Reduction

Reduction
Reduction

A cursory glance at the history of science reveals a continuous succession of scientific theories of various areas or domains. For example, since ancient times theories of the cosmos have been proposed to account for the observed behavior of the heavenly bodies.

The geocentric Ptolemaic theory was, for instance, succeeded by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Another example concerns the nature of light. Corpuscular theories were succeeded by wave theories of light. Wave theories, in turn, have been followed by the quantum theories of electromagnetic radiation.

This entry concerns the nature of certain relations that may obtain between different pairs of theories in such sequences. A radical or extreme view of those relations is that of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn (1970) famously argues that across scientific revolutions there is a radical disconnect between theories. One can find a similar argument in Paul K. Feyerabend (1962). On such a view, no rational relations can obtain between a theory and its predecessor.

Giuseppe Rensi

Giuseppe Rensi
Giuseppe Rensi

Giuseppe Rensi was an Italian skeptical philosopher and professor of philosophy at the universities of Messina and Genoa. Rensi first upheld a religiously or theistically oriented idealistic philosophy, defending it in a number of essays and fostering it through his translations of the works of Josiah Royce.

He contrasted his theistic "constructive idealism" with the "immanentistic idealism" of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile; he regarded the latter as a temporary position that, if developed coherently, would have led to constructive idealism.

According to Rensi, an idealism that does not arrive at God subtracts reality both from the external world, which then becomes a set of ideas, and from the human spirit, which is then resolved into a set of ideas without a subject.

Reason

Reason
Reason

In English the word reason has long had, and still has, a large number and a wide variety of senses and uses, related to one another in ways that are often complicated and often not clear. However, there is one particular sense of the word in which it, with its synonyms or analogues in other languages, has figured prominently in philosophical controversy.

This is the sense, sometimes distinguished typographically by an initial capital, in which the term is taken to designate a mental faculty or capacity— in which reason might, for example, be regarded as coordinate with, but distinguishable from, sensation, emotion, or will.

Questions to be Examined

The question that has been chiefly debated by philosophers might be expressed succinctly, but far from clearly, as "What can reason do?" However, there has also been discussion of the question whether the faculty of reason is peculiar to humanity (and presumably to "higher" beings, if there are any), or whether its possession and exercise in some degree can also be ascribed to "lower" animals.

Reference

Reference
Reference

"Reference" is usually conceived as the central relation between language or thought and the world. To talk or think about something is to refer to it. Twentieth-century philosophy found such relations particularly problematic.

One paradigm of reference is the relation between a proper name and its bearer. On a more theoretical conception all the constituents of an utterance or thought that contribute to determining whether it is true refer to their contributions (as, for example, a predicate refers to a property).

In analytic philosophy discussion of reference was dominated until the 1960s by the views of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and modifications of them (such as those by P. F. Strawson). Criticisms of assumptions common to those views then provoked a revolution in the theory of reference. The alternatives include causal and minimalist theories.

Reflective Equilibrium

Reflective Equilibrium - Oh Da-eun (오다은)
Reflective Equilibrium

Reflective equilibrium is a coherence method of philosophical justification or inquiry. Nelson Goodman (1955) introduced reflective equilibrium, although not under that name, to contemporary philosophy in a discussion of deductive and inductive logic. It is arguable, however, that philosophers have employed something such as reflective equilibrium to inquire into a wide range of topics since ancient times.

Goodman maintained that we justify an inference by showing that it conforms to the rules of either deduction or induction. But for the inferences to be justified, these rules must be valid. Goodman held that we justify rules of inference by showing that they accord with judgments we make about which particular inferences are acceptable and which are unacceptable.

According to the epistemological reading, when we complete the process of mutual adjustment Goodman describes, thereby bringing our judgments regarding the particular inferences and the rules of inference we accept into a state of reflective equilibrium, these rules and particular judgments are by definition justified.

Reformation

Reformation
Reformation

In the narrower and probably most common sense, "Reformation" is the name given to the spiritual crisis of the sixteenth century that resulted in the permanent division of the Western church.

The birthdate of the Reformation is traditionally given as 1517, the year in which Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg; the termination of the period may be assigned to the 1550s, by which time an ecclesiastical stalemate between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics appeared unavoidable.

Sometimes the Reformation is extended backward to include such early reform movements as Lollardy or forward to include the religious conflicts, lasting into the seventeenth century, that sought to resolve the Catholic-Protestant stalemate forcibly or to readjust the divisions between the various Protestant groups.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation
Reincarnation

The doctrine variously called transmigration of souls, metempsychosis, palingenesis, rebirth, and "reincarnation" has been and continues to be widely believed. Although some of these terms imply belief in an immortal soul that transmigrates or reincarnates, Buddhism, while teaching rebirth, denies the eternity of the soul. The word rebirth is therefore the most comprehensive for referring to this range of beliefs.

In one form or another the doctrine of rebirth has been held in various cultures. It was expressed in ancient Greece (Pythagoras, Empedocles, Orphism, Plato, and later, Plotinus); among some Gnostics and in some Christian heresies such as the medieval Cathari; in some phases of Jewish Kabbalism; in some cultures of tropical Africa; and most notably in such Eastern religions as Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism.

