This thesis provides an account of acquaintance with abstract objects. The notion of acquaintance is integral to theorising on reference and singular thought, since it is generally taken to be the relation that must exist between a subject and an object, in order for the subject to refer to, and entertain singular thoughts about the object. The most common way of understanding acquaintance is as a form of causal connection. However, this implies a problem. We seem to be able to (...) refer and have singular thoughts about abstract objects. But given that abstract objects are causally inert, this would mean that we are unable to become acquainted with them. This problem shall be the focus of this thesis. I first argue that these traditional causal interpretations of acquaintance are lacking. Instead, I show that acquaintance is dependent to some degree on factors internal to the subject, namely the skills that they possess. From doctors to sommeliers to mathematicians (and possibly even philosophers!) – these subjects seem to succeed in becoming acquainted with certain objects precisely in virtue of their respective skills. Thus, building off from Evans’ The Varieties of Reference, I present a novel account of acquaintance, which I term as Skill-based Acquaintance (SBA). On SBA, a subject is said to be acquainted with an object when they possess discriminating knowledge of that object, gained through the use of their capacities and skills. The SBA account is applied to virtual (Ch.3), fictional (Ch.4), and mathematical objects (Ch.5), as well as God (Ch.6). SBA is successful in explaining how subjects can indeed become acquainted with these problematic categories of objects - some of which are abstract – thus being able to refer and entertain singular thoughts about them. Overall, then, SBA is shown to have greater explanatory power than competing accounts and should thus be preferred. (shrink)

This chapter traces the genealogy of the term atmosphere in the German language, identifies historical semantic shifts, and points to its grammatical specifics. The state of research on atmospheres is briefly summarized and an overview is offered of the various definitions of the term in different disciplines. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s theory of ambient poetics, and on Hermann Schmitz’s “new phenomenology,” four key characteristics of atmospheres are discussed and elaborated: their mereological constitution, their modal structure, their intensification at affective thresholds, (...) and their affective efficacy through suggestions of movement. (shrink)

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

How do we define religious experiences? And what would be the relationship with spiritual experiences? The author claims that the cognitive turn in science gives us new opportunities to map the territory of religion and spirituality. In line with other authors, he proposes a building block approach of cognitive mechanisms that can deal with questions regarding the specificity, origin, and complexity of religious experiences. Two concepts are presented that bridge the great divide which is presumed to exist between sciences that (...) study the brain and humanities, namely the encultured brain and predictive minds. In section three, six building blocks of the structure of religious experience are formulated. New in his approach is the unexpected possible as distinctive ground between normal experiences and what we consider spiritual and religious experiences. Finally, the author presents a critical reflection on his proposal and challenges for the road ahead. (shrink)

To claim that the divine is a person or personal is, according to Swinburne, ‘the most elementary claim of theism’. I argue that, whether the classical theist’s concept of the divine as a person or personal is construed as an analogy or a metaphor, or a combination of the two, analysis necessitates qualification of that concept such that any differences between the classical theist’s concept of the divine as a person or personal and revisionary interpretations of that concept are merely (...) superficial. Thus, either the classical theist has more in common with revisionary theism than he/she might care to admit, or classical theism is a multi-faceted position which encompasses interpretations which some might regard as revisionist. This article also explores and employs the use of a gender-neutral pronoun in talk about God. (shrink)

Kant's 'Copernican Revolution', which began in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), had, by the early 1790s, fundamentally altered the terrain of German philosophy – but not entirely in the way that Kant had foreseen. Skeptical challenges to Kant's discursive account of cognition, in which experience arises from the separate faculties of sensibility and understanding, had led thinkers such as K.L. Reinhold and J.G. Fichte to attempt to provide a first, foundational principle for the critical philosophy. These efforts were enormously (...) influential, but by the middle of the 1790s, they too were facing a great deal of critical scrutiny. The central challenge to the Fichtean project came from an unlikely quarter: a group of young thinkers and poets who are collectively known as the early Romantics. For the Romantics, Fichte's project remains too 'subjectivist', for it tries to provide an account of the world by beginning with the conditions that govern subjectivity alone. Rather, the Romantics argue that the world must be understood in terms of a monistic Absolute, akin to Spinoza's substance, in which all dualisms are overcome. It is with this step that Absolute Idealism comes on the scene, and sets the stage for the development of Hegel's system in the early 1800s. This essay, which continues the story of 'Who's Who from Kant to Hegel I', examines the ways in which early Romanticism reacted to the Fichtean project, looks at a variety of anti-foundationalist idealisms that the Romantics – in particular Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher – developed, and traces the role that Friedrich Schelling plays in offering the first systematic account of Absolute Idealism. (shrink)

It is by way of the call that one is enabled to wake up to responsibility. What is the illocutionary mood of the ‘call’ of conscience, though? Is this transcendental enabler of responsibility an imposing demand or an invitational question? Both Levinas and Heidegger emphasize the impositional character of the call in conscience. The call seems to be the very essence of imperatives. I develop an apology for questioning by way of appeal to crumbs scattered throughout Jewish traditions as well (...) as throughout the works of Levinas and Heidegger. Perhaps we are invited to be rather than told to be. (shrink)

