The idea that God, understood as the most perfect being, must create the best possible world is often underacknowledged by contemporary theologians and philosophers of religion. This book clearly demonstrates the rationale for what Justin J. Daeley calls Theistic Optimism and interacts with the existing literature in order to highlight its limitations. While locating Theistic Optimism in the thought of Gottfried Leibniz, Daeley argues that Theistic Optimism is consistent with divine freedom, aseity, gratitude, and our typical modal intuitions. By offering plausible solutions to each of the criticisms levelled against Theistic Optimism, he also provides a vigorous and original defence against the charge that it deviates from the Christian tradition. Engaging with both the Christian tradition and contemporary theologians and philosophers, Why God Must Do What is Best positions the idea of Theistic Optimism firmly within the language of contemporary philosophy of religion.

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, Rene Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on modern philosophy. In this short, stimulating introduction, Michael Pendlebury explains Kant’s major claims in the Critique, how they hang together, and how Kant supports them, clarifying the way in which his reasoning unfolds over the course of this groundbreaking work. Making Sense of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason concentrates on key parts of the Critique that are essential to a basic understanding of Kant’s project and provides a sympathetic account of Kant’s reasoning about perception, space, time, judgment, substance, causation, objectivity, synthetic a priori knowledge, and the illusions of transcendent metaphysics. The guiding assumptions of the book are that Kant is a humanist; that his reasoning in the Critique is driven by an interest in human knowledge and the cognitive capacities that underlie it; and that he is not a skeptic, but accepts that human beings have objective knowledge and seeks to explain how this is possible. Pendlebury provides an integrated and accessible account of Kant’s explanation that will help those who are new to the Critique make sense of it.

The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 5 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.