Brendan Sweetman

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyMary Warnock's book is an attempt to address in a short space a large theme: ‘some aspects of the role of religion, and therefore the idea of God, in the twenty‐first century, as it relates to legislation and politics’. Along the way she raises many subsidiary themes, including the historical influence of religion on the law, the tension between religion and liberalism, the difficulty of providing a philosophical foundation for secularist ethics, and the problems of pluralism and relativism that have pervaded such discussions. Her approach to these timely but complex topics is through the lens of various pieces of legislation that came through the British Parliament over the past 40 years or so, including in the House of Lords, of which she was a member for more than twenty years. In particular, she discusses legislation relating to abortion, research...

The discussion between Ernan McMullin and Alvin Plantinga concerning evolution and religion, which first appeared in Christian Scholar’s Review in September 1991, is an enlightening airing of many of the issues that arise with regard to this complex, controversial topic. Overall, Plantinga favors a confrontational view of the relationship between religion and evolution, while McMullin favors a dialogue model. The two thinkers disagree about the evidence for evolution, about what Plantinga calls “theistic science,” about methodological naturalism, and about biblical interpretation. McMullin accepts a mainstream view in several important respects, holding that: (i) evolution is true; (ii) Genesis is not to be read literally; (iii) science should be separated from theology; (iv) we should accept “methodological naturalism”; and (v) we should reject “creation science.” Plantinga disagrees with all of these claims. This article explores the differences between the two thinkers by means of an exposition of the main points, and offers a few important critical observations on key questions.

The main objective of this book “is to reinstate a marginalized intellectual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modern Germany”. In order to do this, Hunter offers an account of two independent intellectual cultures—two “rival enlightenments”—of civil and metaphysical philosophy in early German intellectual history. The first of these rival versions is the current mainstream view: that the enlightenment influences in modern Germany became gradually unified, through Kant’s formalization of the notion of enlightenment which treats it as human reason’s recovery of its own intellectual and moral laws, and through Hegel’s dialectical historicisation of the concept, which allows reason’s self-clarification to occur in time as the transcending reconciliation of a series of fundamental historical oppositions. This conception of enlightenment had a significant influence on, among other things, the notion of the modern secular, pluralist state. It was also a conception of enlightenment that relied upon philosophy for its identification and elaboration.

This article provides, through a discussion of the work of Jacques Derrida, an examination of the philosophical basis of postmodernism. The first section identifies and explains the positive claims of postmodernism, including the key claim that all identities, presences, etc. depend for their existence on something which is absent and different from themselves. The second section further illustrates the positive claims through an analysis of Derrida's "deconstructionist" reading of Plato. The final section raises a number of critical problems for postmodernism: that it confuses aesthetics with metaphysics; that it mistakes assertion for argument in philosophy; that it is guilty of relativism; and that it is self-contradictory.

This paper considers two related claims in the work of D. Z. Phillips: that commitment to God precludes a distinction between the commitment and the grounds for the commitment, and that belief and understanding are the same in religion. Both these claims motivate Phillips’s rejection of natural theology. I examine these claims by analyzing the notion of commitment, discussing what is involved in making a commitment to a worldview, why commitment is necessary at all in religion, levels of commitment, and commitment and justification. I show that Phillips fails to distinguish between adopting a hypothesis, where justification would be germane, and committing to the hypothesis after one has adopted it, where justification is not so pressing. This failure fatally undermines his rejection of natural theology.