This essay explores the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can be understood within the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. Particular attention is given to describing and interpreting what I call the transcendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffereing persons come up against the limits of what can be accounted for in (...) ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. The conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering, however, differs from the model of God in western theism as an absolutely transcendent, all powerful, immutable and impassible being. (shrink)

This essay explores the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can be understood within the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. Particular attention is given to describing and interpreting what I call the transcendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffereing persons come up against the limits of what can be accounted for in (...) ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. The conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering, however, differs from the model of God in western theism as an absolutely transcendent, all powerful, immutable and impassible being. (shrink)

In Towards a World Theology, Cantwell Smith offers a new approach to the issue of conflicting belief claims in the world religions. He argues that most approaches err in considering religion in terms of belief rather than faith. He proposes a world theology of faith that requires persons to move beyond their particular traditions in order to interpret comprehensively the religious faith of human kind. I present Cantwell Smith’s central thesis, analyzing it in term of the relation between faith and (...) belief. I argue that faith and belief are distinguishable but not separable and that to do what Cantwell Smith proposes would require an interpretive scheme or metaphysical theory that can be evaluated in accordance with its ability to make sense of the experience of humankind. (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

This collection of original articles, written by leading contemporary European and American philosophers of religion, is presented in celebration of the publication of the fiftieth volume of the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Following the Editor's Introduction, John Macquarrie, Adriaan Peperzak, and Hent de Vries take up central themes in continental philosophy of religion. Macquarrie analyzes postmodernism and its influence in philosophy and theology. Peperzak argues for a form of universality different from that of modern philosophy, and de Vries (...) analyzes an intrinsic and structural relationship between religion and the media. The next three essays discuss issues in analytic philosophy of religion. Philip Quinn argues that religious diversity reduces the epistemic status of exclusivism and makes it possible for a religious person to be justified while living within a pluralistic environment. William Wainwright plumbs the work of Jonathan Edwards in order to better understand debates concerning freedom, determinism, and the problem of evil, and William Hasker asks whether theological incompatibilism is less inimical to traditional theism than some have supposed. Representing the Thomist tradition, Fergus Kerr challenges standard readings of Aquinas on the arguments for the existence of God. David Griffin analyzes the contributions of process philosophy to the problem of evil and the relation between science and religion. Illustrating comparative approaches, Keith Ward argues that the Semitic and Indian traditions have developed a similar concept of God that should be revised in view of post-Enlightenment theories of the individual and the historical. Keith Yandell explores themes in the Indian metaphysical tradition and considers what account of persons is most in accord with reincarnation and karma doctrines. Feminist philosophy of religion is represented in Pamela Anderson's article, in which she argues for a gender-sensitive and more inclusive approach to the craving for infinitude. (shrink)

Two themes form the basis for this volume. First, the author argues that the relation between an outer transient nature and an inner eternal nature provides a thread which enables the interpreter to trace a coherent point of view and provide an immanent criticism of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts. Second, he argues that there is a dialectic of self and other running throughout the pseudonymous works which challenges the view that Kierkegaard’s image of the human being is that of a single (...) solitary one. He develops these themes by applying a structural analysis to these works. (shrink)

H d lewis gives a central role to religious experience in his philosophy of religion, But argues that religious experience is not some merely non-Cognitive event for which no justification can be given. I introduce lewis' understanding of religious experience and critically evaluate its implications for religious knowledge, The relation between experience and argument and the language of religion.

Otto Poggeler’s Der Denkweg Martin Heidegger was first published in 1963, one year after the English translation of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Widely acclaimed as the most comprehensive and accurate study of the development of Heidegger’s thought, a second unrevised edition was make available in Germany in 1983. Now thanks to the translators, Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber, this important work is available in English for the frist time. Included is a Preface to what Poggeler calls the “American Edition” and (...) an “Afterword to the Second Edition” in which Poggeler discusses recent developments in Heidegger studies including Heidegger’s political entanglements. (shrink)

AT MID-CENTURY, MOST PHILOSOPHICAL ROUTES to transcendence appeared closed. Philosophers and theologians often cooperated in associating transcendence with dubious metaphysics, the otherworldly and the supernatural. This attitude towards transcendence was captured most sharply perhaps, in the work of the logical positivists, but it was shared for different reasons by the positivists of revelation. The rebirth of idealism in British and American philosophy of religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been widely succeeded by realism and naturalism of (...) the kind that, with some exceptions, tended to be indifferent, if not openly hostile to philosophical and theological talk of transcendent reality. Between the wars, metaphysical utterances were condemned by the logical positivists and their immediate successors to the scrap heap of the non-cognitive. Kerygmatic theologians, with their emphasis upon the ontological difference of transcendence and their appeal to the authority of revelation and faith, joined hands with the philosophers in ruling out any connecting point between transcendence and immanence, between the sacred and the secular in the ordinary experience of persons. The positivists of revelation no less than the logical positivists conferred an independence upon the world. Transcendent reality was reduced either to the non-cognitive, or to the miracle of faith and revelation. (shrink)

