An increasingly common complaint about philosophy of religion—especially, though not exclusively, as it is pursued in the “analytic tradition”—is that its preoccupation with questions of rationality and justification in relation to “theism” has deflected attention from the diversity of forms that religious life takes. Among measures proposed for ameliorating this condition has been the deployment of “thick description” that facilitates more richly contextualized understandings of religious phenomena. Endorsing and elaborating this proposal, I provide an overview of different but related notions (...) of thick description before turning to two specific examples, which illustrate the potential for engagement with ethnography to contribute to an expanded conception of philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This article addresses some issues concerning the relation between religious beliefs and the fruits of those beliefs, where ‘fruits’ implies certain relevant forms of behaviour and affective attitudes. My primary aim is to elucidate the dispute between D. Z. Phillips and theological realists, emphasizing the extent to which this dispute is symptomatic of a deeper disagreement over how words acquire their meanings. In the course of doing so, I highlight an important difference between two alternative realist claims, exemplified by Trigg (...) and Hick respectively, and draw attention to an infelicity in Phillips’ way of presenting his case. (shrink)

It is argued that philosophy of religion should focus not only on the epistemic justifiability of holding religious beliefs but also on the moral justifiability of commitment to their truth in practical reasoning. If the truth of classical theism may turn out to be evidentially ambiguous, then pressure is placed on the moral evidentialist assumption that one is morally justified in taking a theistic truth-claim to be true only if one's total evidence sufficiently supports its truth. After investigating some contemporary (...) attempts to retain evidentialism in the face of ambiguity, a modest fideism is proposed which may serve both to ground an important ‘political turn’ in contemporary philosophy of religion and to prompt re-examination of dominant assumptions about the content of core theistic beliefs. (shrink)

یکی از مباحث چالش‌برانگیز در حوزۀ فلسفۀ دین مدل‌هایی است که در حوزۀ الهیات از مفاهیم بازی زبانی و نحوه‌های زندگی ویتگنشتاین اخذ شده است. این مدل‌ها در ظاهر با این که ریشۀ فکری یکسانی در خاک اندیشه ویتگنشتاین دارند و گاهی انتقاداتی مشابه به آنها وارد شده است، در باطن امر برخی از این مدل‌ها بهتر توانسته‌اند از این انتقادات جان سالم به در برند. در این مقاله، دو مدل معروف ویتگنشتاینی را مورد بررسی قرار می‌دهیم: مدل زبانی‌ـ‌فرهنگی جورج (...) لیندبک در حوزۀ دین و الهیات؛ و مدل مبتنی بر آرای نوویتگنشتاینی دی زد فیلیپس. هر دوی این مدل‌ها تلاش کرده‌اند تا پاسخی درخور به نقدهای عقلانیت جهانی بدهند. در ادامۀ مقاله نشان خواهیم داد که مدل لیندبک توانسته است پاسخ قاطع‌تری به نقدها بدهد و از این لحاظ برتری مشخصی بر سایر مدل‌های ویتگنشتاینی از جمله مدل فیلیپس دارد. (shrink)

