In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, (...) who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers. (shrink)

Flew's challenge to the religious believer asks him to specify what would count as a disproof for, e.g. ‘There is a God’. A statement of such a specifiable condition I called an ‘empirical denial’. In my earlier paper I was concerned to show that a statement is a statement whether or not it has such an empirical denial. I was not particularly concerned to show that there are some statements which do not have an empirical denial; my concern was to (...) show that it is not essential that they do. It was in connection with this point that the statement ‘John loves Mary’ was discussed. But this very same example may indeed serve as an example of a statement for which, in certain complex situations, there is no empirical denial. That is, in some circumstances, no matter what empirical conditions are specified, when the statement ‘John loves Mary’ is made, they could obtain and still John might love Mary, as the developing situation would make clear. If the condition specified is that John is cruel to Mary and shows no concern for her, details could always emerge in such a situation to explain why, even though he loved her, he was cruel and showed no concern. And so on. (shrink)

THREE CONCEPTS OF MIRACLE ARE EXAMINED: INTERVENTION MIRACLE, CONTINGENCY MIRACLE, AND NATURAL MIRACLE. IT IS ARGUED THAT EACH CONCEPT OF MIRACLE IS COHERENT. REGARDING THE FAMILIAR CONCEPT OF INTERVENTION MIRACLE, IT IS ARGUED THAT PROBLEMS RELATING TO GOD’S INTERVENING IN THE COURSE OF NATURE, RAISED BY HUME AND OTHERS, CAN BE OVERCOME. THEN IT IS SHOWN THAT IN ANY CASE THERE ARE TWO OTHER COHERENT CONCEPTS OF MIRACLE--CONTINGENCY AND NATURAL MIRACLES--EACH OF WHICH BY ITSELF GIVES US SOME GRASP OF HOW (...) A TRANSCENDENT GOD CAN HAVE A PRESENCE IN THE WORLD. (shrink)

In this article, after providing a preliminary characterization of pacifism, the author first argues that pacifism sensibly articulates with the concepts of force and rights and then critically discusses the just war position, the correctness of which would entail the wrongnessof pacifism in a strong construction. The author goes on to argue that a primary moral obligation of justice is sufficient to make it wrong to resort to war and that, moreover, utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics, and the religious ethics of (...) love, on their own separate grounds, arguably should agree on a repudiation of war, but, finally, religious ethics repudiates war best because it sees best the heart of the matter. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of religion, particularly neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, has reminded philosophers that there is more to religion than belief and, indeed, that there is more to religious belief than mere belief. D. Z. Phillips is among those who have made a contribution here. He has emphasized how religious belief is very different from the kind of belief that amounts to holding a hypothesis, even a God-hypothesis. However, perhaps because of his non-cognitivist tendencies, Phillips, unlike Kierkegaard to whom he often (...) appeals, has failed to bring into relief another quintessential fact about belief in God, namely that it is for the believer an entered relationship with God. We do well to appreciate that belief in God is not identical with making a truth claim. But if the essential core of religious belief is construed as an attitudinal or affective response, as non-cognitivists tend to construe it, an important conceptual dimension of religious faith will all but be overlooked, as, paradoxically it seems it has been by the philosophical approach that strives to describe the religious ‘form of life’ in its own terms. In what follows I shall endeavour to bring into relief what I take to be an essential dimension of religious belief, one which presupposes that religious belief is an entered relationship for the believer. This I shall do by pursuing a contrast which, I think, at once clarifies and makes undeniable religious belief's essential nature as a relationship to God. (shrink)

If determinism is correct, then all that men do is in principle predictable. Further, all that they do is predictable in a certain way, namely on the basis of the causes of their actions, where those causes are sufficient for their actions. That is, according to determinism, the antecedents of human actions, their causes, are such that, given a knowledge of those antecedents, the actions that are their effects can be predicted with certainty because they cannot but occur.

C entral to most religions are God and belief in God. But while this is so for nearly all religions, questions regarding the nature and existence of God have long been a welter for believer and nonbeliever alike. This is not purely a historical comment. Long enduring confusions about God's existence and nature persist and, it seems to me, have even deepened recently. Consider the spectrum of things contemporaneously said about God's existence.