This is a translation of volume 32 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, edited by Ingtraud Gorland. The volume consists of a lecture course given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg during the winter term, 1930–31. Although the lectures focus on Section A and Section B of the Phenomenology, they do not form a commentary in the ordinary sense. They represent Heidegger’s effort to participate in and bring to the surface what is said to be unthought in the movement of thinking called (...) the phenomenology of spirit. Heidegger begins with a discussion of the several titles of the work providing us with a preliminary understanding of this thinking. Then, bypassing the Preface and Introduction, he engages in a sustained dialogue with Hegel’s text on consciousness and unconsciousness. The self exposition of reason which is recognized in German Idealism as absolute and is explicated by Hegel as spirit is said to be called forth by the fundamental question of nothing itself. Hegel uses the words being and beings only for a certain region of beings and a certain mode of being in Heidegger’s sense. What Hegel means by being and beings Heidegger means by das Vorhandene and seine Vorhandenheit. There is then a difference between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s understanding of being, but. (shrink)

For more than thirty years, the question of how sentences about God manage to refer has been in the background and often in the foreground of discussions of religious language and metaphysics. In some cases philosophers of religion and theologians have spoken vaguely about or given up all together claims to depict reality in religious discourse. Janet Martin Soskice challenges these views on the grounds that they are rooted in a bankrupt form of empiricism and that they fail to be (...) consistent with the aim of traditional Christian faith to refer to God as a reality. She argues for the necessity of metaphorical language in speaking of God and for a theory of metaphor consistent with critical realism in theology. (shrink)

In this engaging study, George Allan—Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and long time academic Dean at Dickinson College—brings us into the heart of the current debates about undergraduate curricula led by canonists on the one side and anti-canonists on the other side. Dogmatically defending the traditional educational canon, rejecting it, or vastly expanding its content with respect to historical eras, ethnic groups, or disciplinary traditions, Allan argues, are all recipes for disaster. The first six chapters of the book are devoted to (...) a description and critical analysis of what he calls the content canonists, the procedural or methodological canonists, the anti-canonists, and the relative canonists. His analysis of the different senses of the educational canon and their metaphysical underpinnings leads him to conclude that we end up with a simple polarity with both sides seeming to presuppose the truth of their predetermined views. “Either there is an objective hierarchy of importance that undergirds a rationally defensible standard by which to rank things as essential or unessential, as central or peripheral. Or there is no such hierarchy, and in the absence of any objective standard all judgments of importance are subjective, situationally biased, and probably self-serving. Either the quest for a viable educational canon is justified, however difficult such an undertaking might be, or it is a chimera that we would be better off to avoid”. (shrink)

Many readers of this review will be aware that Karl Barth, like Rudolf Bultmann, was a student of Wilhelm Herrmann and that Barth was both indebted to and critical of aspects of Herrmann's thought. Fewer, however, will have much familiarity with the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism and its influence on the thought of Herrmann and Barth. This study is intended to fill that gap. During the time that Herrmann taught at Marburg, the theological school changed from a rather provincial academic (...) setting to an international center with such distinguished teachers as Weiss, Jülicher, and Otto. At the same time the Marburg philosophical faculty became one of the leading centers for the study of Neo-Kantianism and counted among its leading scholars Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Although Fisher believes that a case could be made for showing an enduring influence of the Marburg Neo-Kantian philosophy on Barth's theology, it is his intent in this book to trace the influence of this school on Barth's earliest theology, that written during the brief period that he was a pastor in Geneva immediately following his theological studies at Marburg, and before his break with theological liberalism. The first two chapters of the book are devoted to a study of Marburg Neo-Kantianism with particular reference to Cohen and Natorp, who tried to make a place for religion within the confines of a way of thinking that tended to limit knowledge claims to three spheres, logico-scientific, ethical, and aesthetic. Initially Cohen reduced religion to ethics but later sought to make a special place for religion. Natorp proposed a religion without God in which religious feeling was identified with the hidden psychic motivation of all human and cognitive striving. Herrmann, who is discussed in the third chapter, regarded his own work as complementary to Cohen and Natorp and sought to mediate between knowledge of the world represented by the Marburg philosophers and the Protestant tradition of Christian faith. Following the discussion of Neo-Kantianism and Herrmann, Fischer provides an extended analysis of Barth's early work, including two unpublished manuscripts, showing the influence of the Marburg philosophers on Barth through Herrmann and at times directly through Barth's study of the works of Cohen and Natorp. (shrink)

