AT least in an early phase of his own academic career, Allen W. Wood had a high opinion of Kant's book, RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE. In contrast to much of the voluminous literature on that somewhat idiosyncratic item in the Kant canon, Wood thought the book consistent with Kant's three great Critiques as well as consistent with the historical monotheistic faiths. Wood wrote, "It would be a great mistake to see in the God of Kant's moral faith no more than an abstract, metaphysical idea. For Kant, moral faith in God ... is the moral man's trust in God." Wood, KANT'S MORAL RELIGION (1970). Wood seemed later to change his view, in two seminal articles in the early 1990s. Who is Allen Wood, you ask? A philosopher born in Seattle in 1942 who has taught at Cornell, Yale, and Stanford.
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An uncle of mine used to make a point of not buying, or reading, any newspaper with a Sunday publication date. He would explain this in a mutter about the day of rest. When I was of a certain age, I thought I understood this. He meant that reading the paper was a form of labor for him -- presumably laboring as a conscientious citizen to remain well informed. And HE would not do that labor on a Sunday. But that isn't what he meant. Later I discovered he felt anger toward the non-Christian or inadequately Christian folks who put out a paper on a Sunday. This did not make sense to me. Although still quite young and inexperienced with the working world, I knew enough to understand that most of the work involved in the Sunday (morning!) papers must have been done on Saturday. My uncle did not regard Saturday as the sabbath, yet he was unhappy about that work because of the date printed on it. Or maybe he was especially unhappy about the guys driving the delivery trucks. At ...
On Quora, someone wrote: "Is it possible that the end of this life is the beginning of another?" I replied: "It is possible, I suppose. After all, one can say it without contradicting one’s self, which is the lowest coherent bar for the notion of possibility. "Is it plausible? Not especially. What seems more plausible, IMHO, is that the end of this life is neither the beginning nor the end of some more real life, but simply a (minor) incident in the unfolding of that more real life. "The 'I' with whom I am most familiar might be the avatar in a video game. Yet the avatar may die, the game may end, etc., while the real I, the player behind that avatar, may continue living only somewhat affected by that loss."
Not long ago, the President of the United States, talking to a scrum of reporters, defending his (insane) policy with regard to US/China trade relations, and in that context said "I am the chosen one," and looked briefly to the sky before resuming his discourse. It was an intense moment. It is worth marking the intensity as the world skids out of control and even crazier news pushes that bit aside. I'm doing the POTUS an undeserved favor in the paragraph above by using all lower case letters for the phrase "chosen one," although he said it as if he mean, "the Chosen One." In a country where a majority of the citizens are Christians the phrase has a pretty specific meaning, and the look at the skies rather confirms it. This remark makes Donald Trump our first President of whom we can say that his self-image isn't just dynastic. It is metaphysical. After a bit of blowback, a couple of days later, Trump was asked to expand on what he meant by ...
A link: https://quillette.com/2019/05/13/bearing-witness-my-story-out-of-mormonism/ The story is heart-felt. It bears on a subject William James discussed (briefly) in VARIETIES. The loss of faith. The de-conversion experience. Sometimes it can be simple. A college kid in a dorm can kneel to pray before getting into bed, just because he always has. His roommate can ask, perhaps jeeringly or perhaps only out of a mild curiosity, "do you still keep up with that sort of thing?" That can trigger the thought, "there's no reason why I should," and an effortless abandonment of such trappings. Or it can be more convoluted. It can be a years-long a struggle. There exists a full range of Varieties of Deprogramming Experience. Perhaps there's a book in it.
Yes, my vacation went well, thank you. (I'm optimistically assuming it will have gone well and have concluded uneventfully before you read this.) Happy Easter. For the religious Christians among you, some thoughts from Albert Schweitzer for this day. This is from The Mystery of the Kingdom of God . All italics are from the original. "Jesus, however, reached back after the fundamental conception of the prophetic period, and it is only the form in which he conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism. He no longer conceives of it as an intervention of God in the history of the nations, as did the Prophets; but rather as a final cosmical catastrophe. His eschatology is the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, since the Kingdom is to be brought about by the Son of Man when he appears upon the clouds of heaven (Mark 8:38 - 9:1) . " The secret of the Kingdom of God is therefore the synthesis effected by a sovereign spirit bet...
About five years ago archaeologists studying the remains of a 7th century church in Sinope, Turkey, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, found a small stone box. Inside the box was a splinter of wood. This type of splinter, inside such a box, was a venerated feature of many churches through the High Middle Ages where it was regarded as a "piece of the True Cross," the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The 7th century dating of THIS find puts it a good deal earlier than most analogous splinters, though. Legend holds that it was Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land discovered the True Cross, and all the splinters that eventually found themselves to churches around Europe (enough to have rebuilt the whole city of Jerusalem, according to cynics) were said to have come from this Cross. Sort of like the use of two fish to feed multitudes? The historic significance of the find doesn't turn on whether one believes th...
Here's a simple question: Why did William James take the approach that he did in Varieties of Religious Experience, an approach to that field marked by the individual experiences of believers in some higher power? There is on one level the 'official' answer: the one that James gives. He told his lectures' audience that he has been invited to give lectures about religion, a wide-open mandate, and that in order to proceed he would have to select "out of the many meanings of the word [religion] ... the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly." The selection is presented as an arbitrary one, defining religion only "for the purpose of these lectures" as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." But no careful student of William James thinks that this is the whole answer. There are at least th...
