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Author: Herman Philipse
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
Published: 2012-02-23
Total Pages: 391
ISBN-13: 0199697531
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHerman Philipse puts forward a powerful new critique of belief in God. He examines the strategies that have been used for the philosophical defence of religious belief, and by careful reasoning casts doubt on the legitimacy of relying on faith instead of evidence, and on probabilistic arguments for the existence of God.
Author: Richard King
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-07-18
Total Pages: 558
ISBN-13: 0231518242
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReligion, Theory, Critique is an essential tool for learning about theory and method in the study of religion. Leading experts engage with contemporary and classical theories as well as non-Western cultural contexts. Unlike other collections, this anthology emphasizes the dynamic relationship between "religion" as an object of study and different methodological approaches and openly addresses the question of the manifold ways in which "religion," "secular," and "culture" are imagined within different disciplinary horizons. This volume is the first textbook which seeks to engage discussion of classical approaches with contemporary cultural and critical theories. Contributors write on the influence of the natural sciences in the study of religion; the role of European Christianity in modeling theories of religion; religious experience and the interface with cognitive science; the structure and function of religious language; the social-scientific study of religion; ritual in religion; the phenomenology of religion; critical theory and religion; embodiment and religion; the impact of colonialism and modernity; theorizing religion in terms of race and ethnicity; links among religion, nationalism, and globalization; the interplay of gender, sex, and religion; and religion and the environment. Each chapter introduces the topic, identifies key theorists and issues, and respects the pluralistic nature of the scholarship in the field. Altogether, this collection scrutinizes the explicit and implicit assumptions theorists make about religion as an object of analysis.
Author: John Cottingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-09-15
Total Pages: 207
ISBN-13: 1107019435
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book, abstract intellectual argument meets ordinary human experience on matters such as the existence of God and the relation between religion and morality.
Author: James Samuel Preus
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJ. Samuel Preus traces the development and articulation of a modern "naturalistic" approach to the study of religion by examining ideas about the origin of religion in the works of nine western thinkers: Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury, Bernard Fontenelle, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Auguste Comte, Edward Brunett Tylor, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. He argues that beginning in the sixteenth century increasing critical detachment from theological presuppositions and commitments made it possible for the question of origins to be posed from an altogether non-religious point of view. This new modernist paradigm was characterized by the conviction that religion could be explained in scientific terms, like any other object of critical investigation.
Author: Martin Hägglund
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2020-02-04
Total Pages: 466
ISBN-13: 1101873736
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.
Author: Jon Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-09-05
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 0192564935
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel treats the religions of the world under the rubric "the determinate religion." This is a part of his corpus that has traditionally been neglected since scholars have struggled to understand what philosophical work it is supposed to do. In Hegel's Interpretation of the Religions of the World, Jon Stewart argues that Hegel's rich analyses of Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Egyptian and Greek polytheism, and the Roman religion are not simply irrelevant historical material, as is often thought. Instead, they play a central role in Hegel's argument for what he regards as the truth of Christianity. Hegel believes that the different conceptions of the gods in the world religions are reflections of individual peoples at specific periods in history. These conceptions might at first glance appear random and chaotic, but there is, Hegel claims, a discernible logic in them. Simultaneously, a theory of mythology, history, and philosophical anthropology, Hegel's account of the world religions goes far beyond the field of philosophy of religion. The controversial issues surrounding his treatment of the non-European religions are still very much with us today and make his account of religion an issue of continued topicality in the academic landscape of the twenty-first century.
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-11-19
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 1551991764
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChristopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.
Author: Ravi Zacharias
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2008-09-09
Total Pages: 148
ISBN-13: 0310295378
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen you pray, are you talking to a God who exists? Or is God nothing more than your "imaginary friend," like a playmate contrived by a lonely and imaginative child? When author Sam Harris attacked Christianity in Letter to a Christian Nation, reviewers called the book "marvelous" and a generation of readers--hundreds of thousands of them--were drawn to his message. Deeply troubled, Dr. Ravi Zacharias knew that he had to respond. In The End of Reason, Zacharias underscores the dependability of the Bible along with his belief in the power and goodness of God. He confidently refutes Harris's claims that God is nothing more than a figment of one's imagination and that Christians regularly practice intolerance and hatred around the globe. If you found Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation compelling, the book you are holding is exactly what you need. Dr. Zacharias exposes "the utter bankruptcy of this worldview." And if you haven't read Harris's book, Ravi's response remains a powerful, passionate, irrefutably sound set of arguments for Christian thought. The clarity and hope in these pages reach out to readers who know and follow God as well as to those who reject God.
Author: Timothy Fitzgerald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-10-16
Total Pages: 291
ISBN-13: 0195347153
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2014-11-06
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 0745694608
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTwo countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of our age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. Advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics are clearing the way for the penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life. For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientific naturalism. At the same time, we are witnessing an unexpected revitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious communities across the world. From a philosophical perspective, this revival of religious energies poses the challenge of a fundamentalist critique of the principles underlying the modern Wests postmetaphysical understanding of itself. The tension between naturalism and religion is the central theme of this major new book by Jürgen Habermas. On the one hand he argues for an appropriate naturalistic understanding of cultural evolution that does justice to the normative character of the human mind. On the other hand, he calls for an appropriate interpretation of the secularizing effects of a process of social and cultural rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West. These reflections on the enduring importance of religion and the limits of secularism under conditions of postmetaphysical reason set the scene for an extended treatment the political significance of religious tolerance and for a fresh contribution to current debates on cosmopolitanism and a constitution for international society.
