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Practices in Religious NaturalismIn Donald Crosby & Jerome Stone (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism, Routledge. pp. 341-351. 2018.There are two main ways to develop practices in religious naturalism. The first way is to practice within some traditional religion. Since those religions involve the worship of divine persons, which religious naturalists reject, religious naturalists must develop non-literal or fictional styles of participation in those religions. The second way is to develop new naturalistic religions. Since these will not be religions of worship, they will be religions of self-realization. Self-realizati…Read more
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Formal Semantics for Metaphors: An Essay in the Computational Philosophy of LanguageDissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook. 1996.My dissertation aims to provide a formal semantic theory for metaphors and a computational model of that theory. A computer program, NETMET, implements the ideas presented in the dissertation. Working in a thoroughly cognitive manner, my dissertation is both rigorously mathematical and psychologically well-informed. The dissertation is scientific in method. The reasoning is primarily abductive, and each proposed hypothesis is validated against large, detailed examples from the history of philoso…Read more
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Religious NaturalismIn Andrei A. Buckareff & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, Oxford University Press. pp. 274-294. 2016.Religious naturalists say all divine or sacred things are natural. A unifying framework is presented for religious naturalism. Nature has five religiously significant levels of organization. These are nature as a whole, the universe, solar system, earth, and body. Each level involves power, cyclicality, complexity, and evolution. These levels take their religious contents from the Zygon group, the World Pantheist Movement, the New Atheists, the New Stoics, and the Burners. Religious naturali…Read more
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InfinityIn Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, Routledge. 2007.This article deals with the concept of infinity in classical American philosophy. It focuses on the philosophical and technical developments of infinity in the 19th Century American thinkers Royce and Peirce.
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NaturalismIn Graham Oppy (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 152-66. 2019.The many kinds of naturalism fall into two main types. Dogmatic naturalists define naturalness using some rule. Progressive naturalists define naturalness in terms of a research program. This research program, illustrated by the sciences, progressively defines things ever more precisely using mathematics. Most traditional religious concepts fail to be natural on any type of naturalism. But progressive naturalists are open to naturalistic revisions of traditional concepts. They do not tie r…Read more
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The Will to Power as Parallel Distributed ProcessingIn Babette Babich & Richard Cohen (eds.), Nietzsche's Epistemological Writings, Kluwer Academic. pp. 313-322. 1999.The will to power has non-trivial physical models taken from the class of parallel dis¬tributed processing systems, specifically wave-mechanical discrete dynamical systems with cyclical entropy. The will to power is thus linked to research in non-linear self-organizing dynami¬cal systems, includ¬ing oscillons, cellular automata, spin-glasses, Ising systems, and connectionist networks.
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Religion after NaturalismIn Paul Draper & J. L. Schellenberg (eds.), Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 63-78. 2017.Theistic religions are not the only religions in the West. Many nontheistic religions are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and natural. Although it cannot be worshiped, this energy can be aroused, directed, and shaped. Hence the energy religions involve tools and techniques for the therapeutic application of the ultimate energy to the self. They are technologies of the self. Attention is focused here on four new types of energy religion. These include the re…Read more
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Process PolytheismIn Demian Wheeler & David Connor (eds.), Conceiving an Alternative: Philosophical Resources for an Ecological Civilization, Process Century. pp. 149-165. 2019.I develop a version of process theology inspired by Hartshorne. This development aims to reconcile Hartshorne both with recent science and with analytic metaphysics. It posits an endless series of ever greater cosmic epochs. Each cosmic epoch is a subcomputation in a divine organism. Each