Some European philosophers, notably Arthur Schopenhauer and J. M. E. McTaggart, have incorporated the doctrine into their metaphysics. The origin of the doctrine of rebirth as a religious belief is obscure.

Religion and the Biological Sciences

Religion and the Biological Sciences
Religion and the Biological Sciences

Plato and Aristotle recognized that understanding nature demands reference to factors—what Aristotle called "final causes"—that in some sense anticipate what will or should happen.

In the Timaeus, Plato wrote, "From the combination of sinew, skin, and bone, in the structure of the finger, there arises a triple compound, which, when dried up, takes the form of one hard skin partaking of all three natures, and was fabricated by these second causes, but designed by mind, which is the principle cause with an eye to the future."

He continued, "For our creators well knew ... that many animals would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails. For this purpose and for these reasons they caused skin, hair, and nails to grow at the extremities of the limbs" (Timaeus, 76d–e).

Reliabilism

Reliabilism
Reliabilism

Reliabilism is an approach to the analysis of either knowledge or justified belief that makes, in some way or another, the reliability of belief-producing faculties or processes the key notion of epistemic assessment.

An early version of a reliabilist theory of knowledge was proposed by David M. Armstrong (1973), who thought of knowledge in terms of a reliable thermometer that accurately indicates the correct temperature. A (noninferential) true belief amounts to knowledge, according to Armstrong, if its properties nomically (i.e., via the laws of nature) guarantee its truth.

Closely related theories conceive of knowledge as resulting from a counter-factual guarantee of truth. For instance, according to Robert Nozick (1981), knowledge comes about when a subject's belief that p tracks the truth of p, which it does (focusing just on the core of Nozick's theory) if the following condition is met: S would not believe that p if p were false.

Naturalistic Reconstructions of Religion

Naturalistic Reconstructions of Religion
Naturalistic Reconstructions of Religion

In philosophy a naturalist is one who holds that there is nothing over and above nature. A naturalist is committed to rejecting traditional religion, which is based on beliefs in the supernatural. This does not necessarily carry with it a rejection of religion as such, however.

Many naturalists envisage a substitute for traditional religion that will perform the typical functions of religion without making any claims beyond the natural world. We can best classify naturalistic forms of religion in terms of what they take God to be—that is, what they set up as an object of worship. In traditional religion the supernatural personal deity is worshiped because he is thought of as the zenith of both goodness and power.

More generally, we can say that religious worship is accorded to any being because it is regarded as having a controlling voice in the course of events and at least potentially exercising that power for the good. This suggests that to find a focus for religious responses in the natural world, we should look for a basic natural source of value. Forms of naturalistic religion differ as to where this is located.

Psychological Explanations of Religion

Psychological Explanations of Religion
Psychological Explanations of Religion

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the chief impact of science on religion came from the revised picture of the cosmos that emerged from developments in astronomy and physics. In the nineteenth century the impact was from the changed view of the history of life on Earth that was presented by geology and evolutionary biology.

In the twentieth century the social sciences had the greatest impact on religion, although of a different nature. Physics and biology worried theologians because they introduced theories about the cosmos, life, and man that were at variance with beliefs intimately bound up with the religious tradition, such as the special creation of man.

The impact of the social sciences, on the other hand, comes not from theories that contradict basic religious doctrines but from explanations of religion itself that seem to rob it of its significance.

Religion and Morality

Religion and Morality
Religion and Morality

Morality is closely associated with religion in the minds of many people. When religious leaders speak out on moral topics, their opinions are often treated with special deference. They are regarded as moral experts. This raises the question of whether morality depends in some way on religion. Many philosophers have held that it does.

John Locke, for example, argued that atheists could not be trusted to be moral because they would not consider themselves obliged even by solemn oaths, much less by ordinary promises. The answer to this question may be of considerable practical importance.

If morality does depend on religion, the process of secularization, in the course of which religious belief and practice wither away, seems to pose a serious threat to morality. At one time many social theorists were confident that secularization was inevitable in modern and postmodern societies. Experience has undermined this confidence.

Secularization
Secularization

Secularization no longer appears to be an inevitable consequence of modernization. Moreover, the process seems to occur at different rates in different modern societies. Thus secularization is more advanced in some Western European societies than it is in the United States.

Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to be concerned about whether morality will decline to the extent that modern societies become more secular if it is the case that morality depends on religion.

This entry discusses several ways in which morality may depend on religion. It considers causal, conceptual, epistemological, and metaphysical dependency relations. It also explores the possibility that morality and religion may come into conflict.

metaphysical dependency
metaphysical dependency

But a fruitful discussion of how two things are related must rely on some understanding of what those two things are. Hence the entry begins with characterizations of domains of morality and religion.

Morality and Religion Circumscribed

Understood in broad terms, morality consists of answers to the general normative question of how one should live one's life. It covers a wide range of topics related to the conduct of human life. Morality concerns actions that should and should not be performed and rules of conduct that should and should not be followed.

