PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON RECENT NEUROBIOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES

Abstract. Recent progress in neurophysiology research has created a certain uneasiness in the modes of explanation. Starting with body experiences this research has progressed to borderline experiences and confronts us anew with the age-old mind-body problem. At this point science is especially exposed to the dangers of reductionism as they have been spelled out by Carl Jung. Evolution, understood not as the deployment of pre-existing properties of matter but as the continued emergence of new realities which integrate and transform the pre-existing realities, may lead to a more profound understanding of humanity, which came into being through the emergence of mind. Archetypes and the human religious dimension or the capability to experience God may be the most significant mark of this emergence.     

RECENT BOOKS IN…PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY

Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue, Nancy Sherman
Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modem and Postmodem Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda, Nancey Murphy
Christianity and Civil Society: The Contemporary Debate, Robert Wuthnow
Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (eds)
Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, Jean Grondin
Verstehen and Humane Understanding, Anthony OHear (ed)
Philosophy and Pluralism, David Archard (ed)
Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion, Van A. Harvey
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrks and American Political Thought after World War II, Peter Graf Kielmansegg (ed, with others)
Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Metaphysics, Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon (eds)     

DEWEY ON EXTENDED COGNITION AND EPISTEMOLOGY

There is a surge of attempts to draw out the epistemological consequences of views according to which cognition is deeply embedded, embodied and/or extended (e‐cog). The principal machinery used for doing so is that of analytic epistemology. Here I argue that Dewey's pragmatic epistemology may be better fit to the task. I start by pointing out the profound similarities between Dewey's view on cognition and that emerging from literature of more recent date. Crucially, the benefit of looking at Dewey is that Dewey, unlike contemporary writers, also devises a corresponding epistemology. I then identify two senses in which contemporary analytic epistemology conflicts with e‐cog—concluding from that the superiority of the Deweyian framework, at least as it concerns accommodating e‐cog.     

BEALER ON THE AUTONOMY OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Abstract: In a series of influential articles, George Bealer argues for the autonomy of philosophical knowledge on the basis that philosophically known truths must be necessary truths. The main point of his argument is that the truths investigated by the sciences are contingent truths to be discovered a posteriori by observation, while the truths of philosophy are necessary truths to be discovered a priori by intuition. The project of assimilating philosophy to the sciences is supposed to be rendered illegitimate by the more or less sharp distinction in these characteristic methods and its modal basis. In this article Bealer's particular way of drawing the distinction between philosophy and science is challenged in a novel manner, and thereby philosophical naturalism is further defended.