The paper reconstructs the trip to Rome of the first Bollandist Fathers, providing numerous historical, documentary and cultural details, while offering a generous cross-section of the academic life of the period.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images (...) of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music. (shrink)

Background. Attending to goal-relevant information can leave us metaphorically ‘blind’ or ‘deaf’ to the next relevant information while searching among distracters. This temporal cost lasting for about a half a second on the human selective attention has been long explored using the attentional blink paradigm. Although there is evidence that certain visual stimuli relating to one’s area of expertise can be less susceptible to attentional blink effects, it remains unexplored whether the dynamics of temporal selective attention vary with expertise and (...) objects types in the auditory modality. Methods. Using the auditory version of the attentional blink paradigm, the present study investigates whether certain auditory objects relating to musical and perceptual expertise could have an impact on the transient costs of selective attention. In this study, expert cellists and novice participants were asked to first identify a target sound, and then to detect instrumental timbres of cello or organ, or human voice as a second target in a rapid auditory stream. Results. The results showed moderate evidence against the attentional blink effect for voices independent of participants’ musical expertise. Experts outperformed novices in their overall accuracy levels of target identification and detection, reflecting a clear benefit of musical expertise. Importanly, the musicianship advantage disappeared when the human voices served as the second target in the stream. Discussion. The results are discussed in terms of stimulus salience, the advantage of voice processing, as well as perceptual and musical expertise in relation to attention and working memory performances. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims that we as body-subjects have an immediate sensational understanding of the world. A body that perceives and experience the world before any thought and word can render it. The words we use describing sensations are interpretations of sense-experiences, and will never render the total bodily understanding of the world. This article gives a brief insight of what an understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject implies for the researcher in body-phenomenological studies of toddlers.

Is there a language of transcendence which does not fall under the well-worn categories of monism, theism, pantheism, biblical or pagan monotheism, personal or tripersonal God, or an impersonal absolute, conceived as immanent and/or transcendent? The present set of studies from different fields of research centers on the question whether it is possible to speak at all of transcendence or a divinity, and if it is, under what limitations does such speech proceed. In current discussion in theology and in philosophy (...) of religion, there is a pervasive awareness that the inherited terms and alternatives, developed in the western tradition, no longer facilitate an adequate understanding of the divine. Increasing familiarity with the languages of 'immanence' and 'transcendence' (under erasure) in Hindu and Buddhist thought has further jumbled our coordinates, while holding out the promise of a more subtle and vital engagement with the matter itself of religious inquiry. A further long-established distinction, between 'personal' and 'impersonal, ' also takes on rich new hues in Asian contexts, where the very notion of 'person' may undergo unsettling critiques. Transgressing the categories of 'personal' and 'impersonal' points to the mystical depth of religious traditions, emphasizes their openness and reintegrates essential elements of both perspectives. Advancing with curiosity and caution, all the contributors take seriously the diversity of historical religious traditions, while nevertheless searching for a fresh language that may connect these traditions and provide a common ground of understanding. (shrink)

Introduction i. Character of the Book The central thesis of this book is that experiential awareness of God, or as I shall be saying, the perception of God, ...

After an exposition of some key concepts in scholastic ontology, this paper examines four arguments presented by Francisco Suarez for the thesis, commonly held by Christian Aristotelians, that God's causal contribution to effects occurring in the ordinary course of nature goes beyond His merely conserving created substances along with their active and passive causal powers. The postulation of a further causal contribution, known as God's general concurrence (or general concourse), can be viewed as an attempt to accommodate an element of (...) truth present in occasionalist accounts of divine causality. (shrink)

In this clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience, William P. Alston argues that the perception of God—his term for direct experiential awareness of God—makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience.

Can God create an unliftable stone? Beall & Cotnoir propose that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). However, this yields a revenge paradox on whether God can eschew gaps. Can God avoid gappy ascriptions of power? Either way, God’s power seems to have limits. In response, it may be said that ascribing God the power to avoid gaps is itself gappy—it concerns a power that God neither has nor lacks. Yet this ends (...) up being inconsistent, for it implies that God definitely lacks that power. Following Aquinas, perhaps Beall & Cotnoir could accept this lack and still uphold omnipotence, suggesting that the power to avoid gaps is impossible for God. Yet the Aquinian stratagem is enough to block the original paradox, which saps the motivation to proffer truth-value gaps in addition. I conclude that the gappy solution is either inadequate or insufficiently motivated. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.