It also comprehends motives for actions that people should and should not have and character traits or habits that people should and should not try to develop. Another subject of moral concern is ideals of saintliness or heroism to which some people may properly aspire, even though not everyone is called upon to live up to these ideals.

Morality and Religion Circumscribed
Morality and Religion Circumscribed

Yet another subject is social and political arrangements that people should and should not strive to create or to sustain. Thus understood, morality consists of a diverse array beliefs and practices, and it is probably not possible to give an

illuminating definition of its scope. Philosophers often say that the realm of morality in this broad sense coincides with the realm of the ethical.

When philosophers reflect on the contents of the ethical, they find it useful to distinguish within it two domains, each characterized by a distinctive family of fundamental concepts. One is the axiological domain.

deontological domain
deontological domain

Its basic concepts are goodness, badness, and indifference. The other is the deontological domain. Its basic concepts are requirement (obligation), permission (rightness), and prohibition (wrongness).

Duty is the chief subject matter of the deontological domain. Some philosophers— Bernard Williams, for example—have proposed that morality be conceived narrowly as restricted to the deontological domain. On this conception, the domain of morality is a proper subdomain of the realm of the ethical.

Discussions of whether morality depends on religion frequently focus exclusively on the deontological domain. It is not hard to see why this occurs. Deontology consists of a system of requirements, permissions, and prohibitions. It is structurally similar to systems of law. Hence it is natural to think of deontology as the domain of moral law.

moral requirements
moral requirements

Once this way of thinking has been adopted, the question arises as to whether moral law's binding force depends on the authority of a divine lawgiver. Most of the discussion in this entry will address the issue of whether moral requirements (obligations) and prohibitions (wrongness) depend on a deity of the sort to which the major monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are committed.

However, some consideration will also be given to the topic of whether axiological goodness depends on such a deity. For this reason, the narrow conception of morality—which restricts it to the deontological domain—will not be adopted in this entry.

Religion, too, consists of beliefs and practices that exhibit great diversity. Most scholars who study it doubt that the concept of religion can be defined or analyzed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a religion. Some philosophers—for instance, John Hick— take the concept of religion to be a family-resemblance concept.

ancient cults of Moloch
ancient cults of Moloch

On this view, religions resemble one another as members of a family resemble one another. For example, the ancient cults of Moloch, Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism may be classified as religions because they resemble one another in various respects, without supposing that all three of them satisfy a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a religion.

A more refined version of this view is provided by accounts developed in cognitive psychology of concepts organized around examples that serve as prototypes or paradigms. As a result of complex patterns of similarity to—and difference from—the prototypes, other cases lie at various distances from the prototypes in a similar space.

Cases near the prototypes fall under the concept; cases far enough away from the prototypes do not fall under the concept. In between there may be a gray area in which can be found borderline cases.

concept of religion
concept of religion

In attempting to define the concept of religion in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, there is often disagreement about whether commitment—in theory or in practice—to superhuman beings is a necessary condition for being a religion. A celebrated debate in anthropology nicely illustrates such disagreement.

Melford Spiro made the following proposal: "I shall define 'religion' as 'an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings'". However, there is an obvious objection to Spiro's proposal.

In its purest form, Theravada Buddhism does not postulate superhuman beings. Yet most scholars think that pure Theravada Buddhism counts as a religion. So Spiro's proposal fails to provide an adequate necessary condition for being a religion. It is too narrow.

Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz (1966) offered a more complex definitional proposal. According to Geertz, a religion is:
  1. a system of symbols which acts to 
  2. establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by 
  3. formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 
  4. clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that 
  5. the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. 
Theravada Buddhism will count as a religion by this definition. But so too will the system of symbols characteristic of Nazism, although most scholars wish to classify Nazism as a secular political ideology rather than as a religion— or at least to insist that it is religious only in some extended or analogical sense.

Thus Geertz's proposal fails to provide an adequate sufficient condition for being a religion. It is too broad. Disagreements of this kind fuel skepticism about whether it is possible to frame an illuminating definition of the concept of religion in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

paradigmatic religions
paradigmatic religions

For historical reasons, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the prototypes of religion for people brought up within European and North American cultures. Discussion in this entry will focus almost entirely on the theism that is common to these paradigmatic religions.

Causal Dependence

Morality would depend historically on religion if moral beliefs and practices were derived by causal processes from prior religious beliefs and practices. It is often imagined that early human societies had worldviews in which no distinctions were drawn between moral and religious beliefs and practices.

All norms of human conduct were then religious in character; their authority was taken to rest on superhuman sources such as the prescriptions of gods. Independent moral beliefs and practices emerged from such religious worldviews in the course of cultural evolution as a result natural processes of functional differentiation.

Causal Dependence
Causal Dependence

Rules governing the performance of religious rituals, for example, were distinguished from norms of ordinary human social interaction. The idea that all early human societies had tightly integrated worldviews dominated by religious concerns is, of course, highly speculative.

There is little direct evidence that supports it. Perhaps studies of tribal societies by anthropologists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lend this idea some indirect evidential support.