Louis Menand summarizes the philosophy of Henry James Sr. quite well. Here's the money quote: "Henry James, Sr. was a Platonist. He believed (following Swedenborg) that there are two realms, a visible and an invisible, and that the invisible realm, which he named the realm of the Divine Love, is the real one. From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James' particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French socialist Charles Fourier...." From Fourier he took an idealization of the brotherhood of men, and the idea expressed in the title of his own final book, Society the Redeemed Form of Man.
The Slate column "Dear Prudence" illustrates the general principle that the best way to answer a question is by asking other questions. One recent query concerned when a woman should begin disclosing to her husband and friends that she had ceased to believe in the religious views that they all shared -- that formed the heart and soul, so to speak, of the town they lived in. This elicited the following barrage of responsive questions: "Ask yourself what you are and aren't willing to do. While you personally no longer believe in your former religion, are you comfortable staying in an environment where most people are? Would you rather live elsewhere? Will it bother you if friends or colleagues continue to assume you're religious? Would you be able to share your beliefs with your children, or would your husband try to insist you keep it a secret from them? Know what it is that you need before you have the conversation. I like Slate so much I've included ...
Fred Hoyle, the creator of steady-state cosmology, wrote something for Harper's about his agnosticism, back in 1951. The magazine has reprinted part of it in the January 2016 issue as one of their continuing "From the Archives" series. "[I]t seems to me that religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic Universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this security is illusory."
A recent issue of THE FEDERAL LAWYER contained a review of a book on religion and the state, Brian Leiter's WHY TOLERATE RELIGION? Okay, the title is rather provocative. But that's how one sells books nowadays. ANyway, I confess that everything I know of the book comes from the review, all the following quotations are second hand. Shame on me. The heart of the book: "[I]t is not obvious why the state should subordinate its other morally important objectives -- safety, health, well-being, equal treatment before the law -- to claims of religious conscience." Related (but distinct) claim is that "religious claims of conscience have no greater entitlement to exemptions than other nonreligious claims of conscience." It is appropriate, Leiter thinks, for a government "to say, the law is the law, and there will be no exemptions for claims of conscience, religious or otherwise." But Leiter approves of this no-exemptions stance only with a cav...
The recent death of Barbara Reynolds is worth some mention here. Barbara Reynolds was the goddaughter of Dorothy Sayers and a formidable scholar of the Italian language. For more than 30 years she was chief executive and general editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary. After Sayers' own untimely death in 1957 it was Reynolds who put together the available materials and finished the work on the Sayers' translation of Paradiso , the third volume of Dante's Commedia . Sayers' translation of Inferno had appeared in 1949, of Purgatorio in 1955. The Sayers/Reynolds translation of Paradiso came out in 1962. Despite huge differences in every sort of respect, I'm a great admirer of the Anglo-Catholic intellects of the first half of the 20th century, the so-called "Inklings" and their circle included, and Sayers perhaps most of all in that crowd, not just for her Dante translation (and the commentaries) but for the detective fiction and the width of h...
"So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ." So wrote the forbidding fellow now known as St. Paul. I only recently discovered that there is some ecclesiological dispute as to what this passage in the letter to the Colossians means. I was surprised by that, though, because the meaning seems to me pretty clear. That is a text written almost in anticipation of William James and his now-famous stress on the personal and experiential significance of religion over the trappings, the ritual, the rules. James put it this way: Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; -- so...
Continuing the line of thought from yesterday and the day before.... So far in this discussion I've quoted Hume only once, that bit from the Enquiry about how "we are ignorant of those powers and forces" etc. So here are a couple of other quotes used by Strawson in laying out his broad thesis. From the Treatise he quotes, "[I am] ready to allow, that there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted." Note the duality, "material and immaterial." One of Strawson's underlying points is that Hume considered Berkeley's metaphysics a plausible one -- neither certain nor probable, but coherent and on its own terms irrefutable. Berkeley saw the world as consisting of a God, various human minds, and the ideas that God implants into their/our minds. These ideas include the entire sensory world, including the regularities we might describe as examples of causality. Berkeley too, then, b...
Continuing yesterday's train of thought... Strawson (pictured here) observes that there are differences between the young Hume and the mature Hume: the fellow who wrote the TREATISE (1740) and the man who wrote the ENQUIRY (1748). To some extent, at least, the positivistic reading of Hume on causation follows from some dramatic overstatements in the earlier book, overstatements that Hume later regretted. In the latter book he said, "the positive air, which prevails in that book, and which may be imputed to the ardor of youth, so much displeases me, that I have no patience to review it." Strawson also sometimes quotes from DIALOGUES ON NATURAL RELIGION, which was written subsequent to the ENQUIRY by at least another couple of years, and specifically of course the words of Philo, the Humean mouthpiece there. At any rate: Strawson reads Hume, at all stages of his working life, in such a way as to connect the issue of causation/Causation to the issue of the independen...
"In one sense at least the personal [side of] religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; -- so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete." VARIETIES O F RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE