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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion
This comprehensive, psychological, and naturalistic analysis of
prayer offers an alternative to William James's model of prayer,
represented in his work "The Varieties of Religious Experience,"
which links supplication to the divine or supernatural realm.
Through his examination of prayer, and its connection to faith,
Faber also analyzes religious faith psychologically and
anthropologically, concluding that subjective prayer is finally an
instance of homeopathic magical conduct. It ritualistically
conjures up, according to the author, a version of the first,
primal, biological situation, in which the dependent little one
cries out to a parental big one for physical and emotional
nourishment. Eventually, religion...and its expression of faith
through prayer, provides us with a magical protective presence that
is natural in its return to the primal, rather than supernatural,
as James argues, in its presence and existence.
The very instructional details of individual prayer, Faber
argues, are unconsciously designed to recreate the magical alliance
through which our existence on the planet commences and goes
forward. Over and over again, dozens of times each day, thousands
of times each year, the little one asks and the big one sees to it
that the little one receives. Such asking and receiving is the
central feature of a child's existence. As we internalize this
reality and seek to re-create it in our adult lives, religious
conviction and faith--as it comes through prayer--helps us to
achieve a sense of security and a psychic return to the parental
alliance. Faber's compelling arguments will challenge readers to
consider prayer and faith as a magical circle of religious belief
and to examine afresh the underlying nature of supplication.
Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist
Philosophy of Religion develops a distinctive approach to
pragmatist philosophy of religion, and more generally to pragmatist
investigations of the human search for meaning, by emphasizing what
may be considered two closely interrelated main features of this
tradition: humanism and antitheodicism. Humanism here emphasizes
the need to focus on religion as a human practice within human
concerns of meaningfulness and significance, as distinguished from
any metaphysical search for cosmic meaning. Antitheodicism, in
turn, stands for the refusal to accept any justification, divine or
secular, for the experiences of meaninglessness that individuals
undergoing horrendous suffering may have. Developing a critical
form of pragmatism emphasizing these ideas, Sami Pihlstroem
explores the relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy
in the philosophy of religion, especially regarding the question of
religious meaning, as well as the significance of literature for
philosophy of religion, with particular emphasis on William James's
pragmatism.
On the Intrinsic Value of Everything is an illuminating
introduction to fundamental questions in ethics. How--and to
what--we assign value, whether it is to events or experiences or
objects or people, is central to ethics. Something is intrinsically
valuable only if it would be valued for its own sake by all fully
informed, properly functioning persons. Davison defends the
controversial view that everything that exists is intrinsically
valuable to some degree. If only some things are intrinsically
valuable, what about other things? Where and how do we draw the
cutoff point? If only living creatures are intrinsically valuable,
what does this imply for how we value the environment? If
everything has intrinsic value, what practical implications does
this have for how we live our lives? How does this view fit with
the traditional theistic idea that God is the source of goodness
and truth? Both critics and proponents of the concept of intrinsic
value will find something of interest in this careful investigation
of the basic value structure of the world.
This book provides the first detailed study in English of the
religious philosophy of Vasilii Rozanov, one of the most
influential and controversial thinkers of Russia's Silver Age. It
examines his subversion of traditional Russian Orthodoxy, including
his reverence for the Creation, his focus on the family, and his
worship of sex.Rozanov is one of the towering figures of Russian
culture, a major influence on thinkers and writers such as Bakhtin,
Maiakovskii, and Mandelshtam, as well as many European writers. He
critiqued Orthodox theology, and wrote extensively on philosophy,
literature, and politics, and helped reform marriage and divorce
laws.His enormous contribution to Russian thought has been largely
neglected, and much of his work has been misunderstood. Ure
addresses this by examining the basis of Rozanov's religious
philosophy, the Creation of the Earth and the Book of Genesis.>
This book synthesizes Jacques Derrida's hauntology and spectrality
with affect theory, in order to create a rhetorical framework
analyzing the felt absences and hauntings of written and oral
texts. The book opens with a history of hauntology, spectrality,
and affect theory and how each of those ideas have been applied.
The book then moves into discussing the unique elements of the
rhetorical framework known as the rhetorrectional situation. Three
case studies taken from the Christian tradition, serve to
demonstrate how spectral rhetoric works. The first is fictional,
C.S. Lewis 'The Great Divorce. The second is non-fiction, Tim
Jennings 'The God Shaped Brain. The final one is taken from
homiletics, Bishop Michael Curry's royal wedding 2018 sermon. After
the case studies conclusion offers the reader a summary and ideas
future applications for spectral rhetoric.
This text presents and addresses the philosophical movement of
antiphilosophy working thru the texts of Christian thinkers such as
Pascal and Kierkegaard. The author as influenced by Alain Badiou,
portrays these Christian thinkers as of a subjective dimension
negating the possibility of an objective quest for truth. The claim
here is that antiphilosophy is abundant in the eyes of these two
thinkers who frame the thought event as represented by
Christianity, ultimately resigning itself to more or less the
opposite of philosophy itself. Readers will discover why
philosophical reason should never be convinced by that which denies
its very authority. Subjecting faith to the perils of philosophical
analysis, confronting the philosophical tradition with the truth of
the Christian faith, and occupying the space between the two: such
are the challenges facing an antiphilosophy of Christianity. This
text will appeal to researchers and students working in continental
philosophy, philosophy of religion and those in religious studies
who want to investigate the links between Christianity and
antiphilosophy.
In this book Jaco Gericke is concerned with different ways of
approaching the question of what, according to the Hebrew Bible, a
god was assumed to be. As a supplement to the tradition of
predominantly linguistic, historical, literary, comparative,
social-scientific and related ways of looking at the research
problem, Gericke offers a variety of experimental philosophical
perspectives that aim to take a step back from the scholarly
discussion as it has unfolded hitherto in order to provide a new
type of worry when looking at the riddle of what the biblical texts
assumed made a god divine. Consisting of a brief history of
philosophical interpretations of the concepts of whatness and
essence from Socrates to Derrida, the relevant ideas are adapted
and reapplied to look at some interesting metaphysical oddities
arising from generic uses of elohim/el/eloah as common noun in the
Hebrew Bible. As such the study seeks to be a prolegomenon to all
future research in that, instead of answering the question
regarding a supposed nature of divinity, it aims to complicate it
beyond expectation. In this way a case is made for a more nuanced
and indeterminate manner of constructing the problem of what it
meant to call something a god.
This is an accessible survey of the most important thinkers on
Religion, from Aquinas, through Kant to William James. Arguments
concerning the existence and nature of God have been a staple of
western philosophy for over 2,000 years. "Philosophy of Religion:
The Key Thinkers" offers a comprehensive historical overview of
this fascinating field. Nine specially commissioned essays
introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who
have shaped the subject and the central issues and arguments
therein. The book reconstructs the history of the philosophy of
religion, clearly illustrating the most important attempts to
address such crucial issues as the ontological argument, the
cosmological argument, the problem of evil, miracles, the moral
argument, the design argument, religious experience and the idea of
god. Thinkers covered include Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Hume, Kant,
Paley and James. Crucially the book demonstrates why the ideas and
arguments these key thinkers developed are still relevant in
contemporary thought. Ideal for undergraduate students, the book
lays the necessary foundations for a complete and thorough
understanding of this fascinating subject.
Weingartner shows that an essential part of natural or
philosophical theology and even a part of theology can be treated
axiomatically. God's essence, omniscience, omnipotence, creating
activity, and all-goodness are described by axioms and by theorems
proved from them.
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