But the inference from structural features of the worldviews of those tribal societies to structural features of the worldviews of early human societies is problematic. After all, when anthropologists encountered them, the tribal societies they studied had themselves been evolving for a long time.

historical origins
historical origins

Moreover, even if something such as this story of the historical origins of morality were true, it would not have important philosophical consequences. It would not establish the conclusion that human beings would never have developed morality if there had been no antecedent religion because a function of large parts of morality is to make possible human cooperation for mutual benefit.

People would have encountered problems of cooperation even in the absence of religious beliefs and practices. Given human ingenuity, therefore, it is plausible to suppose that some form of moral belief and practice would have arisen in the course of human history, even if religion had never existed. Nor would history show that the truth of moral beliefs depends on the truth of religious beliefs.

In general, it is fallacious to infer from the premise that one belief grew out of another that the truth of the former depends on the truth of the latter. Though modern chemistry grew out of alchemy, it is believed that modern chemistry is true, whereas alchemy is viewed as mostly false.

Morality would depend psychologically on religion if religious beliefs were causally necessary to motivate general compliance with the demands of the moral law. If human beings are sufficiently selfish, many of them will not behave morally when the moral law requires large sacrifices from them—unless they believe that it is in the long run in their self-interest to do so.

The common theistic belief that in the afterlife God rewards those who obey the moral law and punishes those who do not will thus serve to motivate compliance with the demands of moral duty. Maybe this purpose can only be effectively served by a belief that morality has the backing of a system of divine rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

If this is the case, people who lack a religious belief of this kind will also lack what it takes to cause or motivate them to live up to the demands of morality when the going gets tough.

However, there are compelling reasons to think that the view of human nature on which this line of thought rests is inaccurate. Living in a social world in which many people lack belief in an afterlife, experience shows that many people are motivated to comply with the most stringent demands of morality even though they lack any belief in a system of divine postmortem rewards and punishments.

It was clear to thoughtful people who inhabited social worlds—worlds in which belief in heaven and hell was nearly universal—that belief in divine punishment in the afterlife all too often did not suffice to motivate people who did believe to obey the moral law.

What is more, according to some moral theories, morality requires not only that people comply with the moral law but also that their compliance be motivated by respect for the moral law itself. For example, Kantians hold that actions that are in compliance with the moral law but are motivated by hope for rewards or fear of punishment have no moral worth, even though they are legally correct.

In other words, morality demands both that people do their duty and that they do it for duty's sake. They will do the right thing for the wrong reason if their obedience to the moral law is caused by the belief that obedience will be rewarded or the belief that disobedience will be punished.

On a view of this sort, religious belief in rewards and punishments in the afterlife constitutes a danger to morality; such belief may tempt people to rely on motivational factors that will deprive their actions of moral value, even when they are the actions prescribed by morality.

Conceptual Dependence

Some philosophers have maintained that concepts of moral deontology contain religious content. In a seminal paper defending a modified divine command account of wrongness, Robert M. Adams (1987, 1999) proposed a theory in which being contrary to the commands of a loving God is part of the meaning of the term wrong in the discourse of some Jewish and Christian theists.

And in her famous attack on modern moral philosophy, G. E. M. Anscombe (1981) recommended getting rid of the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty—and the concepts of moral right and wrong—because they belong to an earlier conception of ethics that no longer survives. The earlier conception she had in mind was a law conception.

In it, according to Anscombe, the ordinary terms should, needs, ought, and must acquired a special sense by being equated in certain contexts with terms such as is obliged, is bound, or is required, in the sense in which one can be obliged or bound—or something be required— legally.

She contends that "it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law-giver; like Jews, Stoics and Christians". In the absence of this religious belief, the concepts of moral deontology have no reasonable sense; they are not really intelligible outside a divine law conception of ethics. Modern moral philosophers who lack belief in God would therefore do well to cease using the deontological concepts in their thinking.

Anscombe realizes, of course, that some nonreligious moral theorists will wish to retain a law conception of ethics without a divine legislator. In a Kantian conception of the moral law, for example, practical reason substitutes for God in the role of moral legislator.

One's own practical reason engages in self-legislation; it is the authoritative source of moral obligations. Anscombe alleges that the idea of self-legislation is absurd. She remarks: "That legislation can be 'for oneself ' I reject as absurd: whatever you do 'for yourself ' may be admirable; but is not legislating".

However, she does not offer an argument to support the charge of absurdity. Hence Kantians are in a position to take issue with her cursory dismissal of the idea of moral self-legislation.

A deflationary approach to the deontological concepts provides another nonreligious alternative to the divine law conception. According to the account of this kind proposed by Williams (1983), obligations are not always prescriptively overriding; they do not always beat out ethical considerations of all other kinds.

Instead, they are constituted by considerations to which some deliberative priority is granted in order to secure reliability in human social life. High deliberative priority is, in the case of some obligations, responsive to the basic and standing importance of the human interests they serve. Such obligations are negative telling people what not to do.

In the case of positive obligations, high deliberative priority is responsive to the demands imposed by emergencies. Williams thus indicates how it is possible for nonreligious moral theory to salvage at least deflated versions of the concepts of traditional moral deontology.
Anscombe's claim that the main concepts of traditional moral deontology have theistic content is intuitively plausible.