The meaning of “talk about God” remains the first and most fundamental issue facing philosophers and theologians in the modern age. This study concerns the analogies needed to make sense of that talk: images, ripe with poetic intensity, borrowed from the language and practice of faith; from the splicing together of lives, human and divine. It concerns, moreover, the reinvestment of those images in the structures of human personality, their role in the development of a renewed metaphysic of the human (...) spirit, aspirationally divine or ‘upwardly’ oriented. Such concerns have, in recent years, gained still greater urgency as a popular and aggressive ‘evangelical atheism’ has come to dominate religious discourse, threatening to obscure the human truth of religious language. The challenge is a familiar one; its polemic deeply indebted to British Empiricism and, perhaps, especially the Logical Positivism of the last century. It seems that those who put their faith in post-modern theories of language to silence the likes of Ayer and Russell spoke too soon. In response, theism has retreated from empiricist attack into a new-found realism. Championed by the likes of Peter Byrne, William Alston, and of course, Richard Swinburne, neo-realist metaphysics has, ostensibly, steeped itself in classical philosophy. Amid the search for reason and necessity, the God of grace and providence, of ordinary belief, has been forced to yield to ‘Perfect Being’ thinking, Absolute Being ontology, and other forms of untenable metaphysics, with few alternatives on the margins of relevance. The God of the philosophers may have the virtue of necessity, but this Being’s temperament remains essentially anti-social. With God successfully held in logical quarantine, we may well wonder whether “God-talk” means anything at all. To close the breach and realign finite with Infinite, philosophical faith with practical piety, has become the most pressing problem in contemporary philosophical theology. Undoubtedly, Whitehead and his neo-classical followers have been quick to learn the lessons of British Empiricism. If anything, however, they learned them too well, placing the religious emphasis almost exclusively on natural, physical forces. So seamless an alignment of God with Creation can be of little comfort to the ordinary believer. Caught between inflationary transcendence and reductive empiricism, the ‘gap’ between theological speculation and religious belief has widened until neither side seems very concerned with the other. Cleaving to ‘first principles’ and other metaphysical abstractions, both classical and neo-classical theologians have disenfranchised the faithful, putting faith on a trajectory for atheism. To steer a course between such extremes, I want to return to an earlier tradition; to a metaphysic of persons exemplified in the practice of faith. Doing so draws upon the logic of personal identity: what it means to be, or rather, to become, a person. This is the practical application of a cutting-edge theology, progeny of one of the twentieth century’s last great metaphysical minds. Almost fifty years after his death, Austin Farrer remains in the vanguard of modern theology, his vital grasp of faith and philosophy unequalled and unrivalled. Farrer first defended theology against the excesses of positivist and then process reduction but he used them to drive his own retreat from the scholastic tradition. This was analysed at great length by Charles Conti in Metaphysical Personalism. Locating the means and motive for revision in the experience and expressions of lived faith, Farrer supplied the vital corrective; there is nothing more one can say about such an overweening impersonalism which describes God as Ens per se, so cuts its own throat by depersonalising the cosmological connection. It is my supposition, on Farrer’s behalf, that person-concepts meet the pragmatic demands of both metaphysical theism and realistic belief. So doing, they open up a more fertile route between orthodox and ‘process’ mythologies. Following that route, I begin with the incoherence of philosophical realism and its ruinous application to theism. From there, we journey backwards into neo-classical and neo-Thomist thinkers who themselves attempted to overcome realist abstractions. Our destination lies in a Feuerbachian anthropology of theology or ‘anthropotheism’. Like Farrer, Ludwig Feuerbach used the language of the believer to relocate theology and philosophy within a framework which makes fertile use of anthropomorphic personifications to ‘think’ God. Ultimately, revisiting the personalist presuppositions of metaphysics in this way throws light on questions of personal identity, which is to describe the nature of an ‘overview’ existence directly related to or experienced in ourselves. This is to ‘draw’ reality on a grand-scale and, most importantly, locate our place within that image. Doing theology dynamically, or psychologically informed – as both Farrer and Feuerbach insisted we must – means recognising the constitutive role projections play in self-construction. Without conscious, active, or intentional participation in our projects, we cannot become persons at all. This returns us to the practice of faith wherein Feuerbach’s anthropology is reconstructed as applied theology, thus completing the personalist metaphysics perpetuated by Farrer as initially developed by the Biblical faith in a Godly person. And what greater challenge can religious philosophy respond to today? (shrink)

Believers regularly refer to God as “forgiving and merciful” when praying for divine forgiveness. If one is committed to divine immutability and impassability, as Maimonides is, one must deny that God is capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving manner. If one rejects divine impassability, maintaining that God has a psychology, as Muffs does, one must reckon with biblical depictions of divine vengeance and rage. Such depictions suggest that while being capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving way, (...) God has a difficulty to manage God’s anger and do so in practice. Employing a Wittgensteinian perspective, I argue that utterances, e.g., “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger. . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”, need not be understood as involving mistaken or confused descriptions of God’s nature and manner of acting. Rather, they can be understood as speech-acts of various types and functions: mystical, theurgic and others, that purport to bring about or transform various states of affairs in this world and/or beyond it. As such, they can function as non-semantic instruments that purport to elevate the believer to the “upper worlds”, or as anger-management devices that purport to help God implement His second order desire to act in a forgiving manner, despite His difficulty to do so. (shrink)

