First published in 1906, these four lectures were originally delivered in the Vacation Term for Biblical Study at Cambridge. Evidence is derived from the native tribes of Australia in particular, whom Jevons compares for his discussion. The first lecture considers whether religion has evolved from, or was preceded by a pre-religion, or non-religious, stage of humankind. The following lectures discuss the science of religion and the theory of Evolution, and the relationship between the evolution of religion and the philosophy of religion. This is a fascinating text that will be of particular value to students interested in the history and development of religion in general.

The papers in this collection are concerned with the epistemology of religious belief. The contributors disagree on such issues as whether philosophers have a role to play in determining the reasonableness or intelligibility of religious beliefs, or whether philosophy properly understood is a descriptive task. But all the papers are informed by the belief that philosophical discussion should proceed by giving attention to the character of the religious beliefs and practices under consideration.

"The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion" features 14 new essays written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in the field. Contributors include Linda Zagzebski, Hugh J. McCann, Brian Leftow, Gareth B. Matthews, William L. Rowe, Elliott Sober, Derk Pereboom, Alfred J. Freddoso, William P. Alston, William J. Wainwright, Peter van Inwagen, Philip Kitcher, William E. Mann, and Philip L. Quinn.

The volume explores questions regarding the nature of God, the existence of God, religious belief, and the impact of religion on our secular lives. Written in clear and accessible prose, these essays provide a comprehensive treatment of the major problems in philosophy of religion and pose new insights, furthering the discussion of these topics. This book is an indispensable resource for students and teachers alike.

In Living Mirrors, Ohad Nachtomy examines Leibniz's attempt to "re-enchant" the natural world-that is, to infuse life, purpose, and value into the very foundations of nature, a nature that Leibniz saw as disenchanted by Descartes' and Spinoza's more naturalistic and mechanistic theories. Nachtomy sees Leibniz's nuanced view of infinity- how it differs in the divine as well as human spheres, and its relationship to numerical and metaphysical unity-as key in this effort. Leibniz defined living beings by means of an infinite nested structure particular to what he called "natural machines"-and for him, an intermediate kind of infinity is the defining feature of living beings. Using a metaphor of a "living mirror," Leibniz put forth infinity as crucial to explaining the unity of a living being as well as the harmony between the infinitely small and the infinitely large; in this way, employing infinity and unity, we can better understand life itself, both as a metaphysical principle and as an empirical fact. Nachtomy's sophisticated and novel treatment of the essential themes in Leibniz's work will not only interest Leibniz scholars, but scholars of early modern philosophy and students of the history of philosophy and science as well.

Religions are the largest communities of the global society and claim, at least in the cases of Islam and Christianity, to be universal interpretations of life and orders of existence. With the globalization of the world economy and the unity of the global society in the Internet, they gain unprecedented access to the entire human race through modern means of communication. At the same time, this globalization brings religions into conflict with one another in their claims to universal validity. How can the conflict of religions be defused? The speculative, philosophical method of dealing with a religion is a way to present one's own religious convictions in the medium of philosophy and rational discourse. The philosophical approach to religion can serve as the basis of the conversation of the world religions, without dissolving their truth claims. It can reduce dogmatic claims and contribute to overcoming fundamentalism. Philosophy builds bridges between religions.
The series A Discourse of the World Religions presents with this volume the fifth and last of the EXPO-Discourses of the World Religions, which took place near the end of the World Exposition EXPO 2000 in Hannover, Germany. The five EXPO-Discourses were held before and during the World Exposition EXPO 2000 in Hannover with the objective of a philosophical-theological dialogue of religions about central themes of their teachings. The series aims at a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their theological and philosophical propositions. It sees in philosophy a bridge between the religions and a means to overcome religious hostility and fundamentalism and to further the dialogue of the religions.

