Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza

Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza

Author: Carlos Fraenkel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-11-22

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0521194571

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This groundbreaking account of the concept of a philosophical religion traces its history from antiquity to the Enlightenment.


Essays in the Philosophy of Religion

Essays in the Philosophy of Religion

Author: Philip L. Quinn

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2006-10-12

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 019156950X

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This volume presents a selection of essays by the late Philip Quinn, one of the world's leading philosophers of religion. Quinn left behind an influential body of work on a wide variety of topics. He was the author of Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (1978) and of more than two hundred papers in philosophy. Fourteen of his best and most influential contributions to the philosophy of religion are gathered here. The papers have been organized around the following topics: religious epistemology, religious ethics, religion and tragic dilemmas, religion and political liberalism, topics in Christian philosophy, and religious diversity.


Epistemic Authority

Epistemic Authority

Author: Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0190278269

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Gives an extended argument for epistemic authority from the implications of reflective self-consciousness. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. The book argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modelled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. Some of these authorities can be in the moral and religious domains. The book investigates the way the problem of disagreement between communities or between the self and others is a conflict within self-trust, and argue against communal self-reliance on the same grounds as the book uses in arguing against individual self-reliance. The book explains how any change in belief is justified--by the conscientious judgment that the change will survive future conscientious self-reflection. The book concludes with an account of autonomy. -- Información de la editorial.


The Significance of Religious Experience

The Significance of Religious Experience

Author: Howard Wettstein

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-11-12

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0190226757

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In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary (as opposed to philosophical) approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification.


Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience

Author: Jack N. Rakove

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0195305817

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In Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Rakove makes broad claims about how religious freedom affects us. He contrasts the radical course of American developments with the more complicated ways in which Europeans tried to promote religious tolerance. He argues that both freedom of conscience and disestablishment were critical constitutional principles whose significance we no longer fully appreciate. Rakove explains why Jefferson's and Madison's understanding of these concepts were influential to their constitutional thinking. And he examines some of our contemporary controversies over church and state from the vantage point, not of legal doctrine, but of the deeper history that gave the U.S. its unique approach to religious freedom.


Religious Freedom and the Constitution

Religious Freedom and the Constitution

Author: Christopher L. Eisgruber

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-04-10

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0674034457

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Religion has become a charged token in a politics of division. In disputes about faith-based social services, public money for religious schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments monuments, the theory of evolution, and many other topics, angry contestation threatens to displace America's historic commitment to religious freedom. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is that constitutional analysis of religious freedom has been hobbled by the idea of "a wall of separation" between church and state. That metaphor has been understood to demand that religion be treated far better than other concerns in some contexts, and far worse in others. Sometimes it seems to insist on both contrary forms of treatment simultaneously. Missing has been concern for the fair and equal treatment of religion. In response, the authors offer an understanding of religious freedom called Equal Liberty. Equal Liberty is guided by two principles. First, no one within the reach of the Constitution ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundation of their commitments. Second, all persons should enjoy broad rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property. Together, these principles are generous and fair to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. With Equal Liberty as their guide, the authors offer practical, moderate, and appealing terms for the settlement of many hot-button issues that have plunged religious freedom into controversy. Their book calls Americans back to the project of finding fair terms of cooperation for a religiously diverse people, and it offers a valuable set of tools for working toward that end.


The Flight from Authority

The Flight from Authority

Author: Jeffrey Stout

Publisher: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Jeffrey Stout argues that modern thought was born in a crisis of authority, took shape in flight from authority, and aspired to autonomy from all traditional influence. The quest for autonomy was an attempt to begin completely anew. As such it was bound to fail. Stout traces the secularization of public discourse and its effect on the relation between theism and culture as well as the severance of morality from traditional moorings in favor of autonomy. He is unabashedly historical in his approach, defending the thesis that all thought is historically conditioned and that historical insight is essential to self-understanding. Each section of the book takes up a major problem in contemporary philosophy - the nature of knowledge, the rationality of religious belief, the autonomy of morality- and sets that problem against the background of early modern disputes over authority. The result is simultaneously a critique of ahistorical biases, a survey of major developments in modern thought, and a normative treatment of the problems addressed. The book culminates in the final section with an account of post-Kantian concern with the autonomy of morals. Morality attained relative independence as a form of discourse only in the modern period, but the nature of this independence is distorted when construed in foundationalist or Kantian terms. After criticizing methodological assumptions in recent moral philosophy and religious ethics, Stout sketches his own account of the emergence of autonomy for morality, stressing the need for substantial rethinking of the relationship between religion and ethics. In a concluding chapter, he places his own position in relation to the philosophical tradition descendant from Hegel.


Religion without God

Religion without God

Author: Ronald Dworkin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 71

ISBN-13: 0674728041

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In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions that men and women have asked through the ages: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What is death and what is immortality? Based on the 2011 Einstein Lectures, Religion without God is inspired by remarks Einstein made that if religion consists of awe toward mysteries which “manifest themselves in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, and which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms,” then, he, Einstein, was a religious person. Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence. Dworkin hoped that this short book would contribute to rational conversation and the softening of religious fear and hatred. Religion without God is the work of a humanist who recognized both the possibilities and limitations of humanity.


Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics

Author: Jonathan Pugh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0198858582

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Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary Western bioethics, and the claim that there is an important relationship between autonomy and rationality is often treated as an uncontroversial claim in this sphere. Yet, there is also considerable disagreement about how we should cash out the relationship between rationality and autonomy. In particular, it is unclear whether a rationalist view of autonomy can be compatible with legal judgments that enshrine a patient's right to refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether ". . . the reasons for making the choice are rational, irrational, unknown or even non-existent". In this book, I bring recent philosophical work on the nature of rationality to bear on the question of how we should understand autonomy in contemporary bioethics. In doing so, I develop a new framework for thinking about the concept, one that is grounded in an understanding of the different roles that rational beliefs and rational desires have to play in personal autonomy. Furthermore, the account outlined here allows for a deeper understanding of different form of controlling influence, and the relationship between our freedom to act, and our capacity to decide autonomously. I contrast my rationalist with other prominent accounts of autonomy in bioethics, and outline the revisionary implications it has for various practical questions in bioethics in which autonomy is a salient concern, including questions about the nature of informed consent and decision-making capacity.


Kant, Religion, and Politics

Kant, Religion, and Politics

Author: James DiCenso

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-08-18

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1139501542

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This book offers a systematic examination of the place of religion within Kant's major writings. Kant is often thought to be highly reductionistic with regard to religion - as though religion simply provides the unsophisticated with colourful representations of moral lessons that reason alone could grasp. James DiCenso's rich and innovative discussion shows how Kant's theory of religion in fact emerges directly from his epistemology, ethics and political theory, and how it serves his larger political and ethical projects of restructuring institutions and modifying political attitudes towards greater autonomy. It also illustrates the continuing relevance of Kant's ideas for addressing issues of religion and politics that remain pressing in the contemporary world, such as just laws, transparency in the public sphere and other ethical and political concerns. The book will be valuable for a wide range of readers who are interested in Kant's thought.