Peirce’s philosophy, to a great extent, continues to be neglected as a potentially valuable resource for theologians and scholars of religion. This essay represents an attempt to rectify that state of affairs, albeit focused narrowly on how some of Peirce’s ideas might help to illuminate the role that attention plays in transforming consciousness and shaping certain meditative practices. Such practices display a logic consistent with the one that Peirce described in the process of developing his semiotic theory and his theory (...) of inquiry. While his writings on logic are voluminous, Peirce produced only a very few scattered remarks about the “logic of meditation,” broadly conceived. One purpose of this essay is to collect and to examine carefully those remarks. Another is to evaluate their significance for contemporary philosophers of religion who are invested in the task of trying to understand the nature and purpose of meditation, not as a single type of exercise, but in its various forms and manifestations. (shrink)

Certain Daoist ideas explored here are compared with features of Peirce's philosophy, supplying a helpful perspective on the latter. In particular, I examine Zhuangzi's instruction about “listening” with one's spirit, along with certain discussions of “listening energy” drawn from texts dealing with the Daoist martial arts. I argue that Daoist “listening” and Peirce's concept of “musement” are both to be regarded as a disciplined form of attentiveness. By attending to no predetermined thing, a person thus disciplined is “ready” for the (...) encounter with what might otherwise remain unperceived in experience, prepared to listen to voices that might otherwise be ignored. (shrink)

This new book by Michael Slater significantly extends the argument articulated in his earlier study of William James on Ethics and Faith, also published by Cambridge University Press. Slater was committed there as here to demonstrating the compatibility of pragmatism with some form of metaphysical realism. There as here he was interested in showing the affinities between James’s thought and certain ideas developed by contemporary analytical philosophers of religion. In Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion, however, the scope of (...) analysis is broadened from a focus on James to a consideration of pragmatism more generally conceived. Two early chapters on James are followed by chapters on Charles S. Peirce... (shrink)

The distance in conceptual space between the philosophical pragmatism of William James and the narrative theologies of Hans Frei and Stanley Hauerwas would appear at first glance to be significant. Hauerwas himself has measured that distance in public, when his extended critique of James supplied a good portion of the agenda for his Gifford Lectures, delivered in 2001 at St. Andrews and subsequently published as With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. In this book, Jacob (...) Goodson dramatically closes the distance, appealing consistently to James's pragmatism as a resource not only for understanding the thought of contemporary narrative theologians but also for productively... (shrink)

The concept of habit supplies one of the key ingredients not only of Charles Peirce’s philosophy, but of philosophical pragmatism more generally. In this volume, the emphasis is placed squarely on Peirce. The essays collected here represent the perspectives of a truly impressive group of Peirce scholars, working in a great variety of academic disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, biology, linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, literary studies, and aesthetics. This community of scholars is also broadly international, with essayists from a dozen different countries (...) in Europe and North and South America. The result of their collective labor is a substantial and important book, one that illuminates not only... (shrink)

The impact of Peirce's philosophy of religion on subsequent religious thinkers was almost immediate. Within five years of the appearance of Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," in 1913, Josiah Royce published his brilliant Hibbert Lectures on The Problem of Christianity, delivered at Oxford earlier that year. It was the first—and in many respects remains the most impressive—attempt to adapt Peirce's ideas for the purposes of articulating a comprehensive philosophical theology. During the last 100 years, only a (...) handful of thinkers have followed Royce's lead, first Charles Hartshorne, more recently Robert Corrington, Hermann Deuser, Robert Neville and Peter Ochs. (Other scholars have set about the... (shrink)

