic citizenship is clarified; and in this light a conception of civic virtue is proposed. Overall, the book advances the theory of liberal democracy, clarifies the relation between religion and ethics, provides distinctive principles governing religion in politics, and provides a theory of toleration for pluralistic societies. It frames institutional principles to guide governmental policy toward religion; it articulates citizenship standards for political conduct by individuals; it examines the case for affirming these two kinds of standards on the basis of what, historically, has been called natural reason; and it defends an account of toleration that enhances the practical application of the ethical framework both in individual nations and in the international realm.Less