El hombre vacio carente de esperanza se ha volcado en un proceso de violencia y de guerras, de drogas, de corrupcion y de violencia buscando opciones satisfactorias de vida plena y digna. El proyecto de Dios es un hombre feliz y pleno, pero este se ha hecho a un lado, el hombre creo sus dioses personales, su propia paz personal. El hombre en la Reforma obtuvo libertad de pensamiento, de accion y de eleccion de sus gobernantes y de la misma iglesia. La revolucion industrial coadyuvo con el capitalismo, pero sin embargo no concibio al hombre negro como libre y digno, tuvo muchas limitaciones por el prejuicio racial. La iglesia no abogo suficiente por los derechos de los negros, de las minorias y, mas tarde, en la revolucion industrial y en los grandes inventos del hombre, no acompano este proceso de creacion de riqueza acumulada con el compromiso de la dignidad humana individual. La Iglesia en el proceso de conquista en sus colonias participo activamente en procesos de control de pensamiento y de reforzamiento de las autoridades con fines economicos. Se vio al margen de un absoluto de moral y de valores bajo las reglas de Dios, Verdad que da unidad a todo conocimiento. Sacrifico el mensaje de Jesus ante el sincretismo y el poder. "Espejo de principes, Cristianismo: religion o cultura?" recupera mitos y tradiciones antiguas que han conformado la nueva religion del hombre; pero hasta donde estas manifestaciones satisfacen el espiritu y la anhelada esperanza del ser humano? La busqueda es infinita.

There is no adequate understanding of contemporary Jewish and Christian theology without reference to Martin Buber. Buber wrote numerous books during his lifetime (1878-1965) and is best known for I and Thou and Good and Evil. Buber has influenced important Protestant theologians like Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr. His appeal is vast--not only is he renowned for his translations of the Hebrew Bible but also for his interpretation of Hasidism, his role in Zionism, and his writings in psychotherapy and political philosophy.In addition to a general introduction, each chapter is individually introduced, illuminating the historical and philosophical context of the readings. Footnotes explain difficult concepts, providing the reader with necessary references, plus a selective bibliography and subject index.

Matthias Smalbrugge compares modern images to plays without a script: while they appear to refer to a deeper identity or reality, it is ultimately the image itself that truly matters. He argues that our modern society of images is the product of a destructive tendency in the Christian notion of the image in general, and Augustine of Hippo's in particular. This insight enables him to decode our current 'scripts' of image. As we live in an increasingly visual culture, we are constantly confronted with images that seem to exist without a deeper identity or reality - but did this referential character really get lost over time? Smalbrugge first explores the roots of the modern image by analysing imagery, what it represents, and its moral state within the framework of Platonic philosophy. He then moves to the Augustinian heritage, in particular the Soliloquies, the Confessions and the Trinity, where he finds valuable insights into images and memory. He explores within the trinitarian framework the crossroads of a theology of grace and a theology based on Neoplatonic views. Smalbrugge ultimately answers two questions: what happened to the referential character of the image, and can it be recovered?

Reading Augustine presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religion scholars. The looming crisis in higher education appears to be a matter of soaring costs and crushing student debt, but the problem is actually much deeper. It is a crisis of soul; a question of the very purpose of learning and the type of people that our educational system produces. Today, in the age of academic hyper-specialization and professional knowledge, the moral and spiritual purposes of learning have been eclipsed by a shallow view of career and success. On Education, Formation, Citizenship, and the Lost Purpose of Learning turns to the influential figure Augustine of Hippo to explore how he saved the liberal arts at the end of the Roman Empire and how his inspiring vision can do the same for higher education today. It offers a roadmap for reviving the soul of education - presenting concrete ways that the intellectual practices and economic enterprise of learning can lead once more to a fulfilled life of knowing God and loving others.

This book""studies education and curriculum from the perspective of the teacher's stance in the classroom. Writing through the lenses offered by autobiography, a lifetime in the classroom serving as teacher, and drawing heavily on Jewish and secular scholarly texts, Block offers a vision of education that serves as an alternative to the increasingly instrumentalist, managerial, standards-driven impersonal nature of contemporary schools. He advocates not for a pedagogy of ethics, but for the original ethical stance every teacher already assumes by entering into the classroom. It is from this stance in ethics, he argues, that all pedagogy derives.