God Never ChangesOr does he? God has been getting a makeover of late, a "reinvention" that has incited debate and troubled scholars and laypeople alike. Modern theological sectors as diverse as radical feminism and the new “open theism” movement are attacking the classical Christian view of God and vigorously promoting their own images of Divinity.God Under Fire refutes the claim that major attributes of the God of historic Christianity are false and outdated. This book responds to some increasingly popular alternate (...) theologies and the ways in which they cast classical Christian theism in a negative light. Featuring an impressive cast of world-class biblical scholars, philosophers, and apologists, God Under Fire begins by addressing the question, “Should the God of Historic Christianity Be Replaced?” From there, it explores issues as old as time and as new as the inquest into the “openness of God.” How, for instance, does God risk, relate, emote, and change? Does he do these things, and if so, why? These and other questions are investigated with clarity, bringing serious scholarship into popular reach.Above all, this collection of essays focuses on the nature of God as presented in the Scriptures and as Christians have believed for centuries. God Under Fire builds a solid and appealing case for the God of classical Christian theism, who in recent years—as through the centuries—has been the God under fire. (shrink)

God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism is a defense of God's aseity and unique status as the Creator of all things apart from Himself in the face of the challenge posed by mathematical Platonism. After providing the biblical, theological, and philosophical basis for the traditional doctrine of divine aseity, William Lane Craig explains the challenge presented to that doctrine by the Indispensability Argument for Platonism, which postulates the existence of uncreated abstract objects. Craig provides detailed examination (...) of a wide range of responses to that argument, both realist and anti-realist, with a view toward assessing the most promising options for the theist. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, this groundbreaking volume engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. (shrink)

Strangers, Gods and Monster is a fascinating look at how human identity is shaped by three powerful but enigmatic forces. Often overlooked in accounts of how we think about ourselves and others, Richard Kearney skillfully shows, with the help of vivid examples and illustrations, how the human outlook on the world is formed by the mysterious triumvirate of strangers, gods and monsters. Throughout, Richard Kearney shows how strangers, gods and monsters do not merely reside in myths or fantasies but constitute (...) a central part of our cultural unconscious. Above all, he argues that until we understand better that the Other resides deep within ourselves, we can have little hope of understanding how our most basic fears and desires manifest themselves in the external world and how we can learn to live with them. (shrink)

Naturalistic ethics is the reigning paradigm among contemporary ethicists; in God and Cosmos, Baggett and Walls argue that this approach is seriously flawed. This book canvasses a broad array of secular and naturalistic ethical theories in an effort to test their adequacy in accounting for moral duties, intrinsic human value, prospects for radical moral transformation, and the rationality of morality. In each case, the authors argue, although various secular accounts provide real insights and indeed share common ground with theistic ethics, (...) the resources of classical theism and orthodox Christianity provide the better explanation of the moral realities under consideration. Among such realities is the fundamental insight behind the problem of evil, namely, that the world is not as it should be. Baggett and Walls argue that God and the world, taken together, exhibit superior explanatory scope and power for morality classically construed, without the need to water down the categories of morality, the import of human value, the prescriptive strength of moral obligations, or the deliverances of the logic, language, and phenomenology of moral experience. This book thus provides a cogent moral argument for God's existence, one that is abductive, teleological, and cumulative. (shrink)

The adolescing self -- Imaging and fettered imaging -- Characteristics of the superego God -- Adolescing religion and formal religion -- Images of the superego God -- The adult self -- Unfettered imaging and religious experiencing -- Characteristics of the living God -- Adult religion and integral spirituality -- Images of the living God -- Transformation and why it gets so little attention -- What hinders transformation -- What facilitates transformation -- Images of transformation.

