A small industry has grown up around these works - Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens - complaining not just about their theological illiteracy but also about their ...

In the current academic climate, teaching is often seen as secondary to research. Teaching Philosophy seeks to bring teaching philosophy higher on the academic agenda.An international team of contributors, all of whom share the view that philosophy is a subject that can transform students, offers practical guidance and advice for teachers of philosophy. The book suggests ways in which the teaching of philosophy at undergraduate level might be facilitated. Some of the essays place the emphasis on individual self discovery, others (...) focus on the wider political context, many offer practical ideas for enhancing the teaching of philosophy through exercises that engage students in often unconventional ways. The integration of students' views on teaching provides a necessary reminder that teaching is not a one-way process, but a project that will ultimately succeed through cooperation and a shared sense of achievement amongst participants. (shrink)

The book offers a conception of philosophy as a form of self-enquiry which begins not in reflection, but in silence and meditation, conceived as conditions for the emergence and cessation of contending states of mind which influence perception and action. The philosopher thus becomes a kind of cartographer of a shifting interior landscape. This underlying perspective explains the personal nature of the writing and its mixing of genres. The book draws on both the Greek and Buddhist traditions, recognising that it (...) is time for Western thinkers to acknowledge and respond to an intercultural canon. It aims to integrate ethics and a non-theistic philosophy of religion through the medium of aesthetics, mapping Buddhist 'mindfulness' and the Greek virtues and vices of temperance and licentiousness, continence and incontinence, onto an account of the development of moral sentiments and their relation to practical judgement in the context of oppressive political and social realities. (shrink)

‘Godless’ was never a neutral term: in 1528 William Tindale talked of ‘godlesse ypocrites and infidels’ and a ‘godless generation’ is one that has turned its back on God and the paths of righteousness. An atheist, by contrast, a new and self-conscious atheist perhaps, might now wear the term as a badge of pride, to indicate their rejection both of belief and the implication of moral turpitude. Traditionally, though, those who declared themselves ‘atheist’ had a hardly better press than the (...) ‘godlesse’, since ‘atheism’ was and in some cases still is considered a form of intellectual and moral shallowness: thus Sir Francis Bacon offers a bluff refinement of the Psalmist's verdict on the fool who says in his heart that there is no God: The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God ; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart ; so he rather saith it, by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it. (shrink)

I have meditated regularly, following simple Buddhist procedures, for more than ten years, and that seems just about long enough for me to start to offer some preliminary account of it, despite the limitations of my progress and experience, and the difficulty of describing the more intimate and less explored reaches of the mind. I think I have learned enough to say that through prolonged spiritual practice one arrives at the springs of action and at root attitudes, and is in (...) a position to be possessed of them in a purer, stronger form. It may seem difficult to see how the practice of philosophy can be reconciled with the practice of meditation, but I shall describe how I have tried to do so, and say how I think the one bears on the other. In fact all I can do in the present paper is to attempt a limited discussion of moral psychology, and its relation to the foundations of ethics, a discussion, I must concede now, in which I waver uncertainly in my expression of the key issues. But I think that I cannot delay indefinitely, and if I can sketch out the terrain even roughly, better work on it can come later. My references to mindfulness and to meditation will be elementary and not systematic, though adequate, I hope, to what I want to say about ethics. What I am writing in praise of is mindfulness, or awareness, which I take to be a virtue that is developed through the practice of meditation or some comparable contemplative activity. I am also concerned for the future direction of philosophy. It seems to me that our attaining to this virtue will transform its practice, so that it moves closer to traditional expectations, somewhat disappointed in recent years, though supposedly less so now. If I am not deluded, there is an interior route towards the great questions of metaphysics, and we shall be known for not having taken it. It is a task for a new generation of philosophers, and I for one still scan the horizon for their arrival. (shrink)

David E. Cooper proposes that the ”mystery’ of ”reality as it “anyway‘ is, independently of human perspective’ provides measure for the leading of our lives and thus avoids, on the one hand, the hubris of a humanism for which moral life is the product of the human will and has no warrant beyond it, and, on the other, a theism which appears to be at once too remote from and too close to the human world to provide any such warrant. (...) The paper rejects the role this gives to ”mystery’ and locates ”warrant’ in a moral perspective that is not the product of will. (shrink)

