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A philosophical inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of theism
and naturalism in accounting for the emergence of consciousness,
the visual imagination and aesthetic values. The authors begin by
offering an account of modern scientific practice which gives a
central place to the visual imagination and aesthetic values. They
then move to test the explanatory power of naturalism and theism in
accounting for consciousness and the very visual imagination and
aesthetic values that lie behind and define modern science.
Taliaferro and Evans argue that evolutionary biology alone is
insufficient to account for consciousness, the visual imagination
and aesthetic values. Insofar as naturalism is compelled to go
beyond evolutionary biology, it does not fare as well as theism in
terms of explanatory power.
A Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion is an indispensable resource
for students and scholars. Covering historical and contemporary
figures, arguments, and terms, it offers an overview of the vital
themes that make philosophy of religion the growing, vigorous field
that it is today. It covers world religions and sources from east
and west. Entries have been crafted for clarity, succinctness, and
engagement. This second edition includes new entries, extended
coverage of non-Christian topics, as well as revisions and updates
throughout. The first edition was named a Choice Outstanding
Academic Title of the Year.
There are deep and pervasive disagreements today in universities
and colleges, and popular culture in general, over the credibility
and value of belief in God. This has given rise to an urgent need
for a balanced, comprehensive, accessible resource book that can
inform the public and scholarly debate over theism. While scholars
with as diverse interests as Daniel Dennett, Terry Eagleton,
Richard Dawkins, Jurgen Habermas, and Rowan Williams have recently
contributed books to this debate, "theism" as a concept remains
poorly understood and requires a more thorough and systematic
analysis than it has so far received in any single volume. The
Routledge Companion to Theism addresses this need by investigating
theism's history as well as its relationship to inquiry in the
sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and to its wider
cultural contexts. The contents are not confined within the
philosophy of religion or even within the more expansive borders of
philosophy. Rather, The Routledge Companion to Theism investigates
its subject through the lens of a wide variety of disciplines and
explores the ramifications of theism considered as a way of life as
well as an intellectual conviction. The five parts of the volume
indicate its inclusive scope: I. What is Theism?; II. Theism and
Inquiry; III. Theism and the Socio-Political Realm; IV. Theism and
Culture; V. Theism as a Way of Life. The result is a well ordered
and thorough collection that should provide a wide spectrum of
readers with a better understanding of a subject that's much
discussed, but frequently misunderstood. As the editors note in
their Introduction, while stimulating and informing the
contemporary debate, a key aim of the volume is to open new avenues
of inquiry into theism and thereby to encourage further research
into this vital topic. Comprised of 54 essays by leading scholars
in philosophy, history, theology, religious studies, political
science, education and sociology, The Routledge Companion to Theism
promises to be the most useful, comprehensive resource on an
emerging subject of interest for students and scholars.
In this volume, Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans promote aesthetic
personalism by examining three domains of aesthetics - the
philosophy of beauty, aesthetic experience, and philosophy of art -
through the lens of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, theistic
Hinduism, and the all-seeing Compassionate Buddha. These religious
traditions assume an inclusive, overarching God's eye, or ideal
point of view, that can create an emancipatory appreciation of
beauty and goodness. This appreciation also recognizes the reality
and value of the aesthetic experience of persons and deepens the
experience of art works. The authors also explore and contrast the
invisibility of persons and God. The belief that God or the sacred
is invisible does not mean God or the sacred cannot be experienced
through visual and other sensory or unique modes. Conversely, the
assumption that human persons are thoroughly visible, or observable
in all respects, ignores how racism and other forms of bias render
persons invisible to others.
The Handbook of Philosophy and Religion is a one-volume examination
of the most salient concepts that sit at the intersection of
religion and philosophy. This book grounds readers in the mysteries
that have evoked wonder and consternation for millennia, such as
the nature of divinity in relation to humanity, the legitimacy of
religious experience and how we frame language to speak about it,
the possibility of miraculous occurrences, and theories regarding
life after death.
The fifth volume of The History of Evil covers the twentieth
century from 1900 through 1950. The period saw the maturation of
intellectual movements such as Pragmatism and Phenomenology, and
the full emergence of several new academic disciplines; all these
provided novel intellectual tools that were used to shed light on a
human capacity for evil that was becoming increasingly hard to
ignore. An underlying theme of this volume is the effort to
reconstruct an understanding of human nature after confidence in
its intrinsic goodness and moral character had been shaken by world
events. The chapters in this volume cover globally relevant topics
such as education, propaganda, power, oppression, and genocide, and
include perspectives on evil drawn from across the world.
