Different religious traditions offer apparently very different pictures of the world. How are we to make sense of this radical diversity of religious belief? In this book, Professor Godlove argues that religions are alternative conceptual frameworks, the categories of which organise experience in diverse ways. He traces the history of this idea from Kant to Durkheim, and then proceeds to discuss two constraints on the diversity of all human judgment and belief: first that human experience is made possible by shared, (...) a priori rules, and second, that as language-users we must presuppose that we hold the vast bulk of our beliefs in common. Given these unavoidable constraints, it is clear how religions may offer encompassing symbolic systems that often diverge dramatically from one another. 'An original and brilliant critique of Durkheim and Kant from within the framework of Davidson's semantic theory. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the academic study of religion, and the problems of relativism and the diversity of belief.' -- Hans H. Penner, Dartmouth CollegeDifferent religious traditions offer apparently very different pictures of the world. How are we to make sense of this radical diversity of religious belief? In this book, Professor Godlove argues that religions are alternative conceptual frameworks, the categories of which organise experience in diverse ways. He traces the history of this idea from Kant to Durkheim, and then proceeds to discuss two constraints on the diversity of all human judgment and belief: first that human experience is made possible by shared, a priori rules, and second, that as language-users we must presuppose that we hold the vast bulk of our beliefs in common. Given these unavoidable constraints, it is clear how religions may offer encompassing symbolic systems that often diverge dramatically from one another. 'An original and brilliant critique of Durkheim and Kant from within the framework of Davidson's semantic theory. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the academic study of religion, and the problems of relativism and the diversity of belief.' -- Hans H. Penner, Dartmouth College. (shrink)

Terry F. Godlove discovers in Immanuel Kant's theoretical philosophy resources that have much wider implications beyond Christianity and the philosophical issues that concern monotheism and its beliefs. For Godlove, Kant's insights, when properly applied, can help rejuvenate our understanding of the general study of religion and its challenges. He therefore bypasses what is usually considered to be the "Kantian philosophy of religion" and instead focuses on more fundamental issues, such as Kant's account of concepts, experience, and reason and their significance (...) in controversial matters. _Kant and the Meaning of Religion_ is a subtle and penetrating effort by a leading contemporary philosopher of religion to redefine and reshape the contours of his discipline through a sustained reflection on Kant's so-called "humanizing project.". (shrink)

Philosophers of religion are indebted to Nancy Frankenberry for a trail of important papers and books in which she scouts the line between philosophical and religious thinking. Robert Neville has already conveyed some sense of the breadth and scope of her work—of the difficult landscape through which she has guided us. So I am going to go small. I am going to focus on two clusters of issues that have been central to her thinking. I have had the good fortune (...) over the years to think with Frankenberry about these issues. With this paper I am, as it were, reporting in on where I am at the moment in our continuing conversation. The first cluster of issues centers on a different kind of conversation: the one.. (shrink)

Today it is no news to point out that Kant’s doctrine of space as a form of intuition is motivated by epistemological considerations independent of his commitment to Euclidean geometry. These considerations surface—apparently without his own recognition—in Poincaré’s, Science and Hypothesis, the very work that helped turn analytically-minded philosophers away from the Critique. I argue that we should view Poincaré as refining Kant’s doctrine of space as the form of intuition, even as we see both views as arbitrarily limited—in Kant’s (...) case, to Euclidean transformations, and, in Poincaré's, to geometries of constant curvature. Both run together the question whether space is an a priori form of intuition with the question whether there are a priori constraints on its applied geometry. At his best, Kant sees—what Poincaré does not—that they are connected by a form of cognition consisting in the intuition of homogeneous pluralities, of totalities apprehended as unities. (shrink)

Abstract Robert Hanna has recently advanced a theory of non-conceptual content, the central claim of which is that "it is perfectly possible for there to be directly referential intuitions without concepts". Hanna bases this claim in Kant's account of intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason, and so extends his Kantian non-conceptualism beyond the epistemology of empirical knowledge into the realm of mathematics. Thus, Hanna has proposed a Kantian non-conceptualist solution to a well-known dilemma set out by Paul Benacerraf in (...) his 1973 paper, "Mathematical Truth". I argue that Hanna is right about Kant's non-conceptualism, but mistaken in its application to Benacerraf's Dilemma. (shrink)

Godlove argues that Dauenhauer, whatever the merits of Silence,suffers from a fundamental confusion about the topic of silence itself. Godlove's paper is presented here in its entirety.

My topic is a long-standing tension in the interpretation of religion. On the one hand, it seems undeniable — seems almost to go without saying — that liturgical and sacrificial practices, sacred dance, divination, procession and pilgrimage are intentional actions undertaken by persons. Yet there is a distinguished tradition in the study of religion according to which religious activity is typically caused by forces over which the agent has little or no control. Visible, latter-day members of this tradition include Hume, (...) Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and, in some moods, Wittgenstein, but its roster is by no means limited to the religiously unmusical. (shrink)

Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. By Ronald Dworkin. Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartse. By Gareth B. Matthews.

Christopher Insole argues that we have underestimated the importance of the following theological problem in the development of Kant’s mature, critical philosophy: “How can it be said that we are free, given that we are created by God?” (p. 5). The author makes a strong case that this problem was formative for a range of Kant’s pre-critical views. What role it continues to play in the 1780s and beyond will be, as the author himself notes, controversial. Chapters 1–3 contain lucid (...) and, especially for those familiar only with Kant’s critical period, helpful discussions of several pre-critical texts together with an engagement with selected secondary literature. Thus, readers who know only Kant’s destruction of the divine proofs, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), may be surprised to find him defending versions of the ontological and cosmological proofs in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763). Here Insole’s exposition is nuanced... (shrink)