Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality provides abundant cause for intellectual offense—including challenges to physics, to theology, and, seemingly, to common sense. Few philosophical conundrums remain unaddressed. Still, the book is stimulating and well presented.

Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality provides abundant cause for intellectual offense—including challenges to physics, to theology, and, seemingly, to common sense. Few philosophical conundrums remain unaddressed. Still, the book is stimulating and well presented.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 282-287 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience. By Paul O. Ingram. New York: Continuum, 1997. 276 pp. Paul Ingram has set out a formidable task for himself. Even though he identifies himself as an historian of religion, he has chosen to push beyond phenomenological description of (...) the religious enterprise to make a prescriptive proposal, a theology that can illuminate and guide the great faith traditions. Simultaneously, his proposal aims at interpreting the necessity and the outlines of interreligious dialogue. Such dialogue, he argues, is not a peripheral enterprise reserved for a handful of religious exotics. It is central to understanding any and all religious traditions in the postmodern world.All religions have been discovered to reflect inescapable historical and cultural relativization. The old assumptions of unconditional claims and absolute assertions are no longer tenable. The world shared by all the religions today is characterized by an unavoidable religious pluralism. It is in this context that religious affirmations must be expressed and religious life embraced. According to Ingram, this is no accident. It is an ontological inevitability. As process philosophy and its roots in modern physics [End Page 282] --and, interestingly, the Buddhist recognition of dependent co-arising (pratitya samutpada)--understand, reality is unending process. This entails the inevitable relativization and contextualization of everything--including the religions. The theological questions that emerge are crucial ones. Among them: Is there an ultimate unity underlying this diversity, generic features common to all conditioned forms of religious faith and practice? What does religious pluralism show about the nature of the Sacred and of being human? Is any one religious Way best or is this even a question worth pursuing?Ingram proposes that the answers to these questions and the only viable response to religious pluralism can be found in interreligious dialogue. He does not even consider religious exclusivism as a viable option. This means only "inclusivist" and "pluralist" approaches are worthy of consideration, approaches that he names the "theology-of-religions model" and the "primordial model" respectively. Both recognize the problem of the relativity of belief and seek to overcome it. Both see the importance of interreligious dialogue as fundamental to religious affirmation. But Ingram rejects the theology-of-religions model because, despite its openness to other religions and its willingness to have interreligious encounter shape the affirmations and life of the believing community, it is self-encapsulated. One moves out from a particular community of faith, "passing over"--to use the language of John Dunne--into another religious Way in order to be creatively transformed, but only to return once again to the original community of faith. One stays within "the theological circle" (Tillich), one does not get beyond it. Some Christians, accordingly, make a blanket assertion about the ultimate and unsurpassable lordship of Christ despite their indebtedness to the creative transformation that interreligious dialogue can produce.Ingram clearly prefers the "primordial model" even though he recognizes that some of its classical proponents have made it vulnerable to criticism. Aldous Huxley's "perennial philosophy" and Sri Ramakrishan's assertion that "all paths lead to the summit" will not do. Huxley assumes that the mystical recognition of the ineffable common root of all religion critiques the historical and culturally relative expressions of this ultimate reality. But Huxley's attempt to make an end run around the problems involved won't work. His approach is ahistorical, makes uncritical assumptions about the nature of mysticism and religious experience, and is totally undialogical. The particularities of the differing religious Ways are dissolved in a universal solvent that is anything but self-evident. The same holds true for Ramakrishnan's subtly imperialistic (and very Hindu) model. It too has no room for religious particularity and imposes a pre-conceived common denominator on the multiplicity of religious phenomena.Ingram derives his term "primordial model" from Huston Smith's argument that a "primordial tradition" can be discerned underlying the multiplicity and variety of religious expressions. His is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 right; and it will be of interest to students of modern aesthetics. But compared with Rudolf Makkreel's ground-breaking study, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, 1975), it is handicapped by an exasperating vagueness. This is mainly because Heinen does not go more deeply into Dilthey's profuse aesthetic writings from a historical perspective and on the basis of a commitment to an appropriate methodology. What we (...) get, instead, is a rather one-sided reflection on several important aspects of Dilthey's aesthetic writings. ROLF-DIETERHERRMANN University of Tennessee Young John Dewey: An Essay in American Intellectual History. By Nell Coughlan. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 187) The author's aim in this carefully researched volume is to examine the early development of Dewey's character, primarily as it is expressed in the changes in his philosophical development from the time he was a student at the University of Vermont until he left the University of Michigan to go to Chicago in 1894. The account is at its best in relating the common problems shared by Dewey, his teachers George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall and his younger colleague George Herbert Mead. All were conscientious men, concerned to develop an account of the world and of society that does not fall back on religion as a crutch, that could give some accounting of or even take advantage of new developments in empirical psychology yet still provide a role for the philosopher as a moral leader. Where in the America of the 1870s and 1880s could such a person turn? Aside from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, there was no place for the independent, secular philosopher in American colleges and universities. The safe clergyman was typically given employment; the free thinking agnostic was considered dangerous. Further, there was the problem of intellectual isolation. Coughlan brilliantly contrasts the tight knit intellectual community of Victorian England with the struggles of individual American thinkers, scattered around the United States, to find like-minded intellectual companionship. Morris tried to resolve these problems by embracing the idealism of T. H. Green and hoping for a full-time chair at Hopkins. Hall, who eventually got the chair, went into empirical psychology. His choice was safe and intellectually respectable but ignored moral matters. Mead and a young friend named Henry Castle went through a long struggle to develop a satisfactory world view. Castle never achieved success and died in a shipwreck at age 32. Mead's correspondence with Castle reveals that he endured a number of acute personal crises before becoming Dewey's colleague at Michigan and discovering the latter's newly developing "organic circuit" theory with all its implications for the development of social psychology. Dewey was the most successful of the lot. It would be easy to construe a scenario wherein the young Dewey became skeptical about Green's idealism and underwent an acute personal crisis at the prospect of a world no longer glued together by the universal mind. This apparently never happened. By his own account, Dewey's "drift" from idealism took fifteen years, 1and I suspect that this gradual disengagement served as an effective buffer against the shock of having to develop an experimental naturalism all of a sudden. At any rate, Coughlan gives the most thorough account available of the evolution of Dewey's thought during the Michigan years. Coughlan is on solid ground so long as he treats Dewey as a person who shared common intellectual problems with like-minded colleagues and teachers. But how can one reconstruct his personal life? The difficulties are real. Dewey's published writings of the period reveal little John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," in John Dewey on Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 12. 490 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of his personality. Indeed, one is moved to ask whether his personality was almost entirely submerged in his work. Colleagues, friends and students are no longer available to tell their story. There is little in the way of revealing personal correspondence that is available. Dewey was not inclined to reminisce.2 About all we have from him... (shrink)