In this book, Professor Mohanty develops a new interpretation of the ontology and nature of Indian philosophical thinking. Using the original Sanskrit sources, he examines the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity, and the theories of meaning and truth, and explicates the concept of theoretical rationality that underlies the Indian philosophies. The author brings to bear insights from modern Western analytical and phenomenological philosophies, not with a view to instituting direct comparisons but in order to interpret Indian thinking. In doing so, (...) he highlights some very distinctive features of Indian thinking. (shrink)

The three of us sweated in the heat and swayed with the rhythms of the crowded suburban train as we talked—or rather shouted to make ourselves heard—hanging by straps in the crush as we trundled back toward Andheri West. We were two Indians, Probal Dasgupta and Prabodh Parikh, and one Britisher, myself—all around the same age, in our late thirties. It was 1985, and Probal and I had traveled down from Pune on the Deccan Express to meet Prabodh in Bombay—and (...) it was also a chance for me to meet the incomparable M. P. Rege. The polymath and inexhaustible Probal had been a kind (but challenging) friend, and had gently but firmly introduced me—opened my eyes—to the real-life of India, including the nature, diversity .. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 4, Page 540-543, October 2022.

An alternative agenda for the philosophy of religion emerges from this interdisciplinary collection. Going outside the traditional concerns of natural theology, the distinguished contributors to this volume explore such topics as the nature of selfhood and its images in the ancient, the medieval and the modern world; the role of philosophy as a route to wisdom; non-conceptual awareness; and the nature of love and its relation to attention. Discussion focuses on the figures of Plato and Augustine, William James and the (...) Absolute Idealist F. H. Bradley, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as leading figures of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

Many people describe themselves as secular rather than religious, but they often qualify this statement by claiming an interest in spirituality. But what kind of spirituality is possible in the absence of religion? In this book, Michael McGhee shows how religious traditions and secular humanism function as 'schools of wisdom' whose aim is to expose and overcome the forces that obstruct justice. He examines the ancient conception of philosophy as a form of ethical self-inquiry and spiritual practice conducted by a (...) community, showing how it helps us to reconceive the philosophy of religion in terms of philosophy as a way of life. McGhee discusses the idea of a dialogue between religion and atheism in terms of Buddhist practice and demonstrates how a non-theistic Buddhism can address itself to theistic traditions as well as to secular humanism. His book also explores how to shift the centre of gravity from religious belief towards states of mind and conduct. (shrink)

The original claim made in the introduction to this classic volume was that it broke fresh ground: that it set a new agenda for the philosophy of religion and was a reaction against a narrow conception of the discipline that had little to say philosophically about human experience, or subjectivity, or about the religious imagination, or the idea of 'spirituality'. In a new foreword to the book, Michael McGhee reflects on how the discipline has changed or remained the same in (...) the intervening twenty-five years since first publication. He argues that the connections between 'philosophy' and 'spirituality' are still developing; and that what we think of as 'religious' or 'spiritual' is shifting, along with ideas about self-knowledge. The book contains pertinent chapters by some of the leading thinkers in the field, including Rowan Williams, Janet Soskice, Fergus Kerr, Stephen Clark and Paul Williams, who offers a comparative piece on Tibetan Buddhism. Michael McGhee is Honorary Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His latest book is Spirituality for the Godless : Buddhism, Humanism, and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021). (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Wittgenstein's ideal of “coolness” seems to be represented by the idea of a temple which provides a larger perspective than those of the passions, which remain present but untroubling. Wittgenstein's temple is the image of a powerful condition of mind with an intentional, cognitive content whose saliencies contrast with those of the passions, which are not so much restrained by a contrary and coercive force as subdued precisely by a transfer of power to another and therefore strengthened form of attention. (...) A form of attention, according to the author, that belongs to the Greek virtue of s ophrosun e, a virtue which is the “coolness” toward which Wittgenstein aspires. The author suggests that “coolness” is best understood as the disclosure of an emergent moral sensibility in the revelation of the natural objects of its attention. (shrink)

Christian thinkers have recently expressed concern about the “silencing” or marginalisation of religion in public life, have affirmed the desirability of dialogue between the world of faith and the world of reason but have raised doubts about the feasibility of a moral language that refers to unconditional moral claims or human rights or the intrinsic dignity of human beings if it is not grounded in a transcendent or supernatural source of value. The present paper is an attempt to open a (...) conversation about these themes from the point of view of a non-theistic humanism inspired by a notion of incarnation. (shrink)