Theological and atheistic responses to evil are also examined in
the volume. This outstanding treatment of approaches to evil at a
determinative period of modernity will appeal to those with
interests in the intellectual history of the era, as well as to
those with interests in the political, philosophical and
theological movements that matured within it.
Despite its name, "naturalism" as a world-view turns out to be
rather unnatural in its strict and more consistent form of
materialism and determinism. This is why a number of naturalists
opt for a broadened version that includes objective moral values,
intrinsic human dignity, consciousness, beauty, personal agency,
and the like. But in doing so, broad naturalism begins to look more
like theism. As many strict naturalists recognize, broad naturalism
must borrow from the metaphysical resources of a theistic
world-view, in which such features are very natural, common
sensical, and quite "at home" in a theistic framework. The
Naturalness of Belief begins with a naturalistic philosopher's own
perspective of naturalism and naturalness. The remaining chapters
take a multifaceted approach in showing theism's naturalness and
greater explanatory power. They examine not only rational reasons
for theism's ability to account for consciousness, intentionality,
beauty, human dignity, free will, rationality, and knowledge; they
also look at common sensical, existential, psychological, and
cultural reasons-in addition to the insights of the cognitive
science of religion.
Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation explores
Hinduism and the distinction between the secular and religious on a
global scale. According to Ranganathan, a careful philosophical
study of Hinduism reveals it as the microcosm of philosophical
disagreements with Indian resources, across a variety of topics,
including: ethics, logic, the philosophy of thought, epistemology,
moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. This analysis offers an
original and fresh diagnosis of studying Hinduism, colonialism, and
a global rise of hyper-nationalism, as well as the frequent
acrimony between scholars and practitioners of Hindu traditions.
This text is appropriate for use in undergraduate and graduate
courses on Hinduism, and Indian philosophy, and can be used as an
advanced introduction to the problems of philosophy with South
Asian resources.
This first volume of The History of Evil covers Graeco-Roman,
Indian, Near Eastern, and Eastern philosophy and religion from 2000
BCE to 450 CE. This book charts the foundations of the history of
evil among the major philosophical traditions and world religions,
beginning with the oldest recorded traditions: the Vedas and
Upanisads, Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhism, and continuing
through Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian schools of thought. This
cutting-edge treatment of the history of evil at its crucial and
determinative inception will appeal to those with particular
interests in the ancient period and early theories and ideas of
evil and good, as well as those seeking an understanding of how
later philosophical and religious developments were conditioned and
shaped.
The fourth volume of The History of Evil explores the key thinkers
and themes relating to the question of evil in eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The very idea of "evil" is highly contentious
in modern thought and this period was one in which the concept was
intensely debated and criticized. The persistence of the idea of
evil is a testament to the abiding significance of theology in the
period, not least in Germany. Comprising twenty-two chapters by
international scholars, some of the topics explored include:
Berkeley on evil, Voltaire and the Philosophes, John Wesley on the
origins of evil, Immanuel Kant on evil, autonomy and grace, the
deliverance of evil: utopia and evil, utilitarianism and evil, evil
in Schelling and Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and the
genealogy of evil, and evil and the nineteenth-century idealists.
This volume also explores a number of other key thinkers and topics
within the period. This outstanding treatment of the history of
evil at the crucial and determinative inception of its key concepts
will appeal to those with particular interests in the ideas of evil
and good.
This sixth volume of The History of Evil charts the era 1950-2018,
with topics arising after the atrocities of World War II, while
also exploring issues that have emerged over the last few decades.
It exhibits the flourishing of analytic philosophy of religion
since the War, as well as the diversity of approaches to the topic
of God and evil in this era. Comprising twenty-one chapters from a
team of international contributors, this volume is divided into
three parts, God and Evil, Humanity and Evil and On the Objectivity
of Human Judgments of Evil. The chapters in this volume cover
relevant topics such as the evidential argument from evil,
skeptical theism, free will, theodicy, continental philosophy,
religious pluralism, the science of evil, feminist theorizations,
terrorism, pacifism, realism and relativism. This outstanding
treatment of the history of evil will appeal to those with
particular interests in the ideas of evil and good
The third volume of The History of Evil encompasses the early
modern era from 1450-1700. This revolutionary period exhibited
immense change in both secular knowledge and sacred understanding.