It may seem odd to review a New York social club's yearbook, with its list of members’ addresses and series of committee reports. But such books sometimes contain material of more general interest. The latest one from the Century Association, for example, devotes 250 of its 685 pages to “Century Memorials”—that is, biographical sketches of recently deceased members, written by other members. Among the well-known figures taken up in these eighty-three sketches are the artists Richard Anuszkiewicz and Robert Motherwell; (...) the architects Henry N. Cobb and Charles A. Platt; the newspaper editors Harold Evans and Whitelaw Reid; the historians Henry F. Graff and William McFeely; the translator and literary scholar Donald Keene; the collector of literary and musical manuscripts Frederick Koch; the popular writer on Russian history Robert K. Massie; the clergyman James Parks Morton; the financier Felix G. Rohatyn; the lawyers Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Isaac N. Phelps Stokes; the literary editor Elisabeth Sifton; the university president Michael Sovern; the museum director Evan H. Turner; and the broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur. The sketches are generally well written and often richly evocative: the writers include Louis Begley, Kenneth T. Jackson, D. T. Max, and Honor Moore.The long shelf of Century volumes like this one clearly constitutes a valuable contribution to prosopographical literature. And the Century is not the only institution with such a tradition (other examples are the British Academy and the American Philosophical Society); but their publications are a frequently overlooked source, one not always available in research libraries. Unfortunately, it is also a source that seems to be diminishing: the American Antiquarian Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are examples of organizations, each with a history of providing biographical information, that are no longer doing so. Of course, the great previous runs of the former's Proceedings and the latter's Reports remain (one hopes) on the shelves for those who know to look for them. A step in the opposite direction has recently been taken by the Grolier Club, which has not had such a tradition (except for two biographical volumes in 1959 and 2000): its Gazette now includes a section of memorials in each issue. This is a welcome move, but one has to regret that so little scholarly use is made of this whole body of biographical detail and reminiscence. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to be frustrated by the outcome of an election or a decision in voting, law, economics, engineering, and other fields. Does this 'bad' result reflect poor data or poorly informed voters? Or does the disturbing conclusion reflect the choice of the decision/election procedure? Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow's famed theorem has been interpreted to mean 'no decision procedure is without flaws'. Similarly, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen dashes hope for individual liberties by showing their incompatibility with societal needs. (...) This highly accessible book offers a new, different interpretation and resolution of Arrow's and Sen's theorems. Using simple mathematics, it shows that these negative conclusions arise because, in each case, some of their assumptions negate other crucial assumptions. Once this is understood, not only do the conclusions become expected, but a wide class of other phenomena can also be anticipated. (shrink)

This is a review of CONDITIONALS: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO COMPUTER SCIENCE, edited by Crocco G., del Cerro L. Fariñas, and Herzig A., Studies in logic and computation, no. 5, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1995.

