scholarly journals The Relation between God and the World in the Pre-Critical Kant: Was Kant a Spinozist?

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Hoffer
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Critical System ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

AbstractAndrew Chignell and Omri Boehm have recently argued that Kant’s pre-Critical proof for the existence of God entails a Spinozistic conception of God and hence substance monism. The basis for this reading is the assumption common in the literature that God grounds possibilities by exemplifying them. In this article I take issue with this assumption and argue for an alternative Leibnizian reading, according to which possibilities are grounded in essences united in God’s mind (later also described as Platonic ideas intuited by God). I show that this view about the distinction between God’s cognition of essences as the ground of possibility and the actual world is not only explicitly stated by Kant, but is also consistent with his metaphysical picture of teleology in nature and causality during the pre-Critical period. Finally, I suggest that the distinction between the conceptual order of essences embodied in the idea of God and the order of the objects of experience plays a role in the transition into the Critical system, where it is transformed into the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible worlds.

scholarly journals Doing natural theology consistently with theism and why one might stop trying

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-351
Author(s):  
T. J. MAWSON
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

AbstractTheists such as Swinburne who seek to use natural theological arguments to move from observations about the world to conclusions about the existence (or probable existence) of God seem to need premises concerning what the world would have been like were Theism to have been false, viz. premises to the effect that it would have been (or would probably have been) different from the way we observe the actual world to be. Surely only that way could observations of the actual world be taken to be evidence that Theism is true.1 And surely for such arguments to be dialectically powerful in discussions with Atheists, these premises need to be acceptable to Theists and Atheists alike.2 In this article, I call these claims into question.

Can Theodicy be Avoided? The Claim of Unredeemed Evil

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wetzel
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

Theodicy begins with the recognition that the world is not obviously under the care of a loving God with limitless power and wisdom. If it were, why would the world be burdened with its considerable amount and variety of evil? Theodicists are those who attempt to answer this question by suggesting a possible rationale for the appearance of evil in a theocentric universe. In the past theodicists have taken up the cause of theodicy in the service of piety, so that God might be defended against libel from humans, particularly the accusation that God's reign lacks justice. Contemporary practitioners, who live in a world where the existence of God can no longer be presumed, tend to favour theodicy as an exercise in securing the rationality of religious belief. Their hope is that one crucial theoretical obstacle to responsible belief in God will have been eliminated, once the idea of God has been reconciled with the reality of evil. What has commonly united theodicists, at least since the Enlightenment, is that they must answer to a non–believing antagonist. Until relatively recently, theodicy has been a debate between apologists for theistic faith and their cultured detractors.

Atheism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Narrow Sense ◽  
The West ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

Atheism is the position that affirms the nonexistence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief. Since many different gods have been objects of belief, one might be an atheist with respect to one god while believing in the existence of some other god. In the religions of the west – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the dominant idea of God is of a purely spiritual, supernatural being who is the perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing creator of everything other than himself. As used in this entry, in the narrow sense of the term an atheist is anyone who disbelieves in the existence of this being, while in the broader sense an atheist is someone who denies the existence of any sort of divine reality. The justification of atheism in the narrow sense requires showing that the traditional arguments for the existence of God are inadequate as well as providing some positive reasons for thinking that there is no such being. Atheists have criticized the traditional arguments for belief and have tried to justify positive disbelief by arguing that the properties ascribed to this being are incoherent, and that the amount and severity of evils in the world make it quite likely that there is no such all-powerful, perfectly good being in control.

Sectarian struggle in the Middle East and the new Alliances

2019 ◽  
pp. 337
Author(s):  
Harith Qahtan Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Era ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
The World ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
Other World ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
New Formation

Our Islamic world passes a critical period representing on factional, racial and sectarian struggle especially in the Middle East, which affects the Islamic identification union. The world passes a new era of civilization formation, and what these a new formation which affects to the Islamic civilization especially in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. The sectarian struggle led to heavy sectarian alliances from Arab Gulf states and Turkey from one side and Iran states and its alliances in the other side. The Sunni and Shia struggle are weaken the World Islamic civilization and it is competitive among other world civilization.

Presence, Environment, and Sound and the Role of Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 667-681
Author(s):  
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keyword(s):  
Computer Games ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Sensory Input ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Dimension ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First Person Shooter ◽  
Selection Of

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard addresses the role of sound in the creation of presence in virtual and actual worlds. He argues that imagination is a central part of the generation and selection of perceptual hypotheses—models of the world in which we can act—that emerge from what Grimshaw-Aagaard calls the “exo-environment” (the sensory input) and the “endo-environment” (the cognitive input). Grimshaw-Aagaard further divides the exo-environment into a primarily auditory and a primarily visual dimension and he deals with the actual world of his own apartment and the virtual world of first-person-shooter computer games in order to exemplify how we perceptually construct an environment that allows for the creation of presence.

scholarly journals A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nils Franzén
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Imaginative Resistance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Evaluative Terms ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

Ghazâlî's Argument from Creation (II)

1971 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lenn E. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Existence Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

If, as Ghazâlî presumes, the fact of creation can serve as evidence of the existence of God, and if, as he attempts to show, creation is the only binding, reasoned proof of God's existence, Ghazâlî must, to fulfill his program of reconstructing the intellectual basis of Islam, somehow find arguments adequate to prove that creation did in fact take place. He must disprove what was in his time the still vital claim that the Universe had not come to be but had existed forever differing in no essential way from the world we know today.

The World Essence

Dialogue ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Joint Paper ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Necessity

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

Moral Values as Religious Absolutes

1992 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
James P. Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
True Proposition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Centrifugal Forces ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

Those who have had the benefit of a reasonably lengthy familiarity with the philosophy of religion, and more particularly with the God question, may be so kind to a speaker long in exile from philosophy and only recently returned, as to subscribe, initially at least, to the following rather enormous generalization: meaning and truth, which to most propositions are the twin forces by which they are maintained, turn out in the case of claims about God, to be the centrifugal forces by which they disintegrate. In simpler language, the greater the amount of intelligible meaning that can be given to the idea of God, the less grounds there would appear to be for assuming let alone asserting, that God exists, at least as a being distinguishable from all the things in this empirical world which are the source of the range of meanings available to us; on the other hand, the more we insist that God exists, a being over and above the things that make up this empirical world (the more we take the proposition ‘God exists’ to be a true proposition in this particular transcendent sense, for the adjective ‘transcendent’ has many uses) the less the amount of commonly available meaning we appear to be able to apply to God. Or, to put this in a manner which might obviate an obvious objection to it; either everything we know is tout ensemble, God, and then nothing in the world that we know is distinctively divine; or else nothing in this world is God, and then nothing that we appear to be able to know is God. That same formulation will work, it should be noted, even if we substitute for ‘things in the world’, ‘an aspect or aspects of things in the world’.

The Actual World

2015 ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Donald Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
The World

This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory of the actual world as the best of all possible worlds. The chapter opens with Leibniz’s response to the two most basic questions of metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing? And, why do certain things exist while other equally possible things do not? It examines Leibniz’s critique of Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics, with particular reference to the argument that God must make a choice among possible worlds because not all possibles are “compossible.” In addition, it explores Leibniz’s claim that the best of all possible worlds is the world containing the highest level of perfection or reality, intelligibility, order, and harmony. The chapter concludes by looking at three theological doctrines underlying Leibniz’s conception of the best of all possible worlds: divine creation, conservation, and concurrence.

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