Religion

This book provides, for the first time, a philosophical study of the whole range of Boethius's writings (except his textbooks on music and arithmetic): the commentaries and monographs on logic, the Opuscula sacra (short treatises on theology) and the Consolation of Philosophy. It also offers a reassessment of Boethius as a philosopher. Boethius, Marenbon argues, was not merely of importance in transmitting ancient Platonism and Aristotelian logical doctrines of the late ancient Platonic schools to the Latin Middle Ages, but was also a subtle and interesting original thinker. In his Opuscula sacra, he makes innovations in the theological method that would mould medieval thinking. The Consolation both directly tackles problems such as the compatibility of human free will and divine prescience and providence, and through its complex use of the dialog form, probes the relation between philosophy and religious belief, Christian and pagan.

This book is a brief introduction to the thought of the great Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure (c.1217-74). It focuses on the long-debated relation between philosophy and theology in the work of this important but neglected thinker, revealing Bonaventure as a great synthesizer. The book's exposition shows in a new and more nuanced way Bonaventure's debt to Augustine, while making clear how he was influenced by Aristotle. The book is organized according to the categories of Bonaventure's own classic text: De reductione artium ad theologiam. Part I is devoted to the definition of Christian Wisdom. In Part II, individual chapters are devoted to Bonaventure's physics, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Part III includes chapters on the Trinity, Creation, Sin, the Incarnation, Grace, the Sacraments, and the Last Things.

Feminist theologians have commonly identified Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism as a prime example of a patriarchal theological ethic that promotes domination. In this study, the author claims that Niebuhr's thought can be usefully appropriated and revised in service of a new ethic – a feminist Christian realism. This new ethic is offered as an answer to the loss of moral grounding and critical judgment within some North American feminist theologies. She contends that an increasingly radical feminist emphasis on divine immanence and human boundedness has undercut key assumptions upon which feminism rests. Niebuhr's realism, she believes, can be the source of a necessary correction. Feminist theologians. Miles argues, would be better served by using the categories of Christian realism to retrieve critically, a more positive understanding of divine transcendence and human self‐transcendence while maintaining their emphasis on human boundedness and divine presence. This position is developed by drawing together the contributions of Niebuhr, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Sharon Welch (two prominent feminist theologians). Ruether's turn to creation and Welch's turn to community together provide an important corrective to Niebuhr's Christian realism.

This book offers a series of reflections on the state of Christianity, and especially Catholicism, in the world today. The centrepiece of the volume is a lecture by the renowned philosopher Charles Taylor, from which the title of the book is taken. The lecture, delivered at Dayton University in January of 1996, offered Taylor the opportunity to speak about his theological views and his sense of the cultural placement of Catholicism, its history and trajectory. Four well-known commentators on religion and society were invited to respond to Taylor's lecture: William M. Shea, George Marsden, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Rosemary Luling–Haughton. Their chapters offer a variety of astute reflections on the tensions between religion and modernity, and in particular on the role that Catholicism can and should play in contemporary society.

This book argues that the traditional, mainly cognitive and metaphorical ways of understanding central Pauline concepts, e.g. ‘being in Christ’, which have been heavily influenced by the incorporation of Platonic dualism into early Christianity from the 2nd century onwards, must be supplemented by a literal, not just cognitive and non-metaphorical understanding that directly reflects Paul's cosmology. That cosmology, including Paul's understanding of the pneuma (‘spirit’), was a materialist, bodily one, with the pneuma being understood by Paul as consisting of a combination of physical elements that would at the resurrection act directly on the ordinary human bodies of believers and transform them into ‘pneumatic bodies’. The book traces this understanding of the future events back to the Pauline present and considers how Paul conceived in bodily terms of his own conversion, of the believers' reception of the pneuma in baptism, and the way it informed his own and their ways of life from the beginning to the projected end. In developing this picture of Paul's overall world view, which maintains its basically ‘apocalyptic’ character, the book draws on ancient Stoic materialist and monistic physics and cosmology, and on modern ideas on ‘religious experience’, ‘self’, ‘body’, and ‘practice’ derived from Foucault and Bourdieu. The book states the cosmological case for the author's earlier ‘ethical’ reading of Paul in his book, Paul and the Stoics (2000).

The Vigrahavyāvartanī is a short work by the second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna. In this text, which is written in a lively question-and-answer style he addresses a number of objections (coming both from Buddhists and from non-Buddhists) which have been put forward against his theory of emptiness discussed in his main work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The Vigrahavyāvartanī is especially noteworthy for its treatment of topics which Nāgārjuna does not much discuss elsewhere, in particular questions of epistemology and the philosophy of language. The purpose of this book is to unlock the philosophical contents of the texts by providing a comprehensive commentary on Nāgārjuna’s arguments as well as a somewhat more general discussion of the philosophical points these raise. It is divided into three sections: the introduction, the translation, and the commentary. The introduction discusses the history of the text and gives a survey of the presently available editions and translations. I then address the question of the authenticity of the Vigrahavyāvartanī, discussing in detail some of the arguments put forward in the secondary literature which attempt to show that the text was not composed by Nāgārjuna. This is followed by some notes on the peculiar structure of the Vigrahavyāvartanī. Here I also explain why I chose to arrange the text differently in the translation and in the commentary. The introduction is concluded by a synopsis which gives a brief survey of the contents of the ten sections into which I have divided the text. The translation is based on the most recent edition of the Sanskrit text (Yonezawa 2008). All explanatory notes, discussions of variant readings and so forth have been left to the commentary. The commentary contains the entire text of the Vigrahavyāvartanī, though in an arrangement which differs from the one followed in the translation. My remarks on a specific section of the text usually follow this section directly, distinguished by a different typeface. The commentary divides Nāgārjuna’s text into ten main thematic units: (1) The status of the theory of emptiness; (2) Epistemology; (3) Intrinsically good things; (4) Names without objects; (5) Extrinsic substances; (6) Negation and existence; (7) The mirage analogy; (8) Emptiness and reasons; (9) Negation and temporal relations; (10) Conclusion

Numerous critics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have argued that God, especially in the Hebrew Bible, is often portrayed as morally vicious. For example, historical narratives in these texts apparently describe God as ordering or commending genocide, slavery, and rape among other moral atrocities; and other texts seem to portray God as commending bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia. The main chapters in this interdisciplinary volume fall into four groups: (i) the first three press objections by philosophers to the moral character of God as it is represented in the Hebrew Bible; (ii) the next five offer responses by theistic philosophers to such objections; (iii) the next two after that present additional responses from the perspective of specialists in biblical studies; and (iv) the final chapter provides some general reflections on the conference at which these papers were initially presented. Also included in the volume are commentators' remarks on each chapter (except the last), along with replies by the original authors.

Consequentialists oppose while absolutists and deontologists rely upon double-effect reasoning (DER) to address hard cases in which good inextricably binds with evil (such as destroying a legitimate military target while concomitantly and foreseeably killing innocents). This book addresses the history, application, and philosophical controversy concerning DER. It traces both the origin of DER in the thought of Aquinas and its development by subsequent ethicists. Considering consequentialist criticisms, proportionalism, and recent revisions of double effect, the book argues at length for the reasonableness of DER, particularly the intended/foreseen distinction. Intent is distinguished from foresight, and this distinction is applied to the classic cases of terror and tactical bombing. Most importantly, the book establishes the ethical relevance of this distinction, grounding its import both in broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic features of action as voluntary, and in a Kantian focus on the victim as an end in himself. The book also considers typically neglected albeit intriguing issues such as DER’s application to allowings and how constitutional legal systems that incorporate exceptionless norms employ a legal analogue to DER.