Hilbert's ε-calculus is based on an extension of the language of predicate logic by a term-forming operator εx. Two fundamental results about the ε-calculus, the first and second epsilon theorem, play a rôle similar to that which the cut-elimination theorem plays in sequent calculus. In particular, Herbrand's Theorem is a consequence of the epsilon theorems. The paper investigates the epsilon theorems and the complexity of the elimination procedure underlying their proof, as well as the length of Herbrand disjunctions of existential (...) theorems obtained by this elimination procedure. (shrink)

This article identifies intellectualism as the view that if we simply think hard enough about our evidence, we get an adequate answer to the question of whether God exists. The article argues against intellectualism, and offers a better alternative involving a kind of volitional evidentialism. If God is redemptive in virtue of seeking divine -human reconciliation, we should expect the evidence for God to be likewise redemptive. In that case, according to the article, the evidence for God would aim to (...) draw the human will toward cooperation with God’s will. Accordingly, the available evidence for God would be volitionally sensitive in that one’s coming to possess it would depend on one’s volitional stance toward its source. The article identifies some implications for divine hiddenness, traditional natural theology, and the view that the evidence for God’s existence is akin to evidence for a scientific hypothesis. (shrink)

In order to understand the place Max Scheler occupied in the debates of his time around the notion of Europe, this article aims to shed some light on the possible convergences between Max Scheler and Rudolf Eucken, who was his thesis director at Jena. The article begins by outlining Rudolf Eucken's conception of Europe, then it identifies a number of points in common between the two authors, before finally measuring the extent of these convergences in Scheler's conception of Europe. At (...) the end of the discussion, it appears that the reception of Augustinianism and a shared conception of community reveal interesting links between the two authors. This connection will give the twenty-first-century reader a better understanding of the framework in which Max Scheler's reflections on Europe are set. (shrink)

Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great”character,theauthor cannot (...) just endowher with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. (shrink)

У статті досліджено мовні помилки, що трапляються в одній із українських інтернет-газет упродовж одного (випадково вибраного) дня цього (2017) року. Указано на високу частотність помилок, на те, що правильність текстів в українських інтернет-ЗМІ значною мірою залежить від мовного оформлення їх безпосереднього джерела, і на те, що в інтернет-ЗМІ часто трапляються найтиповіші помилки сучасної української мови. Доведено, що багато з цих помилок далі поширюють різними веб-порталами (бо часто просто копіюють) без будь-якого мовного редагування. Наголошено на слушності мовного моніторингу українських інтернет-ЗМІ не (...) лише щодо вибору мови, а й щодо мовної правильності. (shrink)

A review of Yvanka Raynova's monograph Sein, Sinn und Werte: Phänomenologische und hermeneutische Perspektiven des europäischen Denkens. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien: 2017, 331 S.

The epistemology of monotheism offered by philosophers has given inadequate attention to the kind of foundational evidence to be expected of a personal God whose moral character is ’agapeic’, or perfectly loving, toward all other agents. This article counters this deficiency with the basis of a theistic epistemology that accommodates the distinctive moral character of a God worthy of worship. It captures the widely neglected ’agonic’, or struggle-oriented, character of a God who seeks, by way of personal witness and intentional (...) action, to realize and manifest ’agape’ among humans who suffer from selfishness. In doing so, the article identifies the overlooked role of personifying evidence of God in human moral character formation. In agreement with some prominent New Testament themes, the new perspective offered ties the epistemology of monotheism to robust ’agapeic’ morality in a way that makes such epistemology ethically challenging for inquirers about God’s existence. Accordingly, s. (shrink)

Canadian Philosopher, John L. Schellenberg, formally proposed and formulated "Divine Hiddenness Argument" in 1993 for the first time. In this atheistic argument, he states that God does not provide sufficient evidence for His existence at least to some people for some times, thus He is hidden. According to his argument which is based on God’s perfect love, Schellenberg believes that if God perfectly loves people as his creatures, He will provide sufficient evidence for his existence to them and therefore He (...) is not hidden. But God does not provide sufficient evidence to them, therefore He is not perfect lover and disbelieving in His existence is rational and inculpable. Schellenberg believes that "Divine hiddenness Argument" justifies atheism and accordingly refutes the existence of God. Paul K. Moser, contemporary American philosopher, rejects Schellenberg’s view in his new approach to epistemology of religion. Rejecting the evidence for Divine hiddenness, Moser believes that there is sufficient evidence for the existence of God. According to Moser, however, this evidence greatly differs with what the people naturally expect. Based on volitional knowledge, he believes that it is the God, not man, who determines the genuine authority and resource for kinds of evidence and its evaluation. So, Moser does not consider divine hiddenness argument, which is formulated on the basis of human authority, successful in justification of divine hiddenness and in refutation of God’s existence. (shrink)