This is the third volume growing out of Lewis's Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1966-68. In the first volume, The Elusive Mind, Lewis argued for a distinction and interaction between mental and physical processes and in the second volume, The Elusive Self, he focused on the problem of self-identify. Lewis had projected a final volume, The Elusive Self and God, but the first part of that project has been rounded off into a discussion of free will (...) and its implications for morality and religion, now published as Freedom and Alienation. Lewis hopes to add one more volume focusing on the idea of God. (shrink)

John Macquarrie's Hensley Henson Lectures for 1993-94 delivered at the University of Oxford may serve two different but not mutually exclusive audiences. First, as a brief, concise, reliable, and yet not uncritical survey of Heidegger's thought from Being and Time through his later meditative thinking of Being, this book stands at the top of my list. Following a discussion of Heidegger's career and early writings, Macquarrie devotes two chapters to his major work, Being and Time. He makes it clear that (...) Heidegger was primarily concerned with developing a general ontology, not philosophical anthropology as many persons initially thought. The fourth chapter, entitled "Theology and Metaphysics," focuses in particular on the essay "What Is Metaphysics?" including the later postscript and introduction, Introduction to Metaphysics, and A Letter on Humanism. These works take up some of the issues unfinished in Heidegger's major work and point the way towards a more direct focus on the question of Being itself. Chapter 5 is concerned with Heidegger's reflections on thinghood, technology, and art showing his development beyond the primarily instrumental world of work in his early writings to a much richer, perhaps even spiritual conception of world. In chapter 6 Macquarrie discusses three closely related topics in Heidegger's later work, thinking, language, and poetry. Here we see Heidegger's progression beyond traditional philosophical and metaphysical thinking of Being to what he calls meditative thinking, a kind of thinking and speaking of Being that has much in common with poetic thinking and speaking and an understanding of Being that finds parallels in some western and eastern mystical traditions. For the title of his seventh chapter, Macquarrie chooses the title of the well-known interview with Heidegger, "Only A God Can Save Us," published in Der Spiegel after his death. He is primarily concerned in this chapter with the understanding of Being, theology, and God. Macquarrie delays until his final chapter the discussion of Heidegger's relation to National Socialism which comprises half of the Der Spiegel article. With characteristic balance Macquarrie argues that although Heidegger's conduct at the time should not be excused or glossed over it needs to be seen in the particular historical and political context which he outlines. To this he adds two personal notes based on his experiences with German prisoners following the cessation of hostilities in 1945 and a conversation with Hannah Arendt. The conversation with Hannah Arendt took place at Heathrow Airport on May 19, 1973 where Dr. Arendt was on her way to Europe for her summer holiday. Heidegger had suggested that Edward Robinson and Macquarrie consult with Arendt if they had any special difficulties translating Being and Time, and Macquarrie and she continued to have contacts following the completion of the translation. Their conversation turned to the sales of the translation of Being and Time which had been quite large, and Macquarrie commented that Heidegger must be making a good bit of money from the translation. Arendt replied that Heidegger was not much of a business man and that most of the money went to the publisher. Macquarrie then asked, "Would you say then that it was because he is not a man of affairs that he became so involved with the Nazis in 1933?" "Yes," she said, "quite so.". (shrink)

EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHERS of religion and theologians speaking out of a Kierkegaardian tradition have argued that Christian theism can be neither proven nor shown to be probable in any strict sense of the word, that God is not an object of thought, that there can be no religious Weltanschauung, and that one can know and speak of God only out of a relationship to Him. This view has the value of preserving the element of unconditional commitment considered by many to be (...) essential to Christian faith but has resulted in an inability to make a rational case for belief in God and in an inability to say anything significant about God. Existentialists have increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome of this approach and have insisted that religious faith is a way of being in the world, a matter of understanding as well as commitment and that religious faith must find expression in some ontology if it is to claim to speak significantly of God. (shrink)

From time to time philosophers are accused of discussing philosophical issues only with those with whom they share much in common. This is not the case with Hywel Lewis and this volume is an excellent demonstration of that. For some years Lewis has defended a version of what is called the Platonic-Cartesian dualism of the mental and the physical. In this volume he continues to defend this position against British, American, and Continental philosophers. The Elusive Self is the second volume (...) of his Gifford Lectures. In the first volume, entitled The Elusive Mind, he argued for a distinction and interaction between mental and physical processes and in this volume he is concerned primarily with the problem of self identity. In the preface to this book he promises a third and final volume which will develop the implications of his view of persons for morality and religion. (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.