It saw the fall of Constantinople and the rise of religious
violence, the burning of witches and the drowning of Anabaptists,
the ill treatment of indigenous peoples from Africa to the
Americas, the reframing of formal authorities in religion,
philosophy, and science, and it produced profound reflection on
good and evil in the genius of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Teresa
of Avila, and the Cambridge Platonists. This superb treatment of
the history of evil during a formative period of the early modern
era will appeal to those with interests in philosophy, theology,
social and political history, and the history of ideas.
The second volume of The History of Evil explores the philosophy of
evil in the long Middle Ages. Starting from the Augustinian theme
of evil as a deprivation or perversion of what is good, this period
saw the maturation of concepts of natural evil, of evil as sin
involving the will, and of malicious agents aiming to increase evil
in general and sin in particular. Comprising fifteen chapters, the
contributions address key figures of the Christian Middle Ages or
traditions sharing some similar cultural backgrounds, such as
medieval Judaism and Islam. Other chapters examine contemporaneous
developments in the Middle East, China, India and Japan. The volume
concludes with an overview of contemporary transpositions of Dante,
illustrating the remarkable cultural influence of medieval accounts
of evil today. This outstanding treatment of the history of evil at
the crucial and determinative inception of its key concepts will
appeal to those with particular interests in the ideas of evil and
good.
Consciousness and the Mind of God is especially concerned with
central metaphysical claims about the nature of persons and the
implications of these claims for the philosophy of God. Charles
Taliaferro shows that in the contemporary climate there is a
widespread view that the insights gained from a philosophy of human
persons lead either to a total abandonment of traditional theistic
claims about God or to a radical revision of theistic claims about
how God relates to the world. Thus, the preponderance of
physicalism has led a wide range of philosophers and theologians to
reconsider the traditional conception of God as a nonphysical
person or person-like reality, ideas about the afterlife, and the
Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Some have taken the
plausibility of physicalism to be a sufficient ground for embracing
philosophical atheism, and thereby rejecting wholesale the
fundamental claims of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Others have
taken the success of a physicalist philosophy to justify treating
religion along noncognitive lines. Taliaferro critically examines
these options, and defends a nonphysicalist understanding of the
God-world relation. He maintains that, while persons are not
identical with their bodies, and God is not identical with the
cosmos, it remains the case that persons and bodies, God and the
cosmos, "exist in a profoundly integral union". His notions of
"integrative dualism" and "integrative theism" seek to avoid some
of the extremes of Cartesian and Platonic dualism.
One in the series New Dialogues in Philosophy, edited by Dale
Jacquette, Charles Taliaferro, a leading philosopher of religion,
presents several fictional dialogues among characters with
contrasting views on the existence of God. The views express the
many standard positions: theism, atheism, skepticism, and other
nuanced arguments about the nature of God. In a series of five
inspired, original debates, Taliaferro taps into several famous
exchanges, including those among Antony Flew, Basil Mitchell and R.
M. Hare; between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell; and
between Copleston and A. J. Ayer. The book includes a set of
observations about the nature and conduct of debate: providing
charitable interpretations of opposing sides and allowing
interlocutors time to develop their points. Series Editor:
Professor Dale Jacquette, Senior Professorial Chair in Theoretical
Philosophy, University of Bern, Switzerland
One in the series New Dialogues in Philosophy, edited by Dale
Jacquette, Charles Taliaferro, a leading philosopher of religion,
presents several fictional dialogues among characters with
contrasting views on the existence of God. The views express the
many standard positions: theism, atheism, skepticism, and other
nuanced arguments about the nature of God. In a series of five
inspired, original debates, Taliaferro taps into several famous
exchanges, including those among Antony Flew, Basil Mitchell and R.
