"There is no attempt here to lay down as inviolable or to legislate certain ways of looking at things or ways of proceeding for philosophers of religion, only proposals for how to deal with a range of basic issues-proposals that I hope will ignite much fruitful discussion and which, in any case, I shall take as a basis for my own ongoing work in the field."-from the Preface Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, (...) J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of religious and irreligious belief, the varieties of religious skepticism, and the nature of religion itself. From the author's searching analysis of faith emerges a novel understanding of propositional faith as requiring the absence of belief. Schellenberg asks what the aims of the field should be, setting out a series of principles for carrying out some of the most important of these aims. His account of justification considers not only belief but also other responses to religious claims and distinguishes the justification of responses, propositions, and persons. Throughout Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg is laying the groundwork for an elaboration of his own vision while at the same time suggesting how philosophers might rethink assumptions guiding most of today's work in analytic philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Any successful account of general terms must explain our ability to apply terms correctly to new instances. Many philosophers have thought resemblance offers an ontologically sparse basis for such an account. However, Any natural and plausible account of general terms on the basis of resemblance requires quite a rich ontology, Including at least second order properties and relations. Given a sufficiently rich structure of resemblances, We can surely account for the application of many general terms. I argue, However, That our (...) ability to recognize shapes and to apply terms for shapes cannot be explained on the basis of resemblance. (shrink)

Probability is sometimes regarded as a universal panacea for epistemology. It has been supposed that the rationality of belief is almost entirely a matter of probabilities. Unfortunately, those philosophers who have thought about this most extensively have tended to be probability theorists first, and epistemologists only secondarily. In my estimation, this has tended to make them insensitive to the complexities exhibited by epistemic justification. In this paper I propose to turn the tables. I begin by laying out some rather simple (...) and uncontroversial features of the structure of epistemic justification, and then go on to ask what we can conclude about the connection between epistemology and probability in the light of those features. My conclusion is that probability plays no central role in epistemology. This is not to say that probability plays no role at all. In the course of the investigation, I defend a pair of probabilistic acceptance rules which enable us, under some circumstances, to arrive at justified belief on the basis of high probability. But these rules are of quite limited scope. The effect of there being such rules is merely that probability provides one source for justified belief, on a par with perception, memory, etc. There is no way probability can provide a universal cure for all our epistemological ills. (shrink)

"A sequel to Pollock's How to Build a Person, this volume builds upon that theoretical groundwork for the implementation of rationality through artificial ...

This exceptionally successful survey text introduces the teachings and practice of Islam from its earliest origins up to its contemporary practice. John L. Esposito, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, traces the development of Islam and its impact on world history and politics.Lucidly written and expansive in scope, Islam: The Straight Path, Updated Fifth Edition, provides keen insight into one of the world's least understood religions. It is ideally suited for use in courses on Islam, world religions, comparative religions, (...) and Middle East history and culture.A FREE 6-month subscription to Oxford Islamic Studies Online, edited by John L. Esposito, is included with the purchase of every new copy of this text. (shrink)

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

A theory of rational choice is a theory of how an agent should, rationally, go about deciding what actions to perform at any given time. For example, I may want to decide whether to go to a movie this evening or stay home and read a book. The actions between which we want to choose are perfectly ordinary actions, and the presumption is that to make such a decision we should attend to the likely consequences of our decision. It is (...) assumed that these decisions must be made in the face of uncertainty regarding both the agent’s initial situation and the consequences of his actions. (shrink)

John Wilson's work as moral educator is summarized and evaluated. His rationalist humanistic approach is based on a componential characterization of the morally educated person. Such a person consistently manifests a unity of reflection, feeling, belief, and acting under the logically structured rubrics of PHIL, EMP, GIG and KRAT, and exemplifying the formal features of 'moral opinion'. The rationale and conceptual status of the components is discussed, as is the view that the concept of education entails that teachers be (...) moral educators. This involves cultivating autonomous rationality with respect to the unconscious, motivation, day-to-day moral decision-making, and the emotions; in the latter case there are extensive applications in religious education. Finally, certain weaknesses and pre-eminent strengths of Wilson's position are indicated, and comparisons briefly made with the views of McPhail, Peters, Frankena and Kohlberg. (shrink)

The traditional paradigm for research relating to the Fishbeinian model of intention is described and some of its limitations are discussed. A structuralist interpretation of the Fishbeinian equation is then put forward from the standpoint of the ethogenic perspective advocated by Harré and Secord. Each component of the Fishbeinian equation is assumed to be the symbolic expression of an account which is attributable to the agent and relates to the act in question. The equation as a whole is then interpreted (...) as a rule governing the intelligibility of a cluster of such accounts. Empirical studies are reported which examine the consequences of transgressing the rule of intelligibility and which use instances of transgression as a means to theoretical development. In this development, the importance of the executive facet of action is acknowledged by utilising Abelson's schemes for the representation of plans. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion as to how this radically different conceptual and methodological approach might be used in future research on the intention-behaviour relation. (shrink)

This exceptionally successful survey text introduces the teachings and practice of Islam from its earliest origins up to its contemporary practice. John L. Esposito, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, traces the development of Islam and its impact on world history and politics.Lucidly written and expansive in scope, Islam: The Straight Path, Fifth Edition, provides keen insight into one of the world's least understood religions. It is ideally suited for use in courses on Islam, world religions, comparative religions, and (...) Middle East history and culture.A FREE 6-month subscription to Oxford Islamic Studies Online, edited by John L. Esposito, is included with the purchase of every new copy of this text. (shrink)

This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’ reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas of (...) Autrecourt, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme. The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel. Examining the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourth chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete, citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré, Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi. Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis, constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal. (shrink)

