Inspiration in the Act of Reading: A Discussion of Ulrich H. J. Körtner's Hermeneutics

In German‐language theology, Professor Ulrich H. J. Körtner's theory of inspiration, as it relates to the Bible reader's perspective, is well known. His attempt to gain fruitful insights from contemporary literary hermeneutics while linking them to theological concerns makes his approach a valued yet not uncontroversial example of a reception‐aesthetics twist on the Lutheran sola Scriptura. This article presents Körtner's hermeneutical considerations with special regard to inspiration related to the Bible reader's perspective and shows how this approach may be related to some aspects of the crisis that the Lutheran churches and theology suffer today.     

ON THE ANALYST'S IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PATIENT: THE CASE OF J.‐B. PONTALIS AND G. PEREC

The writer Georges Perec was in psychoanalysis with Jean‐Bertrand Pontalis for four years in the early 1970s. In this essay, the author presents the exceptional interest this analyst took in this patient and the ways in which that interest manifested itself in his work, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Many correlative factors suggest that identificatory processes persisted beyond the treatment and were maintained into Pontalis's later life. While this paper is primarily intended to provide evidence to support this view of a specific case, the author closes by reflecting that this may be a more general phenomenon and the reasons for this.     

WILLIAM WHEWELL,THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS,AND THE MODERN SOLAR SYSTEM

Astronomers of the first half of the nineteenth century viewed our solar system entirely differently from the way twentieth‐century astronomers viewed it. In the earlier period the dominant image was of a set of planets and moons, both of which kinds of bodies were inhabited by intelligent beings comparable to humans. By the early twentieth century, science had driven these beings from every planet in our system except the Earth, leaving our solar system (and perhaps others) as more or less desolate regions for the most part bereft of intelligent life. This essay traces this extinction and its relation to religious thought, noting the role played in it by Sir John Herschel and especially by William Whewell. The inverse square laws for gravitation, heat radiation, and light receive special attention, as does the question of the relevance of the Christian notions of a divine incarnation and redemption.     

Duns Scotus on material substances and cognition: a discussion of two recent books

In a recent book, Thomas Ward advances an original interpretation of Duns Scotus’s hylomorphism, which stresses the ability of the parts of certain kinds of composites to exist independently from each other and from the composite to which they belong. Ward argues that the notion of essential order plays a key role in accounting for the unity of those parts in a composite. In another book, Richard Cross gives a comprehensive treatment of Duns Scotus’s theory of cognition, which proposes an interesting but controversial interpretation of Duns Scotus as introducing a distinction between object and content and defending the view that the contents of intellectual cognitive acts are determined only by their internal structure.     

Sensuality and Altering Anthropology in Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism

Responding to the 2015 J.K. Russell Fellow Noreen Herzfeld, this paper develops three themes: love, anthropology, and sin. The first section extends Herzfeld's treatment of the incarnation to her discussion of love. Appealing to Reinhold Niebuhr's theological anthropology, the second section examines how AI and transhumanism could affect human nature. The final section provides a complementary approach to Herzfeld's discussion of sin as pride by applying Niebuhr's understanding of sin as sensuality to AI and transhumanism.     

You and me

Are there distinctively second-personal thoughts? I clarify the question and present considerations in favour of a view on which some second-personal thoughts are distinctive. Specifically, I suggest that some second-personal thoughts are distinctive in also being first-personal thoughts. Thus, second-personal thinking provides a way of sharing another person's first-personal thoughts.     

The Scottish Reformation was not Protestant

This article argues that the generally accepted term for the Protestant revolution of 1559–60 in Scotland, ‘The Scottish Reformation’, hides the remnant of a sectarian denominational historiography and should be abandoned. These events should be called ‘The Scottish Protestant Reformation’ while ‘The Scottish Reformation’ should be used for a ‘long reformation’ including Catholic and Protestant reform movements extending from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This terminological change represents a new way of understanding the Scottish Reformation as a long process in the Christian culture of Renaissance Scotland. It brings historical research in line with developments in other disciplines, which have uncovered a flourishing early Scottish Renaissance. Making Christianity the primary category in the religious history of this period, rather than the polemical binary ‘Catholic/Protestant’, enables a more balanced appraisal of the various religious and cultural movements in Scotland.     

New Voices for Expressive Pragmatism: Bridging the Divide between Pragmatism and Perfectionism

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with a pragmatist account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit.     

Reformation Humanism: Reading the Classics in the New Theology

Scholarly discussions on what constitutes Christian humanism in the Renaissance and Reformation periods have typically concentrated on its manifestations before 1536, when Erasmus died. In this period, the old arguments for the reading of the Classics once set out by Basil and Augustine still predominated. Calvin’s teaching on the Fall and the noetic effects of sin, however, provided another basis for the incorporation of pagan thought into Christian learning. Christians who followed Calvin benefited from his precise and comprehensive theological position on the place of worldly knowledge in God’s original creation as a means for justifying their study of the Classics.