If God actually answers prayers that petition him for something, then it seems he is willing to withhold some good from the world unless and until someone prays for those goods. But how is this compatible with His benevolence? On the other hand, if God is dedicated to providing every good to us that we may need, it would seem that He would provide these to us even if we did not pray for them. But if so, it would appear (...) that petitionary prayer is pointless. This discussion reviews the various contributions made by philosophers in trying to answer these questions, and in criticizing these answers. (shrink)

Inattention to the historical antecedents of current philosophical views may impoverish our arguments in defense of those views. A case in point, examined here, concerns the difference that can be made for current strategies designed to defend religious belief by carefully reconsidering the position of historical sceptics.

Most of what has been written about Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education, and specific case studies that aim at putting theory into practice. The perspective taken has always been to hold a dialogue with Buber's works in order to identify and analyse critically Buber's views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; that is, commentators dialogue with the text. In this article our aims are of (...) a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; that is, we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his time, and demonstrate that Buber's work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist; that is the text dialogues with its Zeitgeist. This approach leads us to our second aim, which is to demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and to aid dialogue towards peace in inter-community relations. (shrink)

This paper examines recent deployments of Wittgenstein’s thought, by Mustafa (2018) and Asad (2020), in defense of the Islamic “traditionalism” of Ibn Taymiyyah and the Hanbali school. I will briefly summarize the key features of Wittgenstein’s thought crucial to this, and then examine their ramifications. I argue that Wittgenstein’s position actually undermines any claim to interpretive authority, whether of the “rationalist” or salafi “traditionalist” sort. Secondly, the approach to religious language most commonly associated with Wittgenstein—so-called “Wittgensteinian Fideism” may pose bigger (...) problems for traditionalists than the influence of classical philosophy or “rationalist” theological responses to modern skeptical challenges. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose to analyze the phenomenon of Christian prayer by way of combining two different analytical frameworks. We start by applying Schutz’s theories of “intersubjectivity,” “inner time,” “politheticality,” and “multiple realities,” and then proceed by drawing on the ideas and insights of linguistic philosophers, notably, Wittgenstein’s “language-game,” Austin’s “speech act,” and Evans’s “logic of self-involvement”. In conjoining these accounts, we wish to demonstrate how their combination sheds new light on understanding the phenomenon of prayer. Prayer is a (...) complex phenomenon that involves two major dimensions: the private and the social, as Matthew and Acts, respectively, demonstrate. Schutz’s study of the phenomenon of “inner time” and the “polithetical” structure of consciousness, at both the subjective and intersubjective level, provides a useful lens to analyze these two dimensions. In addition, prayer, in following a specific set of rules, can also be considered as a specific, i.e., religious “language-game”. In the last analysis, however, we propose to analyze prayer within the Schutzian framework of “multiple realities,” “enclaves,” and “symbolic appresentation,” which permits accessing the “religious finite province of meaning” in the very midst of the paramount reality of everyday life. In a nutshell, we claim that Christian prayer is a practice of constructing and living within a “religious province of meaning” in the everyday world; it is a practice that revolves around self-involving language-activities such as praising, confessing, thanksgiving, or requesting to God, which enable the praying subject to transfigure the language of everydayness and “see through” the world of everyday life in order to let it appear in a different light, e.g., the light of grace, gift, and salvation. (shrink)

