John Henry Newman, Plantinga, and Darwin's Doubt

• Speaker: Chris Oldfield, Faraday Institute for Science and Religion
• Location: C0.02 (IAS Seminar Room), Zeeman Building
• Time & Date: 17:30-19:00 GMT, 13 March 2025, Thursday Week 10, Term 2.
• Meeting Link: This event is hybrid. Please register here to receive the meeting link
• Abstract:

In his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent John Henry Newman gave us a way of thinking about doubt, assent and inference that has been lost sight of. In the contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology philosophers have tended to think of faith and doubt as equal/opposite positions or states of mind situated on a sliding scale from unbelief through degrees of credence to fully justified, warranted, true belief or knowledge. In Newman's way of thinking, I will argue (following Antognazza 2024) that this way of thinking rests on a profound mistake, which is exhibited by Alvin Plantinga's reconstruction of Darwin's doubt as an instance of Bayesian reasoning, or a premise in his argument against naturalism.

Matyáš Moravec

Queens University Belfast
Philosophy
24 Oct, 2024

The Spooky Origins of Hypertime

Hypertime is a theory that postulates that time has two or more dimensions. Much of the groundwork underlying current theories of hypertime in analytic philosophy is generally attributed to discussions in the second half of the 20th century—either in connection with the objection against the passage of time or as a means to resolve problems in the philosophy of time travel. This paper demonstrates that the historical roots of hypertime extend much further back. I will demonstrate that sophisticated theories of multi-dimensional time, hitherto neglected by historians of philosophy, were developed by philosophers decades before the interest in time travel took off. These early pioneers of hypertime were working on “psychical research,” the study of psychical phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, or ghosts, widely popular towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. They developed multi-dimensional time as a tool to resolve various problems with precognition, the purported ability to see the future. I will conclude by indicating the pitfalls of neglecting this important chapter in the history of the philosophy of time.

Stephen Connelly

University of Warwick
School of Law
14 Nov, 2024

Philo on Lawfulness and Conscience

In his Allegories of the Laws, Philo of Alexandria sets himself against the Hellenistic philosophers of his time (early 1st century CE). The ‘pride’ of these philosophers, Philo claims, consists in having made pure reason the governor of the soul, and the philosopher governor of the rational city. Yet Philo’s aim is to justify his faith using the tools of Greco-Roman thought, and so, this talk will argue, rather than casting aside the prevailing ‘prideful’ conceptualisation of soul, Philo reconfigures the soul by internalising within it ethical ‘humiliation’. The paper examines a likely key source for this notion of humiliation, and follows through the consequences for Philo’s moral and legal theory.

Andrej Bukovac-Mimica

University of Helsinki / University of Zagreb
Theology
28 Nov, 2024

Religion in a Communist Setting: The Curious Case of Yugoslavia

The notion that Communist political systems aggressively suppress religious thinking and expression is a commonplace we scarcely pause to consider. While this notion may be true for the USSR, and only for certain periods of its nearly-70-year history, in reality, it is a generalization that reduces a highly complex and evolving relationship to a simple slogan. This objection especially applies to former Socialist Yugoslavia, which not only developed its particular flavour of Socialism, but also a particular relationship with its religious citizens and the institutions they belonged to.

The country itself defies most generalizations, being essentially a patchwork of peoples of various ethnicities and religious affiliations, with major segments of the population belonging to either Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim communities, along with a plethora of other minority religious groups. The two largest Christian communities, the Catholic and the Serbian Orthodox church, saw themselves, and were seen by others, as bearers of national identities. These two forms of Christianity provided the backbones of the ethno-nationalist mythologies of Serbia and Croatia that had developed during the late 19^thcentury. Therefore, the government's "ideological struggle" against religion, inspired by an effort to keep this patchwork intact, had much more to do with suppressing nationalism than religion itself. On the other hand, smaller religious communities, unrelated to national identities, were often treated quite benevolently, with some enjoying much more freedom than they had before the World War II.

