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"God is eternal" is a standard belief of all theistic religions. But what does it mean? If, on the one hand, "eternal" means timeless, how can God hear the prayers of the faithful at some point of time? And how can a timeless God act in order to answer the prayers? If God knows what I will do tomorrow from all eternity, how can I be free to choose what to do? If, on the other hand, "eternal" means everlasting, does that not jeopardize divine majesty? How can everlastingness be reconciled with the traditional doctrines of divine simplicity and perfection? An outstanding group of American, UK, German, Austrian, and Swiss philosophers and theologians discuss the problem of God's relation to time. Their contributions range from analyzing and defending classical conceptions of eternity (Boethius's and Aquinas's) to vindicating everlastingness accounts, and from the foreknowledge problem to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. This book tackles philosophical questions that are of utmost importance for Systematic Theology. Its highest aim is to deepen our understanding of religious faith by surveying its relations to one of the most fundamental aspects of reality: time.
This special issue documents the results of a workshop on and with Alvin Goldman at the University of Düsseldorf in May, 2008. The topic was Reliable Knowledge and Social Epistemology. The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth and final chapter. The contributions of the first chapter (E. Brendel, C. Jäger, and G. Schurz) address general questions of social epistemology, veritism and externalism, including critical reflections on Goldman's notion of 'weak knowledge'. The subsequent chapter (T. Grundmann and P. Baumann) examines problems which are involved in the search for an ...
Contextualism has become one of the leading paradigms in contemporary epistemology. According to this view, there is no context-independent standard of knowledge, and as a result, all knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive. Contextualists contend that their account this analysis allows us to resolve some major epistemological problems such as skeptical paradoxes and the lottery paradox, and that it helps us explain various other linguistic data about knowledge ascriptions. The apparent ease with which contextualism seems to solve numerous epistemological quandaries has inspired the burgeoning interest in it. This comprehensive anthology collects twenty original essays and critical comme...
Peter Baumann develops and defends a distinctive version of epistemic contextualism, the view that the truth conditions or the meaning of knowledge attributions can vary with the context of the attributor. Baumann discusses problems and objections, and provides an extension of contextualism beyond epistemology.
Reading and textual interpretation are ordinary human activities, performed inside as well as outside academia, but precisely how they function as unique sources of knowledge is not well understood. In this book, René van Woudenberg explores the nature of reading and how it is distinct from perception and (attending to) testimony, which are two widely acknowledged knowledge sources. After distinguishing seven accounts of interpretation, van Woudenberg discusses the question of whether all reading inevitably involves interpretation, and shows that although reading and interpretation often go together, they are distinct activities. He goes on to argue that both reading and interpretation can be paths to realistically conceived truth, and explains the conditions under which we are justified in believing that they do indeed lead us to the truth. Along the way, he offers clear and novel analyses of reading, meaning, interpretation, and interpretative knowledge.
The first comprehensive history of the Reformation origins and flourishing of Lutheran baroque; while the Protestant reform movements are generally associated with iconoclasm, this book studies art, religion, and politics to show that in Lutheran Germany a rich visual culture developed, despite theologians' ambivalent attitude towards images.
Alvin Plantinga is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of our time. Much of his career has been devoted to explaining and defending the intellectual acceptability of Christian belief. Recently he has developed a comprehensive, rigorous, and distinctively Christian religious epistemology. This book presents the development of Plantinga's religious epistemology before considering Plantinga's mature religious epistemology in detail. Locating Plantinga's most recent work in the context of his theological assumptions, his previous work on religious epistemology, and in the context of the current debate over how knowledge should be characterized, Beilby blends theological and philosophical discussion to offer a unique perspective on Plantinga's influential proposal.
Contributions from an international conference held December 11-13, 2002, at the Institute for Philosophy of Religion at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.
This is a much-needed new introduction to a field that has been transformed in recent years by exciting new subjects, ideas, and methods. It is designed both for students with central interests in philosophy and those planning to concentrate on the social sciences, and it presupposes no particular background in either domain. From the wide range of topics at the forefront of debate in philosophy of social science, the editors have chosen those which are representative of the most important and interesting contemporary work. A team of distinguished experts explore key aspects of the field such as social ontology (what are the things that social science studies?), objectivity, formal methods, measurement, and causal inference. Also included are chapters focused on notable subjects of social science research, such as well-being and climate change. Philosophy of Social Science provides a clear, accessible, and up-to-date guide to this fascinating field.
The central theme of this book is that it's not enough to invoke omnipotence and omniscience as answers to the questions of God’s ability to create and causally affect the world (i.e., perform miracles) and human beings (i.e., to cause mystical experiences) and, conversely, God’s ability to perceive, or otherwise know about the world. Rather, it is incumbent upon theists to explain just how a personal, immaterial being such as God could cause mundane events, could institute (and sometimes circumvent) laws of nature, could be causally affected by the world (as in perception), and the like. That requires examining current thinking (which is diverse) about the very nature of causation, laws of nature, and agency, all of which Fales endeavors to do in this study.