However, moral belief and practice seem capable of surviving, almost unchanged, the replacement of such concepts by successors without religious content. And nonreligious moral theorists may even welcome the deflationary features of such a replacement if it is carried out along the lines envisaged by Williams.

Epistemological Dependence

Many religious believers hold that their moral convictions acquire some positive epistemic status, such as being justified or being warranted, and thereby count as moral knowledge, by virtue of being rooted in religious sources.

Among the sources widely acknowledged in theistic religions are divine revelation recorded in sacred texts, divinely inspired prophetic utterances, and the teachers of divinely guided institutions. Frequently such sources purport to reveal divine commands by means of which God promulgates moral obligations.

In addition, calls from God to perform particular actions or to enter into religious vocations are taken to be revealed in individual religious experience. Perhaps the most celebrated example in the history of Christianity comes from Augustine's Confessions.

In retrospect, he took the childish voice he heard saying "Take and read" to be an indirect communication from God, because the biblical reading he did in response served providentially to trigger his conversion to Christianity.

Because they hold that these sources are reliable—at least in certain circumstances—theists suppose that their deliverances, when properly interpreted, have positive epistemic status.

Religious diversity furnishes the grounds for an objection to this supposition. Survey the entire religious scene and it becomes evident that there is enormous disagreement among religious people about which sources are reliable, as well as how to interpret the deliverances of these various sources.

Consequently, theists disagree among themselves about what God has commanded, and so they disagree about what is morally required or forbidden. Such disagreement undermines the claim that religious sources confer positive epistemic status on their deliverances. Positive epistemic status for one's moral convictions can only be derived from nonreligious sources, because only they can yield agreement. Jeremy

Bentham clearly articulated the epistemic asymmetry implicit in the objection. He remarked: "We may be perfectly sure, indeed, that whatever is right is conformable to the will of God: but so far is that from answering the purpose of showing us what is right, that it is necessary to know first whether a thing is right, in order to know from thence whether it be conformable to the will of God".

In other words, people do not first come to know, from religious sources, that actions are commanded by God and then, on that basis, come to know that they are morally obligatory. Rather, they first come to know, from nonreligious sources, that actions are morally obligatory and then, on that basis, come to know that they are commanded by God.

Religious disagreement clearly does have a negative impact on the degree to which moral beliefs derive positive epistemic status from religious sources. At least for those who are sufficiently aware of it, religious diversity reduces that degree to a significant extent.

After all, moral convictions would acquire a higher degree of positive epistemic status from religious sources if all the sources produced exactly the same outputs. However, nonreligious sources also yield conflicting moral judgments in pluralistic societies that tolerate free inquiry into moral issues.

Anyone who is familiar with the history of secular moral theory in the modern era is apt to think it unlikely that agreement on a single moral theory will ever be achieved under conditions of free inquiry.

So unless people are prepared to live with extensive moral skepticism, they should be reluctant to think that moral beliefs derive no positive epistemic status at all from religious sources merely because those sources yield conflicting deliverances.

Few people who live in religiously pluralistic societies rely exclusively on religious sources for epistemic support of their moral beliefs. Most people think the moral beliefs they form when responding intuitively to their experiences or to works of imaginative literature— or those beliefs acquired from interaction with parents and peers outside of religious contexts—often have positive epistemic status bestowed on them by nonreligious sources of these kinds.

Even the religious people who inhabit such societies typically find themselves with moral convictions that stem from a plurality of sources, some religious and others nonreligious. However, unless the religious worldviews that serve to accredit their religious sources are disqualified for rational acceptance— which would be difficult to establish—religious people seem to be entitled to trust those religious sources and to regard them as conferring positive epistemic status on their deliverances.

Hence the moral convictions of religious believers apparently can, in principle, derive positive epistemic status from both religious and nonreligious sources. Bentham's view is therefore one-sided. While religious believers in pluralistic societies may acquire knowledge of what God commands by first coming to know their obligations, they may also acquire knowledge of their obligations by first coming to know what God commands.

At least some of the moral convictions of such people can be epistemologically dependent on their religious beliefs and yet possess positive epistemic status. Or, at any rate, this view is more plausible than Bentham's if moral and religious skepticism is ruled out.

Metaphysical Dependence

Beginning in the last third of the twentieth century, interesting ideas about how morality might depend metaphysically on God were developed and defended in the work of proponents of divine command theories of morality.

In an influential paper offering suggestions to divine command theorists, William P. Alston (1990) proposed that axiology and deontology depend on God in different ways. In the axiological domain, in Alston's view, God is the paradigm or supreme standard of goodness.

An analogy to the situation helps to clarify Alston's suggestion. He maintained that the meter could be defined in terms of a certain metal bar kept in Paris. What then made a particular table a meter in length was its conformity to a certain existing individual.

Similarly, according to Alston, "what ultimately makes an act of love a good thing is not its conformity to some general principle but its conformity to, or approximation to, God, Who is both the ultimate source of the existence of things and the supreme standard by reference to which they are to be assessed" (Alston 1990, p. 320).

There is, to be sure, a disanalogy as well. While it is arbitrary which particular physical object was chosen to be the standard meter, Alston does not suppose that it is similarly arbitrary whether God or someone else serves as the standard of goodness.