M. Hare; between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell; and
between Copleston and A. J. Ayer. The book includes a set of
observations about the nature and conduct of debate: providing
charitable interpretations of opposing sides and allowing
interlocutors time to develop their points. Series Editor:
Professor Dale Jacquette, Senior Professorial Chair in Theoretical
Philosophy, University of Bern, Switzerland
Turning Images in Philosophy, Science, and Religion: A New Book of
Nature brings together new essays addressing the role of images and
imagination recruited in the perennial debates surrounding nature,
mind, and God. The debate between "new atheists" and religious
apologists today is often hostile. This book sets a new tone by
locating the debate between theism and naturalism (most "new
atheists" are self-described "naturalists") in the broader context
of reflection on imagination and aesthetics. The eleven essays will
be of interest to anyone who is fascinated by the power of
imagination and the role of aesthetics in deciding between
worldviews or philosophies of nature. Representing a variety of
points of view, authors include outstanding philosophers of
religion and of science, a distinguished art historian, and a
visual artist. The book begins with Martin Kemp's essay on the work
of the biologist, mathematician and classical scholar D'Arcy
Wentworth Thompson in which Kemp develops the idea of "structural
intuitions and a critique of reductive thinking about the natural
world. This is followed by Geoffrey Gorham's overview and analysis
of images of nature and God found in early modern science and
philosophy. Anthony O'Hear questions a reductive, naturalist
account of the origin of mind and values. Dale Jacquette offers a
thoroughgoing naturalistic philosophy of the emergence of
intentionality and a unique argument about the emergence of art and
the aesthetic appreciation of nature. E.J. Lowe brings to light
some challenges facing naturalistic approaches to human imaginative
sensibility. Douglas Hedley articulates and defends a cognitive
account of imagination, highlighting some of the difficulties
confronting naturalism. Daniel N. Robinson offers a sweeping
treatment of nature and naturalism, historically engaging
Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and others. Conor Cunningham provides an
aggressive critique of contemporary naturalism. Gordon Graham
investigates the resources of naturalism in accounting for our
sense of the sacred. Mark Wynn provides a subtle understanding of
imagination and perception, suggesting how these may play into the
theism - naturalism debate. The book concludes with Jil Evans'
reflections on how images of the Galapagos Islands have been
employed philosophically to picture either a naturalist or theistic
image of nature.
This Companion offers an up-to-date overview of the beliefs,
doctrines, and practices of the key philosophical concepts at the
heart of Christian theology. The sixteen chapters, commissioned
specially for this volume, are written by an internationally
recognized team of scholars and examine topics such as the Trinity,
God s necessary existence, simplicity, omnipotence, omniscience,
omnipresence, goodness, eternity and providence, the incarnation,
resurrection, atonement, sin and salvation, the problem of evil,
church rites, revelation and miracles, prayer, and the afterlife.
Written in non-technical, accessible language, they not only offer
a synthesis of scholarship on these topics but also suggest
questions and topics for further investigation.
In Contemporary Philosophical Theology, Charles Taliaferro and Chad
Meister focus on key topics in contemporary philosophical theology
within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, as well as Hinduism and
Buddhism. The volume begins with a discussion of key methodological
tools available to the philosophical theologian, such as faith and
reason, science and religion, revelation and sacred scripture, and
authority and tradition. The authors use these tools to explore
subjects including language, ineffability, miracles, evil, and the
afterlife. They also grapple with applied philosophical theology,
including environmental concerns, interreligious dialogue, and the
nature and significance of political values. A concluding
discussion proposes that philosophical theology can contribute to
important reflections and action concerning climate change.
In recent scholarship there is an emerging interest in the
integration of philosophy and theology. Philosophers and
theologians address the relationship between body and soul and its
implications for theological anthropology. In so doing,
philosopher-theologians interact with cognitive science, biological
evolution, psychology, and sociology. Reflecting these exciting new
developments, The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological
Anthropology is a resource for philosophers and theologians,
students and scholars, interested in the constructive, critical
exploration of a theology of human persons. Throughout this
collection of newly authored contributions, key themes are
addressed: human agency and grace, the soul, sin and salvation,
Christology, glory, feminism, the theology of human nature, and
other major themes in theological anthropology in historic as well
as contemporary contexts.
Charles Taliaferro has written a dynamic narrative history of
philosophical reflection on religion from the seventeenth century
to the present, with an emphasis on shifting views of faith and the
nature of evidence. The book begins with the movement called
Cambridge Platonism, which formed a bridge between the ancient and
medieval worlds and early modern philosophy. While the book
provides a general overview of different movements in philosophy,
it also offers a detailed exposition and reflection on key
arguments. The scope is broad, from Descartes to contemporary
feminist philosophy of religion. Written with clarity and verve,
this is a book that will appeal to professionals and students in
the philosophy of religion, religious studies, and the history of
ideas, as well as informed lay readers.
In forty-three brief essays from the life of a philosopher, Charles
Taliaferro guides us toward the heart of human being in all of its
absurdity and joy. Electrocuted by his coffee maker during class,
battling dragons on his rooftop, and accompanying his father to the
border between life and death, Taliaferro recommends to us a life
vulnerable to silliness, pain, and the depths of love they create
in us. Hilarious and sobering, Love, Love, Love investigates what
we need most to live humanely, humorously, faithfully, and well.
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