Deeper Affinities: Fundamental Resonances Between Psychoanalysis and Religion

This essay considers how we “create meaning” in the interplay of “felt sense” and “symbols,” and examines the direct and immediate interplay between some common everyday experiences and a series of concepts from psychoanalytic perspectives to reveal how this interplay has affinities with religion. Psychoanalysis and religion are overlapping projects. Psychoanalytic symbolizing of experience facilitates our knowing features of religion not previously known, as well as knowing features previously known, in new ways.

Commodification in law: ideologies,intractabilities, and hyperboles

In this paper I first aim to identify, from a perspective mindful of both analytic and Continental traditions, the central normative issues at stake in the various debates concerning commodification in law. Although there now exists a wealth of thoughtful literature in this area, I often find myself disoriented within the webs of moral criteria used to analyze the increasingly ubiquitous practice of converting legal goods into monetary values. I therefore attempt to distinguish and organize these often conflated conceptual distinctions across several registers of moral analysis. Second, I formulate what I consider the most illuminating questions regarding the criteria used to evaluate commodification in law. Critiques of commodification in law face what I call problems of ideology, intractability, and hyperbole, and identifying these issues helps to explain the momentum of the law and economics movement.

Ontology,matter and emergence

“Ontological emergence” of inherent high-level properties with causal powers is witnessed nowhere. A non-substantialist conception of emergence works much better. It allows downward causation, provided our concept of causality is transformed accordingly.

Religiousness, Health, and Health Behavior in Public-Use Data of the National Center for Health Statistics

Studies of religiousness and health-related variables in large, population-based cross-sectional or, preferably, longitudinal studies, which are often prohibitively expensive, are important to complement findings from the more commonly performed studies. Inadequately known among social science researchers, the national health surveys of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) offer large, high-quality data sets to the public at no or nominal cost and hence offer important opportunities for research in the area of religion and health, religion and reproductive behavior, sociology of religion and psychology of religion. This report provides an overview of the data sets and a bibliography of prior research using these data, which is intended to suggest how the data of NCHS may be further exploited by researchers of religiousness and health.

Islam and modernity: Islamist movements and the politics of position

With the advent of modernity in the West and the resulting progress that has made Western countries more ‘civilized’ than their counterpart in the Muslim world, Muslim and Arab intellectuals have triggered the debate over the utility of religion in the development of the West. Some intellectuals think that it is only by rejecting religion that the West has achieved astounding progress, while others believe that progress has no connection whatsoever with religion. By implication, Islam is not against progress and will never be if it is properly understood. Islamist movements, with their different positions towards the West and its modernity, differ as well in their conception of Islam in this changing world that is dominated in their views by the West.

Rationality, Justification, and the Internalism/Externalism Debate

In this paper, I argue that what underlies internalism about justification is a rationalist conception of justification, not a deontological conception of justification, and I argue for the plausibility of this rationalist conception of justification. The rationalist conception of justification is the view that a justified belief is a belief that is held in a rational way; since we exercise our rationality through conscious deliberation, the rationalist conception holds that a belief is justified iff a relevant possible instance of conscious deliberation would endorse the belief. The importance of conscious deliberation stems from its role in guiding us in acquiring true beliefs: whereas the externalist holds that if we wish to acquire true beliefs, we have to begin by assuming that some of our usual methods of belief formation generally provide us with true beliefs, the internalist holds that if we form beliefs by conscious deliberation, we can be conscious of reasons for thinking that our beliefs are true. Conscious deliberation can make us conscious of reasons because it proceeds via rational intuitions. I argue that despite the fallibility of rational intuition, rational intuitions do enable us to become conscious of reasons for belief.

Nanotechnology, Contingency and Finitude

It is argued that the social significance of nanotechnologies should be understood in terms of the politics and ethics of uncertainty. This means that the uncertainties surrounding the present and future development of nanotechnologies should not be interpreted, first and foremost, in terms of concepts of risk. It is argued that risk, as a way of managing uncertain futures, has a particular historical genealogy, and as such implies a specific politics and ethics. It is proposed, instead, that the concepts of contingency and of finitude must be central to any understanding of the ethical significance of nanotechnologies, as these concepts can be used to understand the basis of recent work in science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge more widely, which details the multi-dimensional social nature of technological uncertainty.

Scientific Understanding and Mathematical Abstraction

This paper argues for two related theses. The first is that mathematical abstraction can play an important role in shaping the way we think about and hence understand certain phenomena, an enterprise that extends well beyond simply representing those phenomena for the purpose of calculating/predicting their behaviour. The second is that much of our contemporary understanding and interpretation of natural selection has resulted from the way it has been described in the context of statistics and mathematics. I argue for these claims by tracing attempts to understand the basis of natural selection from its early formulation as a statistical theory to its later development by R.A. Fisher, one of the founders of modern population genetics. Not only did these developments put natural selection of a firm theoretical foundation but its mathematization changed the way it was understood as a biological process. Instead of simply clarifying its status, mathematical techniques were responsible for redefining or reconceptualising selection. As a corollary I show how a highly idealised mathematical law that seemingly fails to describe any concrete system can nevertheless contain a great deal of accurate information that can enhance our understanding far beyond simply predictive capabilities.