In Paul Moser’s view, philosophical arguments of natural theology are irrelevant as evidence for God’s existence. I argue that embracing Moser’s view would bring about the end to the project and practice of Christian apologetics as we know it. I draw out implications from Moser’s work on religious epistemology for the project of Christian apologetics. I sketch what Christian apologetics would look like if one were to embrace Moser’s call to eliminate arguments as evidence for God (...) existence. The result of embracing Moser-style apologetics is apologetics without argument. I argue that Moserian apologetics should be rejected. (shrink)

The present paper depicts Moser’s view on the justification of the belief in God. By debunking the efficiency of mere theoretical reason in proving the existence of God, introducing God as the source of justification, and using a moral perspective, he proposes a kind of voluntary knowledge. He assumes the right path to acquire true knowledge of god to be a direct and purposeful evidence, which is found in accordance to divine attributes. For their own redemption, before the interference (...) of thought and feelings, God wills the voluntary moral revolution of human beings from selfishness to selfless absolute love. In this respect, Moser puts forth a virtue-based evidentialism, on the basis of which people can accept God’s invitation to friendship with absolute love and therefore experience God’s blessing in their motivational core. This experience indicates God’s self-manifestation and offers direct evidence for his existence, which causes the subject, by gaining moral attributes and receiving God’s absolute love and sharing it with others, to become a personified evidence of God himself. Moreover, according to the inference to the best explanation, Moser justifies the belief in God by this empirical and non-propositional evidence. As a result, Moser’s existential and moral account, despite being criticized for its being subjective and relative, and the unreliability of religious experiences, has revived a number of forgotten theological concepts. (shrink)

Critical review of *The Rationality of Theism*, a collection of new essays edited by Paul Copan and Paul Moser.

I mostly agree with most of what Paul Moser has said in his books in the Philosophy of Religion. The views he has defended are a needed corrective to the evidentialist paradigm in the philosophy of religion. At the same time, his development of his central ideas has resulted in views that are, somewhat idiosyncratic and extreme. In this essay I hope to present a different articulation of those ideas, also defensible from within a Christian perspective, that preserves their (...) central thrust without being so extreme. (shrink)

I agree with about 95% of what Paul Moser has written in his book The Elusive God. However, I have three main points of disagreement with Moser, two of which I ventilate in this paper. The third I discuss in my paper "What's Love Got to Do with It?" also on this website.

Inspired by Paul Moser's recent work, this paper presents a new parable on the topic of belief and unbelief in the tradition of Wisdom, Flew and Mitchell. -/- This paper was read at the annual POH Symposium at Lake Wenatchee, WA in May, 2010. An edited version of this paper has appeared in the second issue of the Seattle Critical Review (online).

One not infrequently hears rumors that the robust practice of natural theology reeks of epistemic pride. Paul Moser’s is a paradigm of such contempt. In this paper we defend the robust practice of natural theology from the charge of epistemic pride. In taking an essentially Thomistic approach, we argue that the evidence of natural theology should be understood as a species of God’s general self-revelation. Thus, an honest assessment of that evidence need not be prideful, but can be an (...) act of epistemic humility, receiving what God has offered, answering God’s call. Lastly, we provide criticisms of Moser’s alternative approach, advancing a variety of philosophical and theological problems against his conception of personifying evidence. (shrink)

In this chapter, we attempt to show that J.P. Moreland's understanding of apologetics is beautifully positioned to counter resistance to a rationally defensible Christianity—resistance arising from the mistaken idea that any rational defense will fail to support or even undermine relationship. We look first at Paul Moser's complaint that since rational apologetics doesn’t prove the God of Christianity, it falls short of delivering what matters most—a personal agent worthy of worship and relationship. We then consider John Wilkinson's charge that (...) the use of reason and argument in evangelistic contexts is relationally futile. Since people aren’t looking for arguments, and logic is an arbitrary human invention, we should present Christianity to others as an irrational faith story. (shrink)