In short, Yugoslavia's attitude and conduct towards religious communities was the product of complex internal and external policy considerations that evolved over time and varied across republics. Although the regime did nominally consider religion as something superfluous and archaic, that fact could be considered a consequence, rather than the cause of its strained relationship with certain religious groups.

Claire Blencowe

University of Warwick
Sociology
30 Jan, 2025

In Search of Sociological Soul: The case for De-secularising Social Theory Teaching

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in the social theory classroom. Secularism sustains racism and coloniality in the contemporary academy. In the context of sociology, secularism is reinforced through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer to the secularism of social theory, but has often replicated problematic aspects of secularist thought. Whereas post-secular theory affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs spiritual dualism, I am more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers and spiritual wisdomin relationwith secular social theory, such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, Indigenous, feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental—to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension,conocimientoor the cultivation of soul. We might, I propose, supplement the pursuit of sociological imagination with that of sociological soul. The article draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sylvia Wynter amongst others. It also draws on a practical experiment in de-secularising social theory through teaching an undergraduate module called Capitalism and Religion.

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An earlier version of this paper is published, under creative commons license, as Blencowe, C., 2021. 'Disenchanting secularism (or the cultivation of soul) as pedagogy in resistance to populist racism and colonial structures in the academy.'British Educational Research Journal,47(2), pp.389-408. [link]

Steve Fuller

University of Warwick
Sociology
06 Feb, 2025

(Recording available on YouTubeLink opens in a new window)

The Role of Historical Revisionism in the Advancement of Science

One of Thomas Kuhn's most striking claims in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the version of the history of science that science students are taught -- and the public consumes — is 'Orwellian', by which he meant that it is regularly rewritten so that the past is presented as eventuating in whatever turns out to be current research frontier. Although I have been mainly a strong critic of Kuhn's work, I have always found this to be his most profound insight. In this talk, I will explore several dimensions of this insight about how science relates to its history.

Curie Virág

University of Warwick
Philosophy
07 Feb, 2025

Becoming like Gods: Models of Mind and Self-Perfection in Early China

In both the ancient Greek and early Chinese traditions, an ideal of human perfection described in terms of a transcendence of the ordinary human condition and the attainment of a godlike state can be found in major influential writings. While in the Greek tradition, this ideal of godliness—much studied by scholars—was quintessentially associated with the intellect and its capacity for reasoned, orderly contemplation, in early China, there seems to have been less agreement about what it meant to transcend the ordinary human condition and to achieve a superhuman condition—often referred to as shen 神 (spiritual, divine), tian 天 (heavenly) or ling 靈 (numinous, spiritual, intelligent). This paper explores how key early Chinese texts (the Zhuangzi, Xunzi and Guanzi) described human potentiality through the language of self-divinization and what this might tell us about the contours of mind and self as envisioned in these texts. It concludes by considering what we might learn from the parallels and contrasts with Greek ideals of godliness in humans and what a cross-cultural examination of this theme might reveal about the distinct ethical and epistemic practices that developed in the two traditions.

Andrew Huddleston

University of Warwick
Philosophy
27 Feb, 2025

Becoming like Gods: Models of Mind and Self-Perfection in Early China

In both the ancient Greek and early Chinese traditions, an ideal of human perfection described in terms of a transcendence of the ordinary human condition and the attainment of a godlike state can be found in major influential writings. While in the Greek tradition, this ideal of godliness—much studied by scholars—was quintessentially associated with the intellect and its capacity for reasoned, orderly contemplation, in early China, there seems to have been less agreement about what it meant to transcend the ordinary human condition and to achieve a superhuman condition—often referred to as shen 神 (spiritual, divine), tian 天 (heavenly) or ling 靈 (numinous, spiritual, intelligent). This paper explores how key early Chinese texts (the Zhuangzi, Xunzi and Guanzi) described human potentiality through the language of self-divinization and what this might tell us about the contours of mind and self as envisioned in these texts. It concludes by considering what we might learn from the parallels and contrasts with Greek ideals of godliness in humans and what a cross-cultural examination of this theme might reveal about the distinct ethical and epistemic practices that developed in the two traditions.