Despite the general acceptance of Hegel's importance for Marx, virtually no one has paid sufficient attention to Marx's youthful critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Even Alfred Schmidt, whose work refers to the Naturphilosophie most frequently, underestimates its importance in the formulation of Marx's own materialist philosophy of nature and comes close to replicating the very Hegelian views that Marx is attacking. Yet the critique of the Naturphilosophie in Marx's Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts foreshadows Marx's later stated intention in (...) Capital to turn Hegel right-side up. It affirms not only a theory of the ontological reality of the material world, but a dialectics of nature whose importance for Marx extends from the Paris Manuscripts to Capital. Marx' s Naturphilosophie criticizes Hegel's replacement of natural history with a Philosophy of Nature derived from logical categories. It affirms Engels' later view that natural history should be restored by discovering dialectics in nature rather than imposing dialectics on it. (shrink)

Perkins, John L The atrocity of September 11 led me to become an atheist. A boundary had been crossed, I thought, and religions could no longer be regarded as benign. As the buildings crashed to the ground in New York, this conclusion seemed obvious. Yet a decade and a half later, it seems remarkable how few people have been able to reach the same conclusion.

Princeton University Press, 1974. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

There was a long tradition in philosophy according to which good reasoning had to be deductively valid. However, that tradition began to be questioned in the 1960’s, and is now thoroughly discredited. What caused its downfall was the recognition that many familiar kinds of reasoning are not deductively valid, but clearly confer justification on their conclusions. Here are some simple examples.

ABSTRACT In the second decade of the twentieth century a new subject appeared in American high schools, aimed at providing citizens with an understanding of the essential nature of scientific thinking. “General science,” as it was called, was developed and promoted by an emerging class of professional educators who sought to offer a version of science that they believed would both excite public interest and prove useful in the everyday lives of the masses of students streaming into the rapidly expanding (...) institution of secondary education. It was to be a course with real utility that would transcend the boundaries of the specialized, abstract disciplinary subjects like chemistry and physics—subjects with identities tied to the practices and standards of the colleges and universities, which had long exerted control over the content of secondary schooling. This essay recounts the origins of general science and, in particular, examines how the intellectual and material environment of the city of Chicago at the turn of the century influenced the course that was produced and widely adopted in school programs across the United States. (shrink)

In concrete applications of probability, statistical investigation gives us knowledge of some probabilities, but we generally want to know many others that are not directly revealed by our data. For instance, we may know prob(P/Q) (the probability of P given Q) and prob(P/R), but what we really want is prob(P/Q& R), and we may not have the data required to assess that directly. The probability calculus is of no help here. Given prob(P/Q) and prob(P/R), it is consistent with the probability (...) calculus for prob(P/Q& R) to have any value between 0 and 1. Is there any way to make a reasonable estimate of the value of prob(P/Q& R) 1 A related problem occurs when probability practitioners adopt undefended assumptions of statistical independence simply on the basis of not seeing any connection between two propositions. This is common practice, but its justification has eluded probability theorists, and researchers are typically apologetic about making such assumptions. Is there any way to defend the practice? This paper shows that on a certain conception of probability—nomic probability—there are principles of "probable probabilities" that license inferences of the above sort. These are principles telling us that although certain inferences from probabilities to probabilities are not deductively valid, nevertheless the second-order probability of their yielding correct results is 1. This makes it defeasibly reasonable to make the inferences. Thus I argue that it is defeasibly reasonable to assume statistical independence when we have no information to the contrary. And I show that there is a function Y(r, s, a) such that if prob(P/Q) = r, prob(P/R) = s, andprob(P/U) = a (where U is our background knowledge) then it is defeasibly reasonable to expect that prob(P/Q&R) = Y(r, s, a). Numerous other defeasible inferences are licensed by similar principles of probable probabilities. This has the potential to greatly enhance the usefulness of probabilities in practical application. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 14-20, March‐April 2022.

This path-breaking book reconceptualizes our understanding of political tolerance as well as of its foundations.

Distinguishing between the old atheism, the new atheism, and modest atheism, and also between belief and acceptance, and belief and acceptance tokens and types, I defend the disjunctive view that either modest atheistic belief or modest atheistic acceptance, construed as type, is today epistemically justified in the context of philosophical inquiry. Central to my defence is a deductive version of the hiddenness argument and an emphasis on the early stage of philosophical inquiry that we presently occupy.

In this work, all the discourses addressed to lay people in the four main nik?yas of the P?li Canon, and most of those in the fifth, have been surveyed, categorised, and analysed. The different ways in which the Buddha customised his style of teaching and the Dhamma being taught according to the various demographic characteristics of his audience are explored, highlighted and discussed. Some of the findings are to be expected, whereas others are less so. There are several clear gender (...) and class differences in the type of discourse used, the topics of the teaching, and in whether the sutta is oriented to lead the listener to the more worldly goals of happiness in this life or a good rebirth, as opposed to being directed towards complete liberation from rebirth. There are differences too based on the age of the addressees, but less pronounced. This survey has also brought forth some distinct characteristics of the different nik?yas of the P?li Canon in terms of their suttas to the lay community. The A?guttara Nik?ya contains more suttas targeted directly to lay people, plus many others of the ‘indirect’ variety, more suttas addressed to women and to the middle-class, and a higher emphasis on the goals of happiness in this life and a good rebirth. Overall the suttas addressed to lay people show a very strong emphasis on good conduct by body, speech, and mind. But this paper hasn’t addressed whether there would be a different emphasis shown in an examination of the suttas addressed exclusively to the monastic community, and this is an area that warrants further exploration. A comprehensive catalogue of suttas in the P?li Canon that are addressed to householders is included in an appendix. (shrink)