This paper will focus on a famous nineteenth century debate over the physiology of perception between Ewald Hering and Hermann von Helmholtz. This debate is often explained as a contest between empiricism (Helmholtz) and nativism (Hering) about perception. I will argue that this is only part of the picture. Hering was a pioneer of Lamarckian explanations, arguing for an early version of the biogenetic law. Hering explains physical processes, including perception, in terms of ‘organic memory’ that is supported by (...) ‘vital forces’ located throughout the body. Helmholtz, on the other hand, argues that vital forces are in direct conflict with the results he and others proved in the 1840s and 50s on the conservation of force. The battleground of the debate was the interpretation of Johannes Müller’s ‘law of specific nerve energies’, which Hering interpreted in terms of vital forces, and Helmholtz interpreted using a naturalized neo-Kantian approach. In the end, the debate revealed deep fissures in nineteenth century accounts of scientific explanation, as well as in the conception of how physiology, psychology, physics, and philosophy are related. (shrink)

The Darwin-Hecker hypothesis, viz. that laughter induced by tickling and humor share common underlying mechanisms, is so-called in part because of a quotation attributed to Ewald Hecker. However, a German counterpart of the quotation does not appear in the location cited. Some textual sleuthing is undertaken to find out what Hecker actually wrote and where he wrote it.

The history of the interpretation of Psalm 46 has been articulated around the search for its context. Some commentators have sought to pin its historical circumstance to certain events in Israel's past, such as the siege of Sennacherib's army over Judah or a major geological event such as an earthquake. Others have asserted that the author of the Psalm did not have in mind a past event, but a future one, namely, a time of peace and cessation of wars. But (...) is this search for the context of the author's day really essential for the modern reader? Shouldn't the diligent reading of any text culminate in merging the past with the present?And, finally, shouldn't the reader's horizons be called into question when interpreting a text? This research will seek to analyze these questions from the dialogue with authors such as Franz Delitzsch, Hermann Gunkel, Hans Georg Gadamer, G. Heinrich Ewald and Arie Folger; authors who contributed to the reflection of this research. -/- . (shrink)

This study is about Carl Stumpf's achievements during his stay in Prague (1879-1884). It can be considered a piece of sociology of knowledge that is meant to uncover the institutional mechanisms used by Brentano from Vienna in order to implement his philosophical program in Prague. I claim that Stumpf and Marty have been instrumental in Brentano's plans and strategies to consolidate his hold on philosophy and its institutions in Austria. There are also several aspects of Stumpf's and Marty's scientific activities (...) in Prague, which I will also examine in this paper, including their scientific collaborations and exchanges with Ernst Mach, Ewald Hering, Gottlob Frege, and William James during Stumpf's stay in Prague (1879-1884). The last part of this study pertains to the circumstances surrounding Stumpf's departure from Prague and Brentano's reaction to Stumpf's arguments. (shrink)

