Science and religion have been described as the “two dominant forces in our culture”. As such, the relation between them has been a matter of intense debate, having profound implications for deeper understanding of our place in the universe. One position naturally associated with scientists of a materialistic outlook is that science and religion are contradictory, incompatible worldviews; however, a great deal of recent literature criticises this “conflict thesis” as simple-minded, essentially ignorant of the nature of religion and its philosophical (...) and theological underpinnings. In this first part of a two-part article, I set out the wide-ranging background required for a proper understanding of the debate as a preliminary for the second part, in which Ian Barbour ’s influential four-fold typology of science-religion relations is critically assessed, leading to the conclusion that the conflict model is not to be so easily dismissed. (shrink)

Remarks on the Relations between Neurophysiology and Psychology. In the last decades of Analytical Philosophy, contributions to the so-called mind-body-problem have been suffering by several serious methodological misunderstandings: they have failed, for instance, to distinguish between explanations of particular and strictly general properties and between two important senses of existential statements; and they have overlooked the role conceptual explanations play in the development of science. Changing our methodological premisses, we should be able to put questions like that of the relation (...) between physiological and psychological phenomena in a new way - and we should be able to see that such newly understood questions allow answers which evade the pitfalls of both reductionist and holistic positions. The paper tries to illustrate and to defend these contentions by reference to a very elementary example: the rational re-building of our concepts to identify behaviour by which a subject controls the position of his body in space. (shrink)