Philosophy

This book is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. It provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. It offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well‐being. It emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. It rejects as simple‐minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well‐being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. It argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives.

Hume's famous essay on miracles is set in the context of the larger debate that was taking place in the eighteenth century about the nature of miracles and the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of such events. The author contents that Hume's argument against miracles is largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. To advance the issues so provocatively posed by Hume's essay requires the tools of the probability calculus being developed by Hume's contemporaries but largely ignored by Hume.

This book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. Written by a cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, the book argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

Philosophers have long been divided between ‘humanists’, for whom ‘man is the measure of things’, and their opponents, who claim that there is a way, in principle knowable and describable, that the world anyway is, independent of human perspectives and interests. The early chapters of The Measure of Things chart the development of humanism from medieval times, through the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romantic periods, to its modern form, ‘existential humanism’. The author does not identify this final position with that of any particular philosopher, though it is closely related to those of Heidegger, Merleau–Ponty, and the later Wittgenstein. Among the earlier figures discussed are William of Ockham, Kant, Herder, Nietzsche, and William James. Rejecting attempts by contemporary advocates of modest or non-metaphysical realism to dissolve the opposition between humanism and its ‘absolutist’ rival, the author adjudicates that rivality. Prompted by the pervasive rhetoric of hubris that the rivals direct against one another, he argues that the rival positions are guilty of lack of humility. Absolutists — whether defenders of ‘The Given’ or scientific realists — exaggerate our capacity to ascend out of our ‘engaged’ perspectives to an objective worldview. Humanists, conversely, exaggerate our capacity to live without a sense of our subjection to a measure independent of our own perspectives. The only escape from the impasse reached when humanism and absolutism are both rejected lies in a doctrine of mystery. There is a reality independent of ‘the human contribution’, but it is necessarily ineffable. Drawing upon the Buddhist conception of ‘emptiness’ and Heidegger's later writings, the final chapters defend the notion of mystery, distinguish the doctrine advanced from that of transcendental idealism, and propose that it is only through appreciation of mystery that measure and warrant may be provided for our beliefs and conduct.

Molinism, named after the 16^th century Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, re‐emerged in the 1970s after it was unwittingly assumed in versions of Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defence against the Logical Argument from Evil. The Molinist notion of middle knowledge——and especially its main objects, so‐called counterfactuals of (creaturely) freedom—have been the subject of vigorous debate in analytical philosophy of religion ever since. Is middle knowledge logically coherent? Is it a benefit or a liability overall for a satisfying account of divine providence? The essays in this collection examine the status, defensibility, and application of Molinism. Friends and foes of Molinism are well‐represented, and there are some lively exchanges between them. The collection provides a snap‐shot of the current state of the Molinism Wars, along with some discussion of where we've been and where we might go in the future. More battles surely lie ahead; the essays and ideas in this collection are likely to have a major impact on future directions. The essays are specially written by a line‐up of established, well‐respected philosophers of religion, metaphysicians, and logicians. There is a substantive Introduction and an extensive Bibliography to assist both students and professionals.

The problem of evil remains a perennial challenge to theistic belief. However, one aspect of this challenge has been largely unexplored by theists — the problem of non-human animal pain and suffering. This problem has become even more vexing in the last century as theists have come to accept that non-human animals capable of pain and suffering have inhabited the earth for hundreds of millions of years, struggling to survive in the face of disease, deprivation, and predation. Evil of this sort might not be especially problematic if standard theodices offered by theists could be applied here as well. Unfortunately, those explanations seem impotent in this domain. This book explores the special challenge to theism raised by non-human animals pain and suffering and explores four broad-ranging explanations aimed at responding to the challenge.

The philosophy of religion as a distinct discipline is an innovation of the last 200 years, but its central topics—the existence and nature of the divine, humankind’s relation to it, the nature of religion, and the place of religion in human life—have been with us since the inception of philosophy. Philosophers have long critically examined the truth of and rational justification for religious claims, and have explored such philosophically interesting phenomena as faith, religious experience, and the distinctive features of religious discourse. The second half of the twentieth century was an especially fruitful period, with philosophers using new developments in logic and epistemology to mount both sophisticated defenses of, and attacks on, religious claims. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by twenty-one prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint. The Handbook is divided into two parts. The first, “Problems,” covers the most frequently discussed topics, among them arguments for God’s existence, the nature of God’s attributes, religious pluralism, the problem of evil, and religious epistemology. The second, “Approaches,” contains four essays assessing the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of practicing philosophy of religion—analytic, Wittgensteinian, continental, and feminist.