This paper proposes that Moses Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours be viewed as the final chapter in a philosophy of imperfection that Mendelssohn had been developing over the course of his life. It is further argued that this philosophy of imperfection is still of philosophical interest. After demonstrating that the concept of imperfection animates Mendelssohn’s early work, this paper turns towards the specific arguments about imperfection Mendelssohn made in the midst of the pantheism controversy—in particular, the claim that human imperfection attests to (...) an independent existence. Simply put: God knows human imperfection, but does not possess it. Therefore, there is a sense in which humans, because of our imperfections, are distinct from God. It is shown that, at least in part, Mendelssohn’s entry into the pantheism controversy, and his willingness to engage even his recently departed friend Lessing in argument, is part of his strategy to preserve his philosophy of imperfection. (shrink)

(i) God is omniscient; therefore, for any change, C, among particulars, God knows the occurrence of C. (ii) If God knows the occurrence of C, then X. (iii) not-X. It is clear that the set of propositions (i)—(iii) is inconsistent. This is the general form of two problems—which I call the ‘problem of change in knowledge’ (PCK) and the ‘problem of change in essence’ (PCE)—for Avicenna concerning God’s knowledge of particulars. No work in the secondary literature has discussed exactly what (...) PCK and PCE are. In this paper, I will clarify exactly what they are. (shrink)

Euteleology is a metaphysics according to which reality is inherently purposive and the contingent Universe exists ultimately because reality’s overall telos, the supreme good, is realized within it. This book provides an exposition of euteleology and a defence of its coherence. The main aim is to establish that euteleological metaphysics provides a religiously adequate alternative to the ‘personal-omniGod’ understanding of theism prevalent amongst analytic philosophers. The quest for an alternative to understanding the God of the Abrahamic traditions as an omnipotent, (...) omniscient, morally perfect personal being is motivated by criticizing the religious adequacy of this conception of God. This criticism deploys a ‘normatively relativized’ version of the ‘logical’ Argument from Evil: it is argued that an omnipotent personal agent would unavoidably be responsible for a morally flawed relationship with human beings caught up in horrendous evils. Reasons are given for preferring a ‘non-personalist’ account of theism, and the religious adequacy of a euteleological theism is then defended against two main objections—first, that it faces a problem of evil that threatens its coherence, and, second, that it cannot make good sense of the practices of prayer and worship that are essential to theist religion. An important theme is that, though God is not a personal being, nor any kind of ‘being amongst beings’ in basic euteleological ontology, God-talk may be understood as resting on a radical analogy that is apt for enabling right human responses to ultimate divine reality. (shrink)

The God of Western religion is said to be eternal. But what does that mean? Is God somehow beyond time, living a life that does not involve one thing after another? Or is God's relationship to time much more like ours, so that God's eternality just consists in there being no time at which God doesn't exist? Even for non-believers, these issues have interesting implications for the relation between historical and scientific findings on the one hand, and religion on the (...) other. This Element introduces the reader to the requisite metaphysical background, and then examines reasons for and against thinking of God as timeless. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

'Devdutt Pattanaik is an exponent of myths, using them [to] deepen storytelling, and obtain a sense of life and living' -Scroll.in Hindu mythology is vast and voluminous. There is so much we don't know or that has not been presented in a simplified way, making sense to contemporary times. This special omnibus edition brings together two bestselling books by Devdutt Pattanaik, India's most famous and renowned mythologist. My Gita and My Hanuman Chalisa are part of a series where Devdutt does (...) 'darshan' of the scriptures, not just gods, and helps readers navigate through scriptures that seem forbidding (Bhagavad Gita) and simple ones whose sophistication is often overlooked (Hanuman Chalisa). (shrink)

We are living at the dawn of the first truly scientific picture of the universe-as-a-whole, yet people are still dragging along prescientific ideas about God that cannot be true and are even meaningless in the universe we now know we live in. This makes it impossible to have a coherent big picture of the modern world that includes God. But we don't have to accept an impossible God or else no God. We can have a real God if we redefine (...) God in light of knowledge no one ever had before. The key question is, “Could anything actually exist in the scientific universe that is worthy of the name, God?” My answer is yes: God is an “emergent phenomenon,” as real as the global economy or the government or the worldwide web, which are all emergent phenomena. But God arose from something deeper: the complex interactions of all humanity's aspirations. An emerging God has enormous implications. (shrink)

It is common to appeal to governing laws of nature in order to explain the existence of natural regularities. Classical theism, however, maintains the sovereignty thesis: everything distinct from God is created by him and is under his guidance and control. It follows from this that God must somehow be responsible for natural laws and regularities. Therefore, theists need an account of the relation between regularities, laws, and God. I examine competing accounts of laws of nature and conclude that dispositional (...) essentialism provides the most satisfactory explanation of the relation between, and. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is that chance is neither unreal nor non-existent but an integral part of God's creation.