Thus understood, moral axiology depends metaphysically on the nature and character of God. By contrast, within the domain of deontology, moral obligations and moral wrongness depend metaphysically on God's commands, and ultimately on the divine volitions expressed by those commands.

Alston's suggestions have been developed into a framework for ethics by Robert M. Adams. According to his theistic Platonism, God plays the role that the Form of the Good plays in Plato's metaphysics. God is the Good Itself, the standard of goodness; and other things are good by virtue of resembling or being images of God in various ways.

Modifying again his modified divine command theory of wrongness, Adams has claimed that wrongness bears the metaphysical relation of property-identity to contrariety to the commands of a loving God. He asserts: "My new divine command theory of the nature of ethical wrongness, then, is that ethical wrongness is (i.e., is identical with) the property of being contrary to the commands of a loving God" (Adams 1987, p. 139).

And in presenting his framework for ethics, Adams sometimes says that an action's being obligatory consists in its being commanded by a loving God and that an action's being wrong consists in its being contrary to the commands of a loving God. The fundamental principle of obligation of a theory of this kind asserts that actions are obligatory if and only if, and solely because, they are commanded by a loving God.

Its fundamental principle of wrongness claims that actions are wrong if and only if, and solely because, they are forbidden by a loving God. The metaphysical dependency of moral deontology on God is expressed in such principles by their requirement that actions are obligatory or wrong just because a loving God commands or prohibits them.

Of course, many philosophers have mounted objections to divine command theories of morality. Perhaps the most famous objection alleges that divine command theories render moral deontology arbitrary because God could have commanded absolutely anything.

Thus, for example, God could have made cruelty for its own sake obligatory simply by commanding it. A defense against this allegation is available within the framework proposed by Alston and developed by Adams. God's nature and character, which constitute the standard of goodness, constrain what God can command.

Though they may well leave some room for discretion in what God commands, God cannot command absolutely anything. If God is essentially loving and so could not be otherwise, it is impossible for God to command cruelty for its own sake. Hence, according to a divine command theory of this sort, it is likewise impossible for cruelty for its own sake to be obligatory.

Divine command theories have been defended against many other objections in work by Philip L. Quinn (1978) and Edward R. Wierenga (1989). As a result, it seems that these theories are good candidates for adoption by theists. If the larger theistic worldviews in which divine command theories are embedded are themselves rationally acceptable, an account of the metaphysics of morals, according to which morality depends on God, is a live option in moral theory.

Religion and Politics

Religion and Politics
Religion and Politics

Is it morally appropriate for citizens in a liberal democracy like the United States to support or oppose public policies solely for religious reasons? Although regularly serving as grist for the mill of political theorists, that question is not the familiar fare of ordinary political discussion.

It's not a question about, or at least directly about, which laws our government ought to enforce. We're all too familiar with such questions—about the moral propriety and practical wisdom of abolishing the death penalty, legalizing abortion, declaring war on Afghanistan, and so on. Rather, it is a question about the kinds of justifications citizens should or should not have for their political commitments.

The most common position on this issue calls for a general constraint on the political use of religious reasons. Proponents of this constraint argue that citizens must support public policies for secular reasons and therefore that they morally ought to restrain themselves from supporting public policies solely for religious reasons.

Religious Experience

Religious Experience - Vivian Zhang Xinyu
Religious Experience

Most of the philosophical work on "religious experience" that has appeared since 1960 has been devoted to its phenomenology and epistemic status. Two widely shared assumptions help account for this—that religious beliefs and practices are rooted in religious feelings and that whatever justification they have largely derives from them.

The majority of the discussions of the nature of religious experience are a reaction to Walter Stace, who believed that mysticism appears in two forms. Extrovertive mysticism is an experience of nature's unity and of one's identity with it.

Introvertive mysticism is an experience of undifferentiated unity that is devoid of concepts and images; it appears to be identical with what others have called "pure consciousness"—a state in which one is conscious but conscious of nothing.

Religion and the Physical Sciences

Religion and the Physical Sciences
Religion and the Physical Sciences

This entry is concerned with philosophical questions arising from the interaction of religion and physical science. Here the focus is primarily upon Western religious monotheism, for this is the larger religious context in which modern science arose. And among the physical sciences, the focus is on astronomy and physics.

Historical Roots

The relationships between physical science and monotheism have deep roots in the history of Western thought. The simple assumption that religion and science have been and remain in conflict is falsified by the historical data.

Rather, more complex and interesting connections hold between religious faith and scientific understanding in at least three domains: individual scientists and scholars, social institutions, and worldviews.

Charles Bernard Renouvier

Charles Bernard Renouvier
Charles Bernard Renouvier

The French critical philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier was born in Montpellier and was educated at the École Polytechnique, where he specialized in mathematics and natural science. At the school he came under the influence of the work of Antoine Cournot and of Auguste Comte, who at that time was an instructor (répétiteur) in higher mathematics there.