Two forms of ethical relativism are examined: a societal form (ser) and an individual form (ier). The thesis of ier is elaborated, What seems to be the strongest argument for it is analysed, And a number of implications of ier are made explicit. The same three things are then done for ser. The strongest argument for ser reasons from descriptive relativism to ser. It is usually recognized that such premises do not establish such a conclusion. But, In addition, It is (...) argued, Such premises may well be false. Finally several possible sources of ethical relativism are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, (...) who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers. (shrink)

Both philosophy and theology are given a raison d'etre by their problems. Some of their problems they share, and some they do not. They share a concern with the nature of morality and they share the problem of human freedom. But the filioque issue and the controversy between Arius and Athanasius regarding the consubstaniality of the persons of the Trinity belong to theology, if contemporary theology will have them. The problems of reference and denotation, and of classes, in the cast (...) given them by Frege, Russell and others, are exclusively in the domain of philosophy. Sometimes the problems shared by philosophy and theology are also human problems: they intimately touch human lives and have palpable ramifications for the way men live. Camus, who said with a flourish that the only philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide, was saying in part that the only philosophical problems worth considering are human problems. And William James would perhaps concur; he would insist that only philosophical problems that are “living, forced and momentous” present a genuine option to men. (shrink)

‘God is dead’ can mean many things. It can mean that the way God has been thought of is no longer adequate, or that there is no God and never has been, or that human consciousness of God has receded. 1 Our concern in what follows begins with ‘the death of God’ in this last sense, in the specific sense of the death of an awareness of God or of an affective consciousness of God. Or rather, this is where half (...) of our concern begins. The other half begins with a phenomenon which is the mirror image of the death of God:the death of persons. By ‘the death of persons’ I mean something analogous to the sense specified for ‘the death of God.’ I mean the death or at least the decline of a consciousness of the inherent worth of persons, of the worth persons have as persons. In Kantian terms the death of persons is the loss of a consciousness of persons as ends in themselves. The death of God and the death of persons are parallel, and, furthermore, they are connected. The connection is not difficult to see, particularly if we remind ourselves of what Nietzsche said about the death of God. (shrink)

Not too many years ago Antony Flew voiced a challenge. His challenge was directed to religious believers and it was this: ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?’ It was Flew's implicit argument that unless such a challenge could be met an utterance like ‘There is a God’ in fact denied nothing and so asserted nothing either . One great merit of Flew's (...) challenge was that it crystallised a malaise felt by many into a hard, pointed question. As a challenge this question elicited two basic reactions. (shrink)

Among the questions facing the religious there is one that is becoming particularly pressing in our contemporary world of mingled cultures. Expressed as religious people sometimes put it to themselves, it is: How does my religion relate to other religions? There are two very different answers abroad. One is: mine is true and all others, to the extent that they depart from mine, are false and are to be rejected. The other is: mine is valid-for-me, and those of others are (...) valid-for-them. The first answer has the virtue of being utterly straightforward and not mealy-mouthed, but it seems parochial and myopic, for, as John Hick points out: In the great majority of cases, the tradition within which a religious person finds his relationship to the Real depends to a very great extent upon where and when he or she is born…In view of this situation, can one be unquestionably confident that the religion which one happens to have inherited by birth is indeed normative and that all others are properly to be graded by their likeness or unlikeness to it? (shrink)

This book is an inquiry into the extent to which human relationships are foundational in morality. J. Kellenberger seeks to discover, first, how relationships between persons, and ultimately the relationship that each person has to each person by virtue of being a person, underlie the various traditional components of morality—obligation, virtue, justice, rights, and moral goods—and, second, how relationship morality is more fully consonant with our moral experience than other forms of human morality. Kellenberger traces the implications of (...) relationship morality for an understanding of religious duty to God and for the status of our obligations to animals. He also examines issues relating to a feminist "ethics of caring." While this book is a work in ethics, its approach is not limited to an examination of theories of obligation, such as utilitarianism, nor is it limited to the traditional areas covered by wider philosophical treatments of ethics. It embraces these but examines such moral categories as love, respect for persons, shame, and their place in morality. (shrink)

One in the series New Dialogues in Philosophy, edited by Dale Jacquette, J. Kellenberger brings together a group of hypothetical individuals from different backgrounds with real philosophical views to discuss their ideas on morality and moral relativism. The dialogues examine arguments for and against adopting a relativistic stance on morality.