Belief in life after death is implicated, for the typical 'Wittgensteinian', with Cartesian dualism, and the latter seen to entail a private inner subject that cannot survive the anti-private language argument. But Descartes does not really suffer from this defect and belief in life after death is not merely a product of 'confused' Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes is presented as an intellectual analogue of the formation of the concept of 'soul' in spiritual contexts. Just as metaphysical reflection forces us to conclude, (...) for Descartes, that we are only contingently flesh and blood beings, so it is only under the condition of recalcitrant experience that exemplary practitioners seem forced to forge a distinction between body and soul, thus revising influentially their view of themselves as single beings both conscious and extended. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Although sexual continence is no longer considered a necessary condition of the philosophical life, various spiritual traditions favour the development of a form of ‘concentration’ (samadhi) of the person which they claim to depend on such continence, and of which a perceived outcome is a natural state of ‘chastity’. Such ‘concentration’is insisted upon on the grounds that it is the condition under which the real nature of things is disclosed to the practitioner. Since philosophers are concerned to discover the (...) real nature of things the implication might be thought to be that sexual continence should come back into favour and philosophers become spiritual practitioners. However, a distinction is made between ejaculatory and non‐ejaculatory sexual activity and the suggestion made that despite the dominant tradition in the West, the relevant forms of concentration may develop under a regime of non‐ejaculation rather than of continence understood as abstinence. This is the context of a discussion of the state of male sexuality and its dedication to the practice of ejaculation, which is seen as a constraint upon the energy available for action and upon the formation of the energy on which the disclosure of reality is said to depend. Male judgments about the plausibility of such claims are themselves contingent upon the state of male sexuality and its dedication to the practice of ejaculation. (shrink)

In this paper I continue an enterprise begun in earlier work in which I attempt to naturalize into a western philosophical context concepts that derive from the practice of Buddhist meditation. In particular I shall try to make use of the notion of samādhi and vipassanā or insight. I should stress that I make no attempt at a scholarly explication of these terms but try rather to establish a use for them through reflection on experience, and by making a connection (...) with concerns from aesthetics about expression and intentionality: I do so as a moral philosopher seeking to retrieve the Greek virtues of continence and temperance, which I have tried to relate to stages in the emergence of what I call an ‘ethical sensibility’, so that temperance, for instance, is the natural state of one in whom such a sensibility is flourishing. But I see the development of that sensibility as the concentration or gathering of a person's energies into its structure, into the sustaining of the thought or perception upon which action or non-action depends, as well as into the sustaining of action itself. In talking of ‘energy’ here I am trying to develop an idea of Simone Weil's in which she refers to ‘the energy available for action’. (shrink)

There is a short section of Peter Harvey's recent book on Buddhism in which he offers a thumbnail sketch of Buddhist groups in the United Kingdom. Among the groups he describes is the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, and I declare an interest, as one of its members. I have no particular quarrel with the description of FWBO activities, but there is a sting in the tail, which is, I think, a point of some conceptual interest, which others have (...) also focused on. (shrink)

The paper draws on the Heideggerian distinction between Bildung and Besinnung to locate a discussion of theological strategies in the face of Nietzsche's pronouncement that God is dead, and sketches what should be an epistemologically vigilant (and thus properly sceptical) Buddhist response to that pronouncement. The theological options that are mentioned or discussed include naive and critical theological realism, anti-realism and a nontheistic 'spiritual realism'. Buddhism is discussed in terms of its naturalistic sources and their development in the expression of (...) states of mind rather than in terms of belief. (shrink)

How should we understand Wittgenstein's comment in 1929 that his ‘ideal’ was ‘a certain coolness’? Does it have the implication for the practice of philosophy that is suggested by the late Dewi Phillips? Wittgenstein's use of the metaphor of a temple in relation to the passions is curiously reminiscent in its structure of Rilke's first sonnet to Orpheus. In Zettel a similar preoccupation seems to be manifested in the long and unexpected passage that Wittgenstein copies out from Plato, a passage (...) which is juxtaposed to the famous remark that the philosopher is the citizen of no community of ideas. (shrink)