The current technoscientific progress has led to a sectorization in the philosophy of science. Today the philosophy of science isn't is informal interested in studying old problems about the general characteristics of scientific practice. The interest of the philosopher of science is the study of concepts, problems and riddles of particular disciplines. Then, within this progress of philosophy of science, neuroscientific research stands out, because it invades issues traditionally addressed by the humanities, such as the nature of consciousness, action, knowledge, (...) normativity, etc. As a result, the new area of interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy arises: neurophilosophy. This emerging area applies neuroscientific concepts to traditional philosophical questions, limiting their responses to neuroscientific revelations about nervous systems. Neurophilosophy research focuses on problems related to the indirect nature of mind and brain, computational or representative analysis of brain process, relationships between psychological and neuroscientific research, adequate adaptations of physical and philosophical concepts in neuroscience and the place of cognitive functions. Now, the temporal representation of conscious experience and the types of the neural architecture to represent objects in time have aroused scientific interest. Under these interests, we focus on the studies on the temporary triadic structure of phenomenological consciousness in Dan Lloyd and Rick Grush. From Grush’s studies, the importance of Kantian ideas for cognitive neuroscience emerges, due to the active way in which Kant conceived space and time as forms of intuition, within which the mind interprets its experience. Under this perspective, the theoretical arguments of Dennett-Kinsbourne and Eagleman-Sejnowski represent winks in the direction of Kant-Husserl within the neuroscientific goal while considering that the contents provided by the mind included space, objects and perception of causal relationships. Then, theories of cognitive neuroscience are beginning to suggest that these elements are also, as Kant argued, interpretative elaborations provided by mind / brain, and not only content received from outside. In other words, current cognitive neuroscientific theories try to pass from its Humean phase to a Kantian phase. So, the challenge has been to explain that these elements are provided by the mind and the world itself, and how they have the content they have come from. These are lacking in current studies. Filling this gap helps to involve the analysis of the scientist’s experience in his theoretical attitude. In this sense, an investigation under the Kantian-Husserlian approach that involves pure intuitions a priori with the experience of the scientific and neuroscientific concepts represents a ground-breaking. At present, a neurophilosophical study about this does not exist. In this sense, one feasible proposal for research would be based on the application of neuroscientific results of Moser-Britt to philosophical problems of foundational notions in relativistic physics: space, time, space-time, field, etc., under the Kantian-Husserlian approach, which allows to demonstrate the multidisciplinary link between neurophilosophy and physics. This represents a ground-breaking area in current interests in scientific research, with a positive impact in the field of neuroscience, and contributing to the study of abstraction emphasizing the importance of Kant’s Copernican turn and Husserl’s phenomenological ideas in the construction of physical theories. -/- . (shrink)

FENOMENOLOGIA Y FISICA EN HUSSERL, WEYL Y NEELAMKAVIL: MATERIA-CAMPO BASADO EN EXTENSIÓN-CAMBIO Castillo Ochoa, Ruth Transferencias Interculturales e Históricas de la Europa Medieval Mediterránea RESUMEN La historia de la terminología científica posibilita dar cuenta de 'cambios lingüísticos' o contingencia de términos en Ciencia. La Fenomenología de Husserl resulta un marco filosófico completo para elucidar significados en terminología científica enfatizando el carácter a priori de conceptos fundacionales, su aspecto contingente (lenguaje), intersubjetividad, sujeto transcendental y epojé. En tal sentido, soportar las nociones (...) fundacionales en física bajo las categorías universales Extensión-Cambio de Neelamkavil contribuye al ideal husserliano. Aún no se llega a una imagen adecuada de las intricadas relaciones entre Filosofía y Ciencia. Sin embargo, los hallazgos científicos de Moser-Britt (2014) soportan posiciones kantianas y husserlianas en torno a los términos a priori que fundamentan las teorías físicas. Como consecuencia, los resultados han despertado el interés de filósofos y científicos hacia las ideas husserlianas en tanto terminología lingüística y comprensión aprioricista del mundo. De esta forma, dentro del estado actual del arte, P. Berghofer y H. Wiltsche (2018) abordan el rol de fenomenología en Filosofía de la Física; mientras J. Drummond (2019) en "Husserl: German Perspectives" analiza el rol de la fenomenología en Ciencia. R. Neelamkavil (2018) da cuenta de un nuevo conjunto de categorías en física que comulgan con las ideas de Husserl. La comprensión de los términos Masa y Campo en física, se aborda el estudio de H. Grelland "Husserl, Einstein y Weyl and Concepts of Space, Time and Space-Time" y H. Weyl, "Space, Matter and Time". Un análisis metalingüísitico entre términos científicos y fenomenológicos no se ha realizado aún. La intención de la propuesta es abordar este punto ciego. -/- PALABRAS CLAVE Extensión, Cambio, Masa, Campo, Esencia . (shrink)

I examine the notion of the authoritative command of divine love developed by Paul Moser in his book The Elusive God. Using a Calvinist objection to Moser's contention that God must love every one, including His enemies, I conclude that the notion of an authoritative command of divine love is paradoxical. I then offer a resolution of this paradox on terms that I judge to be in line with Moser's intentions.

This review provides a brief summary and analysis of T.J. Mawson's monograph, Monotheism and the Meaning of Life (part of the Cambridge Elements series, edited by Chad Meister and Paul Moser).

An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature with culture is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal (...) relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art. (shrink)

Review of: R. Steven Turner, In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy. xiv + 338 pp., frontis., illus., figs., tables, bibl., index. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.