I discuss E. J. Lowe's conception of criteria of identity and sketch a different and, I think, more adequate conception. On my view, criteria of identity are some of the things we can do. They are what we do when distinguishing between single entities of the kind in question and pairs of entities of the relevant domain. And they enable us to make such distinctions because they are applicable to all single and to all pairs of entities of the relevant (...) domain but fulfilled only by all single entities of the kind in question. This feature of criteria of identity allows us to define these criteria, to explain how to identify a particular criterion of identity and to determine the logical form in which to express such identifications. (shrink)

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience. Drawing upon the scriptures of various traditions, ancillary religious writings, psychological and anthropological studies, as well as reports of epiphanic experiences, the book presents and examines epiphanies as they have occurred across global religious traditions and cultures, historically and up to the present day. Primarily providing a study of (...) the great range of epiphanies in their phenomenal presentation, Kellenberger also explores issues that arise for epiphanies, such as the matter of their veridicality (whether they are truly of or from the divine) and the question of whether all epiphanies are of the same religious reality. (shrink)

Discusses the complexities and paradoxes of love as represented in the history of Western philosophy and Christianity. In The Asymptote of Love, James Kellenberger develops a theory of religious love that resists essentialist definitions of the term and brings into conversation historical debates on love in Western philosophy and Christian theology. He argues that if love can be likened to a mathematical asymptote, which is a straight line that infinitely approaches a curve but never quite reaches it, then the (...) asymptote of love reaches toward the infinite endpoint of love at its uttermost, namely, God’s love. Drawing upon a broad range of thinkers who have put forth classic debates on love—such as St. Augustine of Hippo, Anders Nygren, and St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as some lesser known figures in the debate, such as Leo Tolstoy and Albert Schweitzer—Kellenberger explains the profound connection between human agape and God’s infinite love in its capacity to offer both directive guidance and to exist beyond human conception. James Kellenberger is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge and the author of God’s Goodness and God’s Evil. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic, and an account of consequence offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. This text presents what the authors term as 'logical pluralism' arguing that the notion of logical consequence doesn't pin down one deductive consequence relation; it allows for many of them.

Humility has not always been regarded as a virtue. Aristotle, if he recognized it at all, seems to have regarded it as a vice, a deficiency in regard to magnanimity. In the popular culture of the twenty-first century, while courage is held in high moral esteem, the regard given to humility is more questionable. Humility, however, is not universally dismissed as a virtue. Many see it as having moral value. In fact, a number of contemporary philosophers are relatively clear that (...) humility is a morally valuable trait and so is a moral virtue, although they disagree about its character. For traditional Christianity and Judaism, of course, and for other religious traditions, humility is a religious virtue. However, if humility is a religious virtue, is it different from humility as a moral virtue? Below, we shall start in section II with the question, What is the best way to understand the general notion of humility? In section III it shall be followed by the question, What are the core contrasting states that humility opposes? Third , in section IV we shall ask, Does humility as a religious virtue have a distinctive and abiding character? (shrink)

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) systems (also known as AI “chatbots”) are among the most promising examples of the use of technology in mental health care. With already millions of users worldwide, CAI is likely to change the landscape of psychological help. Most researchers agree that existing CAIs are not “digital therapists” and using them is not a substitute for psychotherapy delivered by a human. But if they are not therapists, what are they, and what role can they play in mental (...) health care? To answer these questions, we appeal to two well-established and widely discussed concepts: cognitive and affective artifacts. Cognitive artifacts are artificial devices contributing functionally to the performance of a cognitive task. Affective artifacts are objects which have the capacity to alter subjects’ affective state. We argue that therapeutic CAIs are a kind of cognitive-affective artifacts which contribute to positive therapeutic change by (i) simulating a (quasi-)therapeutic interaction, (ii) supporting the performance of cognitive tasks, and (iii) altering the affective condition of their users. This sheds new light on why virtually all existing mental health CAIs implement principles and techniques of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — a therapeutic orientation according to which affective change and, ultimately, positive therapeutic change is mediated by cognitive change. Simultaneously, it allows us to conceptualize better the potential and limitations of applying these technologies in therapy. (shrink)

Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of..