‘Prayer’ can be defined as ‘the offering, in public worship or private devotion, of petition, confession, adoration, or thanksgiving to God; also the form of words in which such an offering is made’ (cf. Cohn-Sherbok 2010). In addition to this simple definition it could be said that there are different forms of prayer: some are vocal and articulate and others are only mental in nature; some prayers are communal and liturgical and other prayers are spontaneous or at least composed by (...) the one saying the prayer (cf. Stump 1999). Accordingly, it is evident that there are manifold intricacies involved in any characterisation of ‘prayer’. In this article my aims are twofold. First, I explore the implications of Martin Buber’s philosophy, particularly of his conception of God as Thou for our understanding of ‘prayer’; second, I will argue that Buber’s understanding of ‘prayer’ as dialogue serves as a way for the individual to seek reconciliation with itself, with others, and with God. (shrink)

Of the theologians and philosophers now writing on biblical narrative, Hans Frei and Paul Ricoeur are probably the most prominent. It is significant that their views converge on important issues. Both are uncomfortable with hermeneutic theories that convert the text into an abstract philosophical system, an ideal typological structure, or a mere occasion for existential decision. Frei and Ricoeur seem knit together in a common enterprise; they appear to be building a single narrative theology. I argue that the appearance of (...) symmetry is an illusion. There is a fundamental conflict between the ‘pure narrativism’ of Frei and the ‘impure narrativism’ of Ricoeur. I give reasons for thinking that Ricoeur’s is the stronger position. (shrink)

دی. زد. فیلیپس یکی از فیلسوفان سرشناس در حوزۀ ناواقع‌گرایی زبان دین است. او بسیار تحت تأثیر هیوم بوده و معتقد است هیوم توانسته در سه مرحله براهین خداشناسی را مخدوش کند. اگرچه او این نقدها را موفق می‌داند، با تمسک به هرمنوتیک تأمل معتقد است که می‌توان از هیوم فراتر رفت و به تأمل در مفاهیم دینی پرداخت. او از این طریق راه خود را از طرفداران هرمنوتیک سوءظن و احیاء جدا می‌کند. فیلیپس معتقد است برای فهم دین باید (...) به تأمل فلسفی درباره مفاهیم دینی پرداخت و به سبک زندگی دین‌داران توجه داشت. اما بر خلاف ادعای خودش، تفاسیرش از آموزه‌های دینی مثل وجود خدا، دعا و جاودانگی مطابق باور دین‌داران نیست و با نظر آنها فاصله زیادی دارد. به علاوه وی به انواع تقریرهای برهان نظم توجه ندارد و لذا بررسی‌های او در این زمینه ناقص است. در نهایت می‌توان گفت، اگرچه وی سعی کرده در برابر پوزیتیویست‌ها به مخالفت برخیزد، ولی نظام فلسفی او به گونه‌ای نیست که بتواند از معیارهای آنها فراتر رود. (shrink)

کانت به طور کلی براهین نظری دال بر وجود باری را در سه دستۀ برهان وجودی، جهان‌شناختی و نظم جای می‌دهد. در نگاه او، چون وجود یک محمول واقعی و تعین‌بخش نیست، نمی‌تواند در تعریف شیء حاضر باشد و بنابراین برهان وجودی عقیم است. این مقاله، همگام با کانت و بنت، می‌کوشد تا نشان دهد که وجود نه مایۀ کمال و نه محمولی تعین‌بخش است. نیز بر خلاف نظر بنت، که دلایل کانت را ناکافی می‌داند، ادعا می‌شود که کانت مغالطۀ (...) بنیادینی را که در برهان وجودی نهفته است پیدا و هویدا کرده است. به زعم کانت، خطای برهان جهان‌شناختی وابستگی آن به برهان سست‌بنیان وجودی است. بنت به درستی، ابهام و سستی این وابستگی را مورد توجه قرار می‌دهد. با این حال، کانت در فرصتی دیگر، با نقدی قوی، استدلال جهان‌شناختی را از اعتبار ساقط می‌کند. در مرحلۀ آخر، کانت با همۀ دلبستگی‌ای که به برهان نظم دارد، آن را مبتنی بر برهان معیوب جهان‌شناختی توصیف می‌کند. نقد بنت در این مرحله، از ارتباطی ذاتی که میان برهان جهان‌شناختی و نظم وجود دارد غفلت می‌ورزد. (shrink)