Disembodied Minds and the Problem of Identification and Individuation

We consider and reject a variety of attempts to provide a ground for identifying and differentiating disembodied minds. Until such a ground is provided, we must withhold inclusion of disembodied minds from our picture of the world.

The Headscarf Controversy: A Response to Jill Marshall

This paper argues that Article 8 of the ECHR, as applied to the protection of a person’s right to wear a headscarf, is an inappropriate locus for thrashing out arguments about the right to protection of religious freedom, and that Article 9 allows for a broader legal and political analysis of the multiple meanings and impacts of religion in our lives. However, the law should not prohibit women from wearing the headscarf. Legal regulation of the headscarf should be replaced with robust political debate about the many diverse and intersecting ways in which it is possible to experience womanhood, sexuality, culture, religion, race, nationality and economic security in the twenty-first century.

An Eliminativist Theory of Religion

A philosophical theory of religion ought to meet four criteria: it should be extensionally accurate, neutral, phenomenological, and non-circular. I argue that none of the popular theories of religion meet all these criteria, and that, in particular, the extensional accuracy criterion and the non-circularity criterion can’t be met without sacrificing extensional accuracy. I conclude that, therefore, religions do not form a kind, and so, there is no such thing as religion.

Why Theists Cannot Accept Skeptical Theism

In recent years skeptical theism has gained currency amongst theists as a way to escape the problem of evil by invoking putatively reasonable skepticism concerning our ability to know that instances of apparently gratuitous evil are unredeemed by morally sufficient reasons known to God alone. After explicating skeptical theism through the work of Stephen Wykstra and William Alston, I present a cumulative-case argument designed to show that skeptical theism cannot be accepted by theists insofar as it crucially undermines epistemic license to the very theism it is invoked to defend. I also argue that attempts to defend a theism-friendly moderate version of skeptical theism either fail to halt the spread of damaging skepticism, or lack philosophical validity.

Attentional capture and attentional character

Attentional character is a way of thinking about what is relevant in a human life, what is meaningful and how it becomes so. This paper introduces the concept of attentional character through a redefinition of attentional capture as achievement. It looks freshly at the attentional capture debate in the current cognitive sciences literature through the lens of Aron Gurwitsch’s gestalt-phenomenology. Attentional character is defined as an initially limited capacity for attending in a given environment and is located within the sphere of attention, primarily as an irrelevant centering in attending.

Intrinsic Finks, Masks, and Mimics

I argue for the existence of intrinsic Finks, Masks, and Mimics, and argue that these undermine certain recent attempts to revive simple conditional analyses of dispositions. I present some examples of intrinsic Finks, Masks, and Mimics, and argue that the example of an intrinsic fink I present has certain advantages over the examples of intrinsic finks recently suggested by Randolph Clarke. I conclude that the existence of such Finks, Masks, and Mimics, undermine a recent attempt by Sungho Choi to distinguish dispositional properties from categorical properties.

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Religion,the Culture of Biomedicine,and the Tremendum: Towards a Non-Essentialist Analysis of Interconnection

The question of the extent of the interconnection, if any, between religion and the Western culture of biomedicine has received considerable scholarly attention over the past several decades. However, any phenomenological analysis that begins by positing an essence of religion is, if not doomed, deeply flawed from the outset. This paper employs William Alston’s non-essentialist notion of ‘religion-making characteristics’ to assess the extent of the interconnection. The conclusion is that the culture of biomedicine does share many, if not all of these characteristics, and that both religion and medicine overlap in significant ways on, to use Erwin Goodenough’s metaphor, the painted curtain that separates man from the tremendum.

Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence,Transcendence, and Constitution in <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Idea of Phenomenology</Emphasis>

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called “the riddle of transcendence” can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution.

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Understanding and the facts

If understanding is factive, the propositions that express an understanding are true. I argue that a factive conception of understanding is unduly restrictive. It neither reflects our practices in ascribing understanding nor does justice to contemporary science. For science uses idealizations and models that do not mirror the facts. Strictly speaking, they are false. By appeal to exemplification, I devise a more generous, flexible conception of understanding that accommodates science, reflects our practices, and shows a sufficient but not slavish sensitivity to the facts.

Punishment as Fair Play

This article defends the fair-play theory of legal punishment against three objections. The first, the irrelevance objection, is the long-standing complaint that fair play fails to capture what it is about crimes that makes criminals deserving of punishment; the others are the recently raised false-equivalence and lacks-integration objections. In response, I sketch an account of fair-play theory that is grounded in a conception of the political order as a meta-cooperative practice—a conception that falls somewhere between contractual and communitarian conceptions—and draw on this account to show how the theory can overcome the objections.

Must an Educated Being Be a Human Being?

This paper argues that an educated being logically does not have to be a human. Philosophers analyzing the concept of education have reached a consensual notion of the matter; but in applying that idea, they have barely discussed whether or not human beings are the only entities that may be educated. Using their notion as the core of a heuristic conception of education, this paper attempts to show that in some contexts it might make sense to predicate education of certain non-human entities. In addition, the paper examines the place of beliefs, reflective intelligence, practical thinking, and feelings in education. It concludes by discussing its implications for educational theory and practice and for the connections between the educated being and personhood and the right to education.