In 1848 Renouvier published in Paris his Manuel républicain de l'homme et du citoyen, a volume addressed to schoolteachers, which urged the preaching of socialism. But his political views were frustrated by the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon, and he retired from active participation in politics to write philosophy.

Renouvier never held an academic position but worked as a private individual, producing one of the longest series of philosophical works in French history. In 1867 he began the publication, with his friend and collaborator François Pillon, of L'année philosophique, a monthly that propagated Renouvier's philosophical doctrines.

L'année philosophique
L'année philosophique

These doctrines were chiefly expounded in a series of books, constantly revised by Renouvier, the Essais de critique générale, the final edition of which appeared in 1897. He continued writing up to the time of his death, his last work being Le personnalisme (1903). Though his pluralism and his personalism anticipated some philosophical doctrines of the early twentieth century, his main influence was upon his French contemporaries.

Neocritism

Renouvier's general position is called neocriticism, because it took the method of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy as its starting point. But though Renouvier started with Kant's method, he did not accept Kant's conclusions but used them rather as a basis from which to launch a set of ideas often critical of Kant.

Renouvier laid down as an integral part of his philosophy what he called the "law of numbers," according to which every cardinal number is an ultimate individual, finite and irreducible. Mathematics is the paradigm of thinking, and the law of contradiction is more clearly manifested in mathematical operations than anywhere else.

mathematical operations
mathematical operations

But the term mathematics, as Renouvier used it, was restricted to arithmetic, and he derived the nature of numbers exclusively from the cardinal numbers. This led him to deny the existence of any infinite, for he maintained—unable to anticipate the work of Georg Cantor— that an infinite number was a contradiction in terms. Renouvier extended his criticism of the notion of infinity beyond numbers to deny the infinity of space and time as well.

Renouvier recognized that knowledge is relative to its premises and to the person who laid down the premises; nevertheless he could not accept the relativity of logical processes. There is a distinction involved here between logic and the psychology of thought.

Just as each number is a distinct and separate entity, so is each human being. And just as the characteristics of each number—duality, triplicity, and so on—can never be reduced to, or "reconciled" with, the characteristics of any other number, so each human being is not exactly like any other and cannot be merged into a general group-consciousness or absorbed into an absolute mind.

neocriticism
neocriticism

Knowledge is always the property of individual knowers, and the distinction between knowledge and belief disappears. What an individual knows is what seems reasonable to him, and his contribution to knowledge can never be subtracted. The subtraction can be made verbally, to be sure, but to do so is to alter the character of cognition, which is essentially judgment.

Phenomena

Renouvier also differed from Kant in his doctrine of phenomena. Phenomena are not the appearances of anything other than themselves. They are neither illusions nor purely subjective beings. They are sui generis, being whatever we perceive or whatever we make judgments about.

He granted that the name is unfortunate except insofar as it indicates appearances. Because there are no things-inthemselves, Renouvier criticized Kant's antinomies, which hold good only if there are noumena. His attack on the first antinomy, for example, was based on its use of the concept of infinity.

phenomena
phenomena

Since infinity is an inherently inconsistent idea, Renouvier asserted that the world must have had a beginning in time and that space is limited. The domination of the number concept as a conceptual model appears here in full force.

For Renouvier, the numbers begin with one, since zero and negative numbers are not really numbers, and spaces are the spaces of individual discrete beings, there being no such entity as numberin-itself or space-in-itself.

There exists within the number series the category of relation. For the numbers are ordered, and order is a kind of relation. All other categories are, for Renouvier, forms of relation, but of relation as discovered within the framework of an individual's consciousness.

space-in-itself
space-in-itself

There turn out to be nine categories—relation, number, position, succession, quality, becoming (devenir), causality, purposiveness, and personality. Each has its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and all are rooted in the phenomenal world as judged by us.

It is uncertain whether Renouvier attempted to derive his categories in the manner of Maine de Biran from personality—our acting as a cause, our seeking ends, our sensory discriminations (which might produce the separateness of quantity and quality), spatial positions, moments in time, and the intervals between them—or whether his assertion that personality is one of the categories is derived from his premise of the law of numbers.

In any event, just as each number has its own distinctive quality, its own position in the numeral order, and its many relations to other numbers, determined not only by its own character but also by that of the other numbers, so the human being has his own personality and displays the other categories not only as a distinct entity but also as a perceptive consciousness.

parallelism
parallelism

The parallelism between the ways in which a man judges, perceives, and knows and the ways in which he as a person differs from other beings pervades Renouvier's writings. Thus, because one acts to achieve one's purposes, it follows that both causality and purposiveness exist within the human being and must likewise be combined in the phenomenal world. A cause determines the path of an event, but the direction of that event is determined by that which participates in it.

Since no two events are exactly alike, the deterministic factor in nature is mitigated by chance. Renouvier probably got this argument from Cournot, who also insisted upon the probabilistic element in nature. To frame a law or a generalized description depends upon our ability to discover absolutely homogeneous phenomena or groups of phenomena.

If this is impossible, then generalizations are at most only probable. But at the same time, each individual phenomenon contributes something to the events of which it is a part, and that contribution in the very nature of things cannot be predicted.

