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Work on the norms of belief in epistemology regularly starts with two touchstone essays: W.K. Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" and William James's "The Will to Believe." Discussing the central themes from these seminal essays, Evidentialism and the Will to Believe explores the history of the ideas governing evidentialism. As well as Clifford's argument from the examples of the shipowner, the consequences of credulity and his defence against skepticism, this book tackles James's conditions for a genuine option and the structure of the will to believe case as a counter-example to Clifford's evidentialism. Exploring the question of whether James's case successfully counters Clifford's evidenti...
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Throughout the medieval era, the Latin Church denounced and prohibited dancing, often aligning it with demonic intervention, lust, pride, and sacrilege. However, Ringleaders of Redemption reveals how the historical sources - including biblical commentaries, sermons, saints' lives, ecclesiastical statutes, mystical treatises, vernacular literature, and iconography from France, Italy, Germany, England, Spain, and beyond - tell a different story. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice.
Tracing heated exchanges between Spanish and Latin American intellectuals that took place in journals, magazines, and newspapers in the early twentieth century, Defining and Defying Borders details how borders and boundaries were contested within a medium that simultaneously crossed borders and defined boundaries. Vanessa Marie Fernández demonstrates that print media is an invaluable resource for scholars because it offers a nuanced perspective of the complex postcolonial relationship between Spain and Latin America that shaped aesthetic production within and beyond national boundaries. Presenting inclusive paradigms that are at once able to transcend borders, acknowledge national boundaries, and account for empire, Defining and Defying Borders illustrates that investigating journals, magazines, and newspapers is crucial to better understanding postcolonial literary and cultural production.
Catholic colleges and universities have long engaged in conversation about how to fulfill their mission in creative ways across the curriculum. The "sacramental vision" of Catholic higher education posits that God is made manifest in the study of all disciplines. Becoming Beholders is the first book to share pedagogical strategies about how to do that. Twenty faculty--from many religious backgrounds, and in fields such as chemistry, economics, English, history, mathematics, sociology and theology--discuss ways that their teaching nourishes students' ability to find the transcendent in their studies.
This pioneering study examines the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna, bringing him into dialogue with Western thinkers. Sri Ramakrishna's expansive conception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, Maharaj argues, introduces a new paradigm for addressing central issues in the philosophy of religion.
In the last decade, the familiar problem of the regress of reasons has returned to prominent consideration in epistemology. And with the return of the problem, evaluation of the options available for its solution is begun anew. Reason’s regress problem, roughly put, is that if one has good reasons to believe something, one must have good reason to hold those reasons are good. And for those reasons, one must have further reasons to hold they are good, and so a regress of reasons looms. In this new study, Aikin presents a full case for infinitism as a response to the problem of the regress of reasons. Infinitism is the view that one must have a non-terminating chain of reasons in order to be justified. The most defensible form of infinitism, he argues, is that of a mixed theory – that is, epistemic infinitism must be consistent with and integrate other solutions to the regress problem.
Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement presents an accessible and engaging introduction to the theory of argument, with special emphasis on the way argument works in public political debate. The authors develop a view according to which proper argument is necessary for one’s individual cognitive health; this insight is then expanded to the collective health of one’s society. Proper argumentation, then, is seen to play a central role in a well-functioning democracy. Written in a lively style and filled with examples drawn from the real world of contemporary politics, and questions following each chapter to encourage discussion, Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement reads like a guide for the participation in, and maintenance of, modern democracy. An excellent student resource for courses in critical thinking, political philosophy, and related fields, Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement is an important contribution to reasoned debate.
This book comprises a searching philosophical meditation on the evolution of the humanities in recent decades, taking Dante studies as an exemplary specimen. The contemporary currents of theory have decisively impacted this field, but Dante also has a strong relationship with theology. The idea that theology, teleology, and logocentric rationalities are simply overcome and swept away by new theoretical approaches proves much more complex as the theory revolution is exposed in its crypto-theological motives and origins. The revolutionary agendas and methodologies of theoretical currents have ushered in all manner of minorities and postcolonial and gender studies. But the exciting adventure they inaugurate shows up in quite a surprising light when brought to focus through the scholarly discipline of Dante studies as a terrain of dispute between traditional philology and postmodern theory. On this terrain, negative theology can play a peculiarly destabilizing, but also a conciliatory, role: it is equally critical of all languages for a theological transcendence to which it nevertheless remains infinitely open.
William James claimed that his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking would prove triumphant and epoch-making. Today, after more than 100 years, how is pragmatism to be understood? What has been its cultural and philosophical impact? Is it a crucial resource for current problems and for life and thought in the future? John J. Stuhr and the distinguished contributors to this multidisciplinary volume address these questions, situating them in personal, philosophical, political, American, and global contexts. Engaging James in original ways, these 11 essays probe and extend the significance of pragmatism as they focus on four major, overlapping themes: pragmatism and American culture; pragmatism as a method of thinking and settling disagreements; pragmatism as theory of truth; and pragmatism as a mood, attitude, or temperament.
This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.