An earlier version of the lead article in this issue, by Nancy Frankenberry, was originally presented as the annual AJTP Lecture at the Baltimore meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November 2013. This is the final issue for which I will serve as editor of the AJTP. The opportunity during these last five years to interact with so many wonderful scholars and to facilitate the publication of their work is one for which I am grateful. Many new authors, (...) especially younger authors, who had never previously published in our journal’s pages are now a part of the AJTP “family.” This is something of which I am especially proud. I am also grateful to those individuals who provided invaluable .. (shrink)

in november of 2019, the Charles S. Peirce Society convened a session at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego, California. That session involved the presentation of papers by four panelists, each supplying comments on Robert Neville’s recently published book on the Metaphysics of Goodness, as well as Neville’s response. The papers collected in this issue of The Pluralist are all edited versions of the remarks presented in San Diego—in the case of Neville’s comments, significantly expanded and (...) revised. Taken together, they represent what was—as affirmed by numerous persons who attended the session—an extraordinary conversation. I was responsible for organizing and convening the panel... (shrink)

This insightful and provocative discussion of John Dewey’s philosophy appears a decade after Richard Gale’s publication of his important book The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge University Press, 1999). In that earlier work, Gale exposed and explored the tension in James’s thought between the robust Promethean tendency to pursue a “morally strenuous life” and a passive mystical tendency toward unity with that which is greater than oneself. The present study is a kind of sequel to that work, as Gale (...) shows the same tendencies to be operative in Dewey’s philosophy, however, not remaining in tension (as with James) but finally integrated or synthesized, so that he can be accurately portrayed as a “Promethean .. (shrink)

Toward the end of his late magnum opus on The Problem of Christianity, Josiah Royce identified loyalty with a “third attitude of the will,” contrasting it with two other attitudes that he had previously described based on his reading of Schopenhauer. Neither a simple affirmation nor a denial of the will to live, loyalty, as portrayed by Royce, is a “positive devotion of the Self to its cause.” Anyone who properly understands the “meaning of this third way,” Royce announced, “will (...) therefore be better prepared to grasp the foundations upon which the metaphysics of interpretation rests.”1 This discussion of loyalty occurs within the much broader context of a detailed and extended treatment of Charles S. Peirce’s... (shrink)

In a 1991 issue of the journal Semiotica, Christopher Hookway published a review essay devoted to my book on Peirce's Philosophy of Religion, which had appeared two years earlier, in 1989. Sometime later, in the year 2000, an adapted version of that essay was included as chapter eleven in Hookway's book entitled Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce.1 Hookway graciously admitted that he agreed with much of my interpretation of Peirce, but that he would focus his analysis on those (...) matters that he understood differently from me. Since the philosophical issues that Hookway raised are still salient, I now propose to offer my long-delayed response. The contrast between... (shrink)

Este ensaio representa uma resposta longamente adiada aos comentários feitos por Peter Ochs a respeito de minha proposta para uma teologia filosófica peirciana concebida como “teossemiótica”. O esboço para essa proposta apareceu primeiramente em 1989, com as observações de Ochs incluídas em um artigo de 1992 e, depois, em um livro publicado em 1998. Mais de duas décadas se passaram desde a última dessas publicações, mas a recente conclusão de um projeto de longo prazo que prossegue e desenvolve minha proposta (...) inicial em um manuscrito do tamanho de um livro revisitando os comentários de Ochs parece apropriado. Aqui, tento explorar tanto as afinidades quanto as divergências entre a teossemiótica e a articulação construtiva do próprio Ochs de um “pragmatismo rabínico”. Enquanto ambas as perspectivas enfatizam a significância teológica de uma leitura e releitura, elas incorporam avaliações diferenciadas dessas práticas. (shrink)

During a time period spanning from 2013 to 2015, Robert Neville published the three volumes of his magnum opus on Philosophical Theology, selected aspects of which will be the main focus of my attention in this essay.1 Rather than hover at ten thousand feet and try to provide a broad overview or a bare sketch of Neville's thought as he developed it there, I have decided to take the plunge, to focus my attention more narrowly on specific issues, while trying (...) also to illuminate as much of the rest of his philosophical theology as I possibly can. This means lingering over volume one of his trilogy, on Ultimates, to a greater extent than I do with either volume two, on Existence, or volume three, on Religion.2 Within... (shrink)

