In this work the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrates that the scientist's personal participation in his knowledge, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of science itself. Even in the exact sciences, "knowing" is an art, of which the skill of the knower, guided by his personal commitment and his passionate sense of increasing contact with reality, is a logically necessary part. In the biological and social sciences this becomes even more evident. The (...) tendency to make knowledge impersonal in our culture has split fact from value, science from humanity. Polanyi wishes to substitute for the objective, impersonal ideal of scientific detachment an alternative ideal which gives attention to the personal involvement of the knower in all acts of understanding. His book should help to restore science to its rightful place in an integrated culture, as part of the whole person's continuing endeavor to make sense of the totality of his experience. In honor of this work and his The Study of Man Polanyi was presented with the Lecomte de Noüy Award for 1959. (shrink)

We have lived under the hegemony of the reductionistic scientific worldview since Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. In this view, the universe is meaningless, as Stephen Weinberg famously said, and organisms and a court of law are "nothing but" particles in morion. This scientific view is inadequate. Physicists are beginning to abandon reductionism in favor of emergence. Emergence, both epistemological and ontological, embraces the emergence of life and of agency. With agency comes meaning, value, and doing, beyond mere happenings. More organisms (...) are conscious. None of this violates any laws of physics, but it cannot be reduced to physics. Emergence is real, and the tiger chasing the gazelle are real parts of the real universe. We live, therefore, in an emergent universe. This emergence often is entirely unpredictable beforehand, from the evolution of novel functionalities in organisms to the evolution of the economy and human history. We are surrounded on all sides by a creativity that cannot even be prestated. Thus we have the first glimmerings of a new scientific worldview, beyond reductionism. In our universe emergence is real, and there is ceaseless, stunning creativity that has given rise to our biosphere, our humanity, and our history. We are partial co-creators of this emergent creativity. It is our choice whether we use the God word. I believe it is wise to do so. God can be our shared name for the true creativity in the natural universe. Such a view invites a new sense of the sacred, as those aspects of the creativity in the universe that we deem worthy of holding sacred. We are not logically forced to this view. Yet a global civilization, hopefully persistently diverse and creative, is emerging. I believe we need a shared view of God, a fully natural God, to orient our lives. We need a shared view of the sacred that is open to slow evolution, because rigidity in our view of the sacred violates how our most precious values evolve and invites ethical hegemony. We need a shared global ethic beyond our materialism. I believe a sense of God as the natural, awesome creativity in the universe can help us construct the sacred and a global ethic to help shape the global civilization toward what we choose with the best of our limited wisdom. (shrink)

Presents Newton's unifying idea of gravitation and explains how he converted physics from a science of explanation into a general mathematical system.

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous understanding of the subconscious as a means of bridging between religion and science accounts for some of the interpretive difficulties, but it does not explain why his overarching question (...) was so obscure, why psychopathology and unusual experiences figured so prominently, or why he gave us so many examples and so little argument. To understand these persistent puzzles we need to do more than acknowledge James's indebtedness to Frederic Myers's conception of the subconscious. We need to read VRE in the context of the transatlantic network of experimental psychologists and psychical researchers who provided the primary intellectual inspiration for the book. Doing so not only locates and clarifies the underlying question that animated the work but also illuminates the structural and rhetorical similarities between VRE and Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. In contrast to the individual case studies of hysterics, mediums, and mystics produced by others in this network, both Myers and James adopted a natural-history approach in which they arranged examples of automatisms to produce a rhetorical effect, thus invoking science in order to evoke a religious response. Where Myers organized his examples to make a case for human survival of death, James organized his to make a case for the involvement of higher powers in the transformation of the self. Read in this way, VRE marks a dramatic shift from a religious preoccupation with life after death to a religious preoccupation with this-worldly self-transformation. (shrink)

"Sir Hermann Bondi, NatureThe late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received ...

Examines both sides of this major dilemma, arguing that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord with each other.

