God and Contemporary Science: Philip Clayton's Defense of Panentheism

Philip Clayton's God and Contemporary Science is summarized and discussed. Clayton presents a theological reading of biblical texts. In my opinion, science-and-religion studies should deal more substantially with insights of secular studies on the situated character of these texts. Clayton uses the relationship between mind and brain as analogy for the relationship between God and the world. This runs the risk of understanding God as analogous to the mind and hence secondary and emergent relative to the world. Besides, Clayton's arguments for “mental causation” are wanting. But then, why should a defender of panentheism decouple the mental and the material?     

Shaping the Field of Theology and Science: A Critique of Nancey Murphy

Nancey Murphy is a key second-generation figure in the field of religion and science. Through a variety of responsibilities, some of which are reviewed here, she has worked as a discipline builder over the last fifteen years. After trying to convey the general spirit of Murphy's work, the author focuses on five areas where readers might resist her conclusions, including her "postmodern" theory of scientific (and religious) knowledge and truth, her treatment of theology and science as "separate but equal," and her defense of physicalism.     

Pragmatism, Science, And Society: A Review Of Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1

Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 is a collection of papers that explores the implications of philosophical pragmatism in several areas, including natural science, mind—body issues in philosophy, and perspectives on liberal democracy and social change. Similarities between Rorty's pragmatism and Skinner's radical behaviorism are explored in each of these three areas. Although some important and interesting differences are found regarding the role of science in social change, most areas show remarkable similarities between the two systematic perspectives.     

Logic and Philosophy of Logic in Wittgenstein

This essay discusses Wittgenstein's conception of logic, early and late, and some of the types of logical system that he constructed. The essay shows that the common view according to which Wittgenstein had stopped engaging in logic as a philosophical discipline by the time of writing Philosophical Investigations is mistaken. It is argued that, on the contrary, logic continued to figure at the very heart of later Wittgenstein's philosophy; and that Wittgenstein's mature philosophy of logic contains many interesting thoughts that have gone widely unnoticed.     

Philosophy,Logic, Science,History

Analytic philosophy is sometimes said to have particularly close connections to logic and to science, and no particularly interesting or close relation to its own history. It is argued here that although the connections to logic and science have been important in the development of analytic philosophy, these connections do not come close to characterizing the nature of analytic philosophy, either as a body of doctrines or as a philosophical method. We will do better to understand analytic philosophy—and its relationship to continental philosophy—if we see it as a historically constructed collection of texts, which define its key problems and concerns. It is true, however, that analytic philosophy has paid little attention to the history of the subject. This is both its strength—since it allows for a distinctive kind of creativity—and its weakness—since ignoring history can encourage a philosophical variety of “normal science.”     

What Is Legal Philosophy?

This article delineates some of the main issues that are debated by philosophers of law. It explores the connections between legal philosophy and other areas of philosophy, while also seeking to specify the distinctiveness of many of the concerns that have preoccupied philosophers of law. It illustrates its abstract points with examples focused on the separability of law and morality, the nature of the rule of law, the nature of rights, justifications for the imposition of punishment, and the identification of basic legal entitlements.     

Modeling,Truth, and Philosophy

Knowledge requires truth, and truth, we suppose, involves unflawed representation. Science does not provide knowledge in this sense but rather provides models, representations that are limited in their accuracy, precision, or, most often, both. Truth as we usually think of it is an idealization, one that serves wonderfully in most ordinary applications, but one that can terribly mislead for certain issues in philosophy. This article sketches how this happens for five important issues, thereby showing how philosophical method must take into account the idealized nature of our familiar conception of truth.     

Hume and the nominalist tradition

Many of the central theses of Hume's philosophy – his rejection of real relations, universals, abstract objects and necessary causal relations – had precedents in the later medieval nominalist tradition. Hume and his medieval predecessors developed complex semantic theories to show both how ontologies are apt to become inflated and how, if we understand carefully the processes by which meaning is generated, we can achieve greater ontological parsimony. Tracing a trajectory from those medieval traditions to Hume reveals Hume to be more radical, particularly in his rejection of abstraction and abstract ideas. Hume's denial of general, abstract ideas is consistent with his philosophical principles but fails to appreciate the more sophisticated nominalist approaches to abstraction, the result of which is a theoretically impoverished account of our capacity for generalization.     

Skepticism,naturalism, pyrrhonism

Skepticism and naturalism bear important connections with one another. Do they conflict or are they different sides of the same coin? In this paper, by considering the ways in which Sextus and Hume have examined these issues, I offer a Pyrrhonian response to Penelope Maddy's attempt to reject skepticism within the form of naturalism that she calls “second philosophy” (Maddy, 2007, 2017) and to Timothy Williamson's attempt to avoid skepticism from emerging within his knowledge-first approach (Williamson, 2000). Some lessons about Pyrrhonism result.     

Affective atmospheres of weapons technologies: The case of battle drones,combat fighters and bodies in contemporary German geopolitics

Using the example of the defense and security sector at the Innovation and Leadership in Aerospace aviation fair in Berlin, this paper interrogates how the presentation of weapons technologies at German security and aviation fairs produces a/effects that influence the body and serve to legitimize political decisions. It examines to what extent the body becomes the site of geopolitical negotiation via affective atmospheres and how different scales interact within this process. First, I argue that affective connections between weapons technologies and spectators are essential for legitimizing warfare technologies. Second, I argue that affects of weapons technologies are subject to ambivalence and ambiguity, and that they are to be understood as entangled with other affects in the same body. Third, I argue that affects become effective across material and spatial scales. Drawing on geographic work on affective atmospheres, debates in intimate geopolitics and feminist science and technology studies, the paper contributes to critical geopolitics by unpacking the role of affective dimensions in naturalizing the development and acquisition of weapons technologies. In doing so, it also contributes to debates on the methodological operationalization of theories of affect and to emotional geographies of (in)security.