The Truth Conditions of Christian Belief: A Critique of Bruce Marshall

2005 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-57
Author(s):  
Michael Scott
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
J. G. Bradbury

This essay explores Charles Williams’s use of the Arthurian myth to sustain a religious worldview in the aftermath of sustained attacks on the relevance and veracity of Christian belief in the early twentieth century. The premise to be explored is that key developments in science and philosophy made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in a cultural and intellectual milieu in which assertions of religious faith became increasingly difficult. In literary terms this became evident in, amongst other things, the significant reduction in the production of devotional poetry. By the late 1930s the intellectual environment was such that Charles Williams, a man of profound religious belief who might otherwise have been expected to produce devotional work, turned to a much older mode, that of myth, that had taken on new relevance in the modern world. Williams’s use of this mode allowed him the possibility of expressing a singularly Christian vision to a world in which such vision was in danger of becoming anathema. This essay examines the way in which Williams’s lexis, verse structure, and narrative mode builds on his Arthurian source material to allow for an appreciation of religiously-informed ideas in the modern world.


Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Indiwan Seto Wahju Wibowo

Soeharto’s death becomes a major topic of Tempo Magazine ,issue No.50/XXXVI/04-10 February, 2008 specially in the magazine’s cover. And this cover is so controversial as describes Soeharto as Jesus at the last supper an iconic Christianity symbol. The last supper is the final meal that according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. This research is about to describe what Tempo Magazine play their role as social control and it’s rivalitation towards Soeharto. The purpose of this Research is to find out the meaning behind the Tempo Magazine Cover as describes Soeharto – the former Indonesia President- as Jesus. Kata kunci : makna kematian Soeharto, Semiotika Charles Sander Peirce, Kualitatif


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Indiwan Seto Wahju Wibowo

Soeharto’s death become a major topic of Tempo Magazine, issued No.50/XXXVI/04-10 February, 2008 specially in the magazine’s cover. Nad this cover is so controversial as describes Soeharto as Jesus at the last super an iconic. Christianity symbol. The last super is the final meal that according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. This research is about to describe what Tempo Magazine play their role as social control and it’s rivalitation toward Soeharto. The purpose of this research is to find out the meaning behind the Tempo Magazine Cover as describes Soeharto – the former Indonesia – as Jesus. Kata kunci : makna kematian Soeharto, Semiotika Charles Sander Pierce, Kualitatif


2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (12) ◽  
pp. 4432-4435

Presenting specialty literature background in: organic chemistry, neurology, theology and clinical psychology, in order to conceptualize and bring to the forefront the interdependency between organic chemistry, neurology, psychology and religion in describing the implications of religious thinking in therapeutic compliance is a first objective of the present paper. As such, we addressed the importance of neurotransmitters in the neurophysiology of spiritual interventions. Another specific objective was defined as measuring psychological reactions, components of the moral and religious structure of human personality, with the help of psychophysiological involved factors, in rapport with therapeutic compliance. According to the descriptive statistic of data, we found that those who do not adhere to any religious cult have greater chances of being diagnosed with a disease that necessitates daily treatment and monitoring (the percentage found was 20%), in comparison with those who are part of a religious cult (6.67 %). The estimated non-linear regression model to confirm the interdependency between the medial psychophysiological reactivity to religious stimulus and the medial score obtained in the compliance questionnaire was validated by the values of R = 0.99 and p-value=0.00≈10-10<0.05). As such, we can accept the hypothesis that “there is a statistically significant association between religious thinking and compliance”. On the other hand, the hypothesis “there is a statistically significant association between religious thinking and compliance” was validated, using the t test, only at 40%, as the results of the t test were only considered on significant components of the applied MARS questionnaire. The results given by approaching the two hypotheses through the mixture of psychophysiological and application of the MARS questionnaire consistently highlighted an image of importance of religious thinking in therapeutic compliance. The current study is useful in motivating adherents of any religion, in our study, the Christian belief, to improve their compliance. Keywords: oxcytocin, vassopressin, MARS scale, therapeutic compliance, religious experience


Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers

The Introduction summarizes the aims and methods of the book, explains the title, taken from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, addresses the paradox of the otherworldly aims of religion and the worldly means of book publication, lists the principal questions the book sets out to answer and the denominations and groups covered, and points out the varied meanings of the terms ‘Methodist’ and ‘evangelical’. Despite the theological and organizational differences between these denominations and groups, they agreed on the fundamental importance of disseminating books for inculcating Christian belief and practice. To illustrate the long-term influence of such publications there is a brief analysis of Collins’s nineteenth-century series, ‘Select Christian Authors, with Introductory Essays’.


Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan

This chapter motivates a theory of causation according to which causal claims are existential claims about mechanisms. The chapter begins with a review of the variety of causal claims, emphasizing the differences between singular and general claims, and between claims about causal production and claims about causal relevance. I then argue for singularism—the view that the truth-makers of general causal claims are facts about collections of singular and intrinsic causal relations, and specifically facts about the existence of particular mechanisms. Applying this account, I explore possible truth conditions for causal generalizations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between mechanistic and manipulability approaches to causation. I argue that Woodward’s manipulability account provides valuable insights into the meaning of causal claims and the methods we use to assess them, but that the underlying truth-makers for the counterfactuals in that account are in fact mechanisms.


Author(s):  
Samuel Lebens

Hassidic idealism is the view that the world and everything in it (even you and I) exist only in the mind of God. To be is to be part of God’s dream, or the story that God is telling. This chapter argues that Hassidic idealism, coupled with an understanding of the philosophy and semantics of fiction, allows us to generate a distinctive solution to ‘the problem with sefirot.’ The sefirot are the attributes of God, as the Kabbalistic tradition understands them. The problem with the sefirot is that, as they are classically understood, belief in them seems to collapse into polytheism. The problem is analogous to certain problems facing the Christian belief in the Trinity. This chapter proposes an original Hassidic solution to this problem that relies upon various insights about fictions within fictions, and fictions that include their authors as a character.


Author(s):  
Sara Bernstein

This chapter argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, is at least as attractive as several contemporary views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. The chapter discusses three such views: contextualism, which holds that truth conditions for causal judgments are contextual; contrastivism, which holds that the causal relation is a quaternary relation between a cause, an effect, and contextually specified contrast classes for the cause and the effect; and pragmatism, which holds that causal claims are sensitive to pragmatic factors. This chapter suggests that causal idealism has at least as much explanatory strength as these three theories, and is more parsimonious and internally stable.


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