Reading Proclus and the Book of Causes, published in three volumes, is a fresh, comprehensive understanding of the history of Neoplatonism from the 9th to the 16th century. The impact of the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes is reconsidered on the basis of newly discovered manuscripts and evidences. This second volume revises widely accepted hypotheses about the reception of the Proclus' text in Byzantium and the Caucasus, and about the context that made possible the composition of the Book of Causes and its translations into Latin and Hebrew. The contributions offer a unique, comparative perspective on the various ways a pagan author was acculturated to the Abrahamic traditions.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is one of the most influential intellectuals of the past century. His work is invoked by philosophers, film critics and feminist theorists, but religious scholars have tended to keep their distance. Whilst the religious dimensions of Freud and Jung have been investigated exhaustively, much work still needs to be done in exploring this aspect of Lacan's thought. "Lacan and Religion" presents students of religion and theology with a clear introduction to a famously difficult thinker. The theological analysis is grounded in a solid understanding of Lacan's work as a psychoanalyst, whilst the book also explores how Lacan's concepts can be fruitful for those who labour in what Lacan called the "field of the divine."

Described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas, the Swiss pastor and theologian, Karl Barth, continues to be a major influence on students, scholars and preachers today.
Barth's theology found its expression mainly through his closely reasoned fourteen-part magnum opus, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Having taken over 30 years to write, the Church Dogmatics is regarded as one of the most important theological works of all time, and represents the pinnacle of Barth's achievement as a theologian.

Pluriverse, the final work of the American poet and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, was published posthumously in 1920. After an experience of the anaesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation, Blood came to the conclusion that his mind had been opened, that he had undergone a mystical experience, and that he had come to a realisation of the true nature of reality. This title is the fullest exposition of Blood's esoteric Christian philosophy-cum-theology, which, though deemed wildly eccentric by commentators both during his lifetime and later in the twentieth century, was nonetheless one of the most influential sources for American mystical-empiricism. In particular, Blood's thought was a major inspiration for William James, and can be seen to prefigure the latter's concept of Sciousness directly.

The Ethics of Time utilizes the resources of phenomenology and hermeneutics to explore this under-charted field of philosophical inquiry. Its rigorous analyses of such phenomena as waiting, memory, and the body are carried out phenomenologically, as it engages in a hermeneutical reading of such classical texts as Augustine's Confessions and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, among others. The Ethics of Time takes seriously phenomenology's claim of a consciousness both constituting time and being constituted by time. This claim has some important implications for the "ethical" self or, rather, for the ways in which such a self informed by time, might come to understand anew the problems of imperfection and ethical goodness. Even though a strictly philosophical endeavour, this book engages knowledgeably and deftly with subjects across literature, theology and the arts and will be of interest to scholars throughout these disciplines.

Is it merely an accident of English etymology that 'imagination' is cognate with 'image'? Despite the iconoclasm shared to a greater or lesser extent by all Abrahamic faiths, theism tends to assert a link between beauty, goodness and truth, all of which are viewed as Divine attributes. Douglas Hedley argues that religious ideas can be presented in a sensory form, especially in aesthetic works. Drawing explicitly on a Platonic metaphysics of the image as a bearer of transcendence, The Iconic Imagination shows the singular capacity and power of images to represent the transcendent in the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. In opposition to cold abstraction and narrow asceticism, Hedley shows that the image furnishes a vision of the eternal through the visible and temporal.

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth of interest over the past half century. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board, it publishes exemplary papers in any area of philosophy of religion.

In recent years there has been a bold revival in the field of natural theology, where "natural theology" can be understood as the attempt to demonstrate that God exists by way of reason, evidence, and argument without the appeal to divine revelation. Today's practitioners of natural theology have not only revived and recast all of the traditional arguments in the field, but, by drawing upon the findings of contemporary cosmology, chemistry, and biology, have also developed a range of fascinating new ones. Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology brings together twenty experts working in the field today. Together, they practice natural theology from a wide range of perspectives, and show how the field of natural theology is practiced today with a degree of diversity and confidence not seen since the Middle Ages. Aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, the volume will also be of interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and religious studies, as an indispensable resource on contemporary theistic proofs.

Building on the philosophies of the social sciences and of religion, this book is concerned with the interplay between the inner powers of individuals and the structures of their societies and also with how these inner powers affect how they see outer realities. Dorothy Emmet looks at persons in a world of impersonal processes. She is critical of the notion of a personal God, but sees the emergence of personal activities as constrained but also sustained through "an enabling universe".