Robert Neville is the author of more than twenty books, and he is presently completing a three-volume systematic philosophical theology, a work that promises to be the crown jewel in a lifetime of extraordinary scholarly accomplishment. Considered within the framework supplied by this remarkable oeuvre, the material published in Realism in Religion takes on a special significance. The essays collected here, although in most cases modified for inclusion, first appeared in various other contexts over a period of time spanning four (...) full decades. Despite their disparate points of origin, these essays represent variations on a single general theme, articulating a consistent and forceful argument for the adoption of a .. (shrink)

early last year, i was invited to write a review for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion of Roger Ward’s recently published book on Peirce and Religion: Knowledge, Transformation, and the Reality of God. I was delighted to do so, and I am now equally pleased to participate in today’s discussion.1 My presentation here represents a natural sequel to that published review. The greater length of this paper should allow me to explain more clearly and carefully why I (...) think this book is so important and valuable, while also allowing me to clarify those places where Ward and I interpret Peirce differently and, finally, to raise a few questions.I noted in my review the unfortunate fact that... (shrink)

Just about a decade ago, at the very beginning of what has proven now to be a staggeringly long midlife crisis, I wrote a little book about the religious significance of boredom. (I think of this as yin to the yang of more commonplace considerations of the religious significance of beauty.) That book concluded with a brief meditation on “waiting,” in which I distinguished between waiting for meaning and the more proactively creative exercise of waiting on meaning. Daniel Dombrowski’s splendid (...) book on Charles Hartshorne’s aesthetics is of the latter sort, a real service to meaning, both a careful attentiveness to meaning as it is embodied in Hartshorne’s writing and the insightful extension of the latter’s .. (shrink)

However, other leading philosophers of the era--such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and J.G. Herder--placed greater emphasis on feeling, seeing moral and political ...

This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the philosophical core of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century.

Michael L. Morgan is Emeritus Chancellor Professor at Indiana University and the Grafstein Visiting Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively on ancient Greek philosophy, modern Jewish philosophy, and post-Holocaust theology and ethics.

The goal of military medicine is to conserve the fighting force necessary to prosecute just wars. Just wars are defensive or humanitarian. A defensive war protects one's people or nation. A humanitarian war rescues a foreign, persecuted people or nation from grave human rights abuse. To provide medical care during armed conflict, military medical ethics supplements civilian medical ethics with two principles: military-medical necessity and broad beneficence. Military-medical necessity designates the medical means required to pursue national self-defense or humanitarian intervention. (...) While clinical-medical necessity directs care to satisfy urgent medical needs, military-medical necessity utilizes medical care to satisfy the just aims of war. Military medicine may therefore attend the lightly wounded before the critically wounded or use medical care to win hearts and minds. The underlying principle is broad, not narrow, beneficence. The latter addresses private interests, while broad beneficence responds to the collective welfare of the political community. (shrink)

Although Lewis's personal journey was a deeply philosophical search for the most adequate worldview, the few extant books about his Christian philosophy focus on specific topics rather than his overall worldview. In this book, Michael Peterson develops a comprehensive, coherent framework for understanding Lewis's Christian worldview-from his arguments from reason, morality, and desire to his ideas about Incarnation, Trinity, and Atonement. All worldviews address fundamental questions about reality, knowledge, human nature, meaning, and so forth. Peterson therefore examines Lewis's Christian (...) approach to these same questions in interaction with other worldviews. Accenting that the intellectual strength and existential relevance of Lewis's works rest on his philosophical acumen as well as his Christian orthodoxy-which he famously called "mere Christianity"-Peterson skillfully shows how Lewis's Christian thought engages a variety of important issues raised by believers and nonbelievers alike: the problem of evil and suffering, the problem of religious diversity, the problem of meaning, the relation of prayer and providence, the relation of science and religion, the nature of humanity, and others. Just as Lewis was gifted in communicating philosophical ideas and arguments in an accessible style, Peterson has crafted a major contribution to Lewis scholarship presented in a way that will interest scholars and benefit the general reader ". (shrink)