Indeterminism

Indeterminism - Akiho Yoshizawa
Indeterminism

The problem of causation arises with regard to human beings in the form of the antithesis between free will and determinism. Since every act of consciousness is a relation between a perceiving subject and that which is perceptible, then as soon as a conscious act is formulated and made clear to the perceiving mind, it will be organized in terms of the categories.

But there is a choice among the various categories to be applied, for we are not forced either to quantify or qualify, to count or to locate, to assign a date or to recognize a cause. The categories limit the possibilities of judgment but have no inherent order of predominance.

In other words, Renouvier held that when we see a phenomenon, for example, a tree, we are not forced first to judge it as green, then as distant, old, fan-shaped, simple, or what you will. The order of judgment is determined by us, and we are free, within the range of possible categories, to judge it as we will. The selection of a category or group of categories depends on our free choice in accordance with our interests at the moment of judging.

self-determined - Nisa Beiby
self-determined

Freedom cannot be proved, nor can determinism. Both are assumptions utilized in view of their consequences. These consequences may be purely intellectual or may be moral or practical. But freedom itself rests upon the inherent individuality of the human will, an individuality which cannot be completely absorbed into any larger class of beings.

Insofar as any being is unique, to that extent it is undetermined or self-determined. And insofar as it is identical with other beings, to that extent the homogeneity of its class accounts for the regularity of its behavior.

In short, individuality and freedom are synonymous terms, and Renouvier even called freedom the principle of individuation. The consequence is that just as the personal equation enters into all judgments, so the only certainty we have is the certainty of our judgments. Renouvier put it as follows:

present experience
present experience

Certitude is not and cannot be absolute. It is a condition and act of man—not an act and a condition in which he grasps immediately that which could not be immediate, i.e., facts and laws external and superior to present experience, but rather one in which he posits his awareness as it exists and as he maintains it. Strictly speaking, there is no certitude; there are only men who are certain. (Traité de psychologie rationnelle, Paris, 1912, Vol. I, p. 366)

But indeterminism is not limited to human judgments. It extends also to history. For since history is in part made up of human behavior, human decisions must be included in its scope, and there is no way of eliminating them. One can, of course, describe the environment of human life, its stability, and its mutability; but if it remains stable, that is because human beings have not changed it, and if it changes, that is due to human acts as much as to natural disasters.

People modify their living conditions, not as a group acting as one person, but as a collection of individuals. Their reasons for doing so may vary, as is inevitable, and of course they are not able to modify their conditions completely.

G. W. F. Hegel
G. W. F. Hegel

But Renouvier emphasized the importance of human decisions for the way in which individuals will live, since the ability of human beings to make choices makes it impossible to lay down either a law of universal progress toward the good or one of constant degeneration. Hence Renouvier rejected historical laws, such as those of Comte and G. W. F. Hegel, though he was attracted to meliorism.

Ethics

If there is no historical law dooming humankind to move in any predetermined direction and if history only records actual change, the question arises of the relation of history to ethics. People make moral judgments and act so as to achieve what they believe to be right.

Morals, then, are not the result of history, though what happens in history reflects our moral judgments. Morals are rather the source of historical changes, and if we are to appraise historical events, we shall have to do so in moral terms.

Ethics
Ethics

This clearly requires a definition of good and evil, and in view of the radical individualism of Renouvier this might seem an insurmountable task. But he identified evil with conflict, conflict both between persons and between groups of persons.

For warfare is in essence the prevention by one or more persons of the fulfillment of the volitions of others. Hence tyranny, slavery, and conquest are to be condemned. This assumes that it is possible for a group of enlightened people to respect the individuality of their fellows and for all to live in peace.

In his fictional account of what history might have been, Uchronie (1876), Renouvier claimed that the secret of human happiness lies in our recognition of the individual's freedom. If at any epoch people had accepted individual freedom wholeheartedly, he argued, universal peace and harmony would have prevailed.

Religious, economic, and national wars would have ended at once; for everyone would have taken it for granted that each person has a right to his own religious views, to the satisfaction of his own economic interests, and to his own national loyalties.

Renouvier held that education alone could bring this about, though he had no illusions that proper education was ever likely to be instituted. The dogma of historical determinism has had too firm a hold on human will power and has brought about acquiescence, sloth, injustice, and ignorance.

The basic premises of Renouvier's Science de la morale (1869) are that human nature is rational and that people believe themselves to be free. Their belief in freedom leads individuals to act for what they judge to be better, and their rationality guides them in their choice of ends. To act morally is to act rationally.

By doing so we rise above the beasts; we recognize the humanity in our fellows and respect it. For this reason Renouvier became a bitter opponent of the Catholic Church and of monarchy and urged his readers to turn to Protestantism as the religion of individual conscience.

To him Protestantism was the religion of a personal God—not an absolute and unchanging Being, omniscient and omnipotent, but finite, limited, free, and the guarantor of our freedom. God's existence is not proved, but it is a reasonable hypothesis drawn from the existence of our moral objectives.

Running through Renouvier's many works are the premises that the plurality of existing things is irreducible; that chance is real and is reproduced in individual freedom of choice; that time and novelty really exist; and that no absolutes or infinites exist.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...