Grafts of embryonic neural tissue into the brains of adult patients are currently being used to treat Parkinson's disease and are under serious consideration as therapy for a variety of other degenerative and traumatic disorders. This target article evaluates the use of transplants to promote recovery from brain injury and highlights the kinds of questions and problems that must be addressed before this form of therapy is routinely applied. It has been argued that neural transplantation can promote functional recovery through (...) the replacement of damaged nerve cells, the reestablishment of specific nerve pathways lost as a result of injury, the release of specific neurotransmitters, or the production of factors that promote neuronal growth. The latter two mechanisms, which need not rely on anatomical connections to the host brain, are open to examination for nonsurgical, less intrusive therapeutic use. Certain subjective judgments used to select patients who will receive grafts and in assessment of the outcome of graft therapy make it difficult to evaluate the procedure. In addition, little long-term assessment of transplant efficacy and effect has been done in nonhuman primates. Carefully controlled human studies, with multiple testing paradigms, are also needed to establish the efficacy of transplant therapy. (shrink)

In this book Dr. Donald Bloesch sharply diverges from much traditional thinking on the relationship between theology and philosophy and suggests an alternative that is solidly anchored in biblical faith. Instead of seeing this relationship in terms of synthesis or correlation or even simple subordination, he calls for the conversion and transformation of philosophical meanings in the light of the biblical revelation. Philosophy can be of considerable aid to theologians, but they must take care not to let philosophical concepts (...) determine the meaning of faith. Reason can be enlisted in the service of revelation, but it cannot establish the truth of revelation. Against the irrationalism of contemporary existentialist theology and the rationalism that has pervaded both scholastic orthodoxy (Catholic and Protestant) and liberal philosophical theology, Bloesch proposes an evangelical theology of revelation that seeks to employ reason in the task of understanding the faith. The author upholds not an autonomous reason but an obedient reason, and he shows that this ideal has support in the history of theology as well as in the Bible. (shrink)

The mystery of the Jews as the chosen people of God is to be understood in light of the wider biblical view that God intends his covenant of grace for all humanity; all peoples are destined to serve the glory of God and to participate in his Kingdom.

The different ways in which contemporary theologians understand the saving work of Christ arise from the different premises with which the theological task is undertaken.

Each entry includes a brief listing of the subjects covered in the work. The volume also includes a full subject index and an author index.

Despite some clinical promise, using fetal transplants for degenerative and traumatic brain injury remains controversial and a number of issues need further attention. This response reexamines a number of questions. Issues addressed include: temporal factors relating to neural grafting, the role of behavioral experience in graft outcome, and the relationship of rebuilding of neural circuitry to functional recovery. Also discussed are organization and type of transplanted tissue, the of transplant viability, and whether transplants are really needed to obtain functional recovery (...) after brain damage. (shrink)

The concept of “the good life” is not one that receives much attention from conventional economic theory.1 About the closest it comes to such attention is in the area of welfare economics and here it is mostly concerned with the distribution of costs and benefits of various economic choices and wherein benefits are measured in terms of utility and costs in terms of disutility or utility foregone. It is usually taken for granted that utility is a function of consumption of (...) goods and services, and disutility is a function of the “toil and trouble” associated with the effort to acquire goods and services. Labor, therefore, is typically taken to be a major source of disutility. Even many economists will admit that .. (shrink)

Johnstone, H. W., Jr. Rhetoric and communication in philosophy.--Smith, C. R. and Douglas, D. G. Philosophical principles in the traditional and emerging views of rhetoric.--Wallace, K. R. Bacon's conception of rhetoric.--Thonssen, L. W. Thomas Hobbes's philosophy of speech.--Walter, O. M., Jr. Descartes on reasoning.--Douglas, D. G. Spinoza and the methodology of reflective knowledge in persuasion.--Howell, W. S. John Locke and the new rhetoric.--Doering, J. F. David Hume on oratory.--Douglas, D. G. A neo-Kantian approach to the epistomology of judgment in criticism.--Bevilacqua, (...) V. M. Lord Kames's theory of rhetoric.--Brockriede, W. E. Bentham's philosophy of rhetoric.--Anderson, R. E. Kierkegaard's theory of communication.--Macksoud, S. J. Ludwig Wittgenstein, radical operationism and rhetorical stance.--Stewart, J. J. L. Austin's speech act analysis.--Torrence, D. L. A philosophy of rhetoric from Bertrand Russell.--Clark, A. Martin Buber, dialogue, and the philosophy of rhetoric.--Bennett, W. Kenneth Burke--a philosophy in defense of un-reason.--Dearin, R. D. The philosophical basis of Chaim Perelman's theory of rhetoric. (shrink)

The late Frank M. Turner’s revisionist biography, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion has caused controversy. This essay considers one of Turner’s controversial contentions, namely, that Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is a naturalistic account of the history of the Christian church—an account devoid of the presence of Providence.

It is well known that decision methods based on pairwise rankings can suffer from a wide range of difficulties. These problems are addressed here by treating the methods as systems, where each pair is looked upon as a subsystem with an assigned task. In this manner, the source of several difficulties is equated with the standard concern that the “whole need not be the sum of its parts.” These problems arise because the objectives assigned to subsystems need not be compatible (...) with that of the system. Knowing what causes the difficulties leads to resolutions. (shrink)

The indigenization of Christ to non-Western cultures is becoming a fact that may reshape Christology far more radically than any alternative now at work in academic circles.

The Holy Spirit is the actuality of God's freedom to be not only “for us” but also “in us.”.