This article is devoted to examining theoretical issues on the interface of the psychology of religion and the psychology of emotion, something which recently has been surprisingly neglected. The broad range of psychological components involved in emotion, and the importance of emotional processes in religion, make it a particularly relevant area of general psychology as far as religion is concerned. The first issue to be examined is the centrality of emotion (or feeling) in religion and the extent to which religion (...) can be conceptualized as a kind of emotional state—an idea that can be found in different forms in Schleiermacher and James. Though both psychology and emotion are now seen as less private than previously supposed, the analogy remains potentially fruitful. The second issue arises from the notable tendency in the psychology of emotion to see emotion as functional, even rational, rather than disruptive. The view of Averill is endorsed that emotions can be psychologically creative when used appropriately. This leads to a review of attitudes toward emotional aspects of religion and religious attitudes to everyday emotions, where a positive but discriminating approach to emotions seems appropriate. (shrink)

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an early (...) dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

Since the English translation first appeared in 1923, Rudolf Otto's volume has established itself as a classic in the field of religious philosophy. It offers an in-depth inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.

This lucidly written book examines the social and political significance of the natural sciences through a detailed and original account of science as an interpretive social practice.

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in 1902 (...) and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

Pragmatism has played only a small role in the half century and more of the science‐and‐religion dialogue, in part because pragmatism was at a low ebb in the 1950s. Even though Jamesean pragmatism in particular is experiencing a resurgence, owing partly to the work of Rorty and Putnam, it remains inconspicuous in the dialogue. Excepting artificial intelligence and artificial life, computer science also has not played a large role in the dialogue. Recent research into the foundations of object‐oriented programming, however, (...) shows this increasingly pervasive practice possesses an implicit pragmatist epistemology. Although science will have to become more computational, it will have to come to terms with both object‐oriented computing and its implicit pragmatism, which in turn supports the conclusion that we have fresh warrant for recasting the science‐and‐religion dialogue in Jamesean pragmatist terms. Some preliminary consequences of such a recasting of the dialogue are explored. (shrink)

He draws on recent philosophy, but assumes no knowledge of the texts or terminology. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Contemporary debates on God’s emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God’s emotionality on the basis of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us. Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent (...) with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy. (shrink)

In this article, I call into question the relevance of emergence theories as presently used by thinkers in the science–religion discussion. Specifically, I discuss theories of emergence that have been used by both religious naturalists and proponents of panentheism. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) If we take the background theory to be metaphysical realism, then there seems to be no positive connection between the reality of emergent properties and the validity of providing reality with a religious interpretation, though (...) one could perhaps construe an argument for the positive ontological status of emergence as a negative case for a religious worldview. (2) To be considered more plausible, religious naturalism should interpret religious discourse from the perspective of pragmatic realism. (3) Panentheistic models of divine causality are unable to avoid ontological dualism. (4) It is not obvious that emergent phenomena and/or properties are nonreducible in the ontological sense of the terms; indeed, the tension between weak and strong emergence makes it difficult for the emergentist to make ontological judgments. My general conclusion is that the concept of emergence has little metaphysical significance in the dialogue between science and theology. (shrink)

Complexity and emergence (the appearance and impact of the new) can be the bane of managers and their organizations. Both complexity and emergence threaten to upset adherence to predefined categories, which supposedly allows for efficiency. Indeed, traditional management thinking focuses on a retrospective coherence where ideas and events are assigned to categories, the categories are labeled, and outliers are treated as statistical deviants. The study of how such attributed (retrospective) sense-making breaks down in and around organizations is the focus of (...) social complexity theory. Coherence in the Midst of Complexity discusses the social complexity approach, where dialogue and stories allow for the degrees of freedom needed for the opportunities of emergence to take root. The book focuses on the experience of coherence and how such experiential lessons differ from the establishment and maintenance of categories and labels. The authors offer a four-fold logic for discussing experiential coherence and the embrace of emergence in organizations of all sizes. (shrink)

Reviews the book 'William James and the Metaphysics of Experience,' by David C. Lamberth.