Schleiermacher's Soliloquies not only represent a pivotal work in this classically modern theologian's development as a moral philosopher. They are also arguably the principal moral writing of the early German romantic movement and therefore a significant, if widely overlooked, contribution to the history of ethics in the West. This essay provides a comprehensive interpretation and modest retrieval of this unusual and difficult work by bringing Schleiermacher's early “ethics of individuality” into conversation with Charles Taylor's conception of “expressivist” understandings of human (...) selfhood. It argues that the Monologen are a signal instance of what Taylor has subtly characterized as romanticism's expressivist impulse. (shrink)

Schleiermacher's "Soliloquies" not only represent a pivotal work in this classically modern theologian's development as a moral philosopher. They are also arguably the principal moral writing of the early German romantic movement and therefore a significant, if widely overlooked, contribution to the history of ethics in the West. This essay provides a comprehensive interpretation and modest retrieval of this unusual and difficult work by bringing Schleiermacher's early "ethics of individuality" into conversation with Charles Taylor's conception of "expressivist" understandings of human (...) selfhood. It argues that the Monologen are a signal instance of what Taylor has subtly characterized as romanticism's expressivist impulse. (shrink)

Philosophical foundations of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s christology are found in his rejection of the likeness theology found in many medieval theologians and in German rationalist philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries such as Leibniz and Kant. Instead, Schleiermacher offers a theology of divine otherness, as an interpretation of religious consciousness as awareness of oneself as absolutely (i.e., totally and unconditionally) dependent. On this basis all that we can characterize of that on which we are absolutely dependent (God) is its causality. (...) Hence, Schleiermacher argues, Christian theology must not speak of a nature of God, but only of a causality of God, as present in Christ in a special way. It is argued that he identifies this divine causality as love (that is, as a causality tending toward human redemption), and as identical with Christ’s human love, on the basis of a teleology known in Christian experience of redemption. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent shift towards the dominance of the study of philosophy of religion, ethics and critical thinking within religious education in Britain. It explores the impact of the critical realist model, advocated by Andrew Wright and Philip Barnes, in response to prior models of phenomenological religious education, in order to expose the ways in which both approaches can lead to a distorted understanding of the nature of religion. Although the writing of Emmanuel Levinas has been used in (...) support of the critical realist model by Wright, I will consider how his and Slavoj Žižek's writings on the nature of religion might challenge the dominance of the critical realist approach and provide a conceptual framework through which it might be possible to develop an alternative approach to religious education that attends to the complexity, ambiguity and demanding nature of engaging with religious traditions. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the apparent vagueness and broadness of the concept ‘spirituality’ and the difficulty in finding an agreeable definition for it are related to the different meanings of the concept within different intellectual and religious contexts and, subsequently, to different valuations of spirituality in relation to religion and lived religiosity. This article also examines the concept spirituality in the context of the psychology of religion’s historical entanglement with theology. On the one hand, the psychology of (...) religion has emancipated itself from theological discourse and theological institutions. On the other hand, the psychology of religion is still closely connected to a modernist theological project of founding religiousness in a province of the mind that resists religious critique of traditional contents and institutional structures in a secular era. The author pleas for more differentiation between theistic and non-theistic dimensions of the concept spirituality. (shrink)

Abstract: A 1991 article by psychologist John D. Carter offers an underdeveloped insight that typologies for relating science and religion might be fruitfully formulated in discipline-specific perspectives. This essay thus covers a specifically theological perspective only briefly outlined in Carter, and it expands four models that theologians have used to relate religion and science. This essay renames these models and expands their implications, especially for addressing the behavioral sciences. (1) The contrarian model generally opposes science, (2) the apologetic makes theology (...) congenial to science, (3) the correlational holds both disciplines in tension, and (4) the synthetic attempts a grand unification of them. Arguing from the theologian's perspective, this essay is intended to demonstrate that different models/methods for relating science and religion are really reflections of deeper religious attitudes and argues that the task for which a method is employed ultimately determines its adequacy within that attitude's constraints. (shrink)

The question of whether Heidegger’s phenomenological contribution to the philosophy of being originates from his pre-philosophical attitude to theology or rather, it is the methodological question of phenomenology which influenced his thinking, is one of the most essential questions in Heidegger-research. Though, this has already been elaborated on in a broader sense, the publication of the Black Notes has opened new dimensions for discussion. It is not the aim of this paper to represent Heidegger’s concept of the history of being (...) in the light of the new debates, but rather to confirm the thesis, that, in spite of the ‘turn’; in Heidegger’s thinking, his phenomenological hermeneutics was inspired, above all, by his reflection on Christianity. Moreover, the paper will question whether the linearity of Heidegger’s thinking about the historical being remains on the horizon of the religious phenomenon, as it is thematized in his early papers and lectures. While Heidegger’s early phenomenological approaches to religion and theology have been sufficiently elaborated on by several authors, and the phenomenological–hermeneutical relevance has been proven in his thinking, the linkage between the early philosophical approaches to the problem of religiosity and of historical being arising newly in Heidegger’s thinking from the 1930s is missing. The present paper will not just refer to the thesis that Heidegger’s theological background contributed to his questioning of being, and that it was influenced in different ways, but makes an attempt to reveal the internal dynamics of Heidegger’s early thinking prior to the publication of Being and Time and the time of composing the Contributions to Philosophy of those of Heidegger’s lectures which remain in the parallel analysis of religiosity and historicity. (shrink)

(2013). Heidegger, Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgement: On the Roots and Significance of ‘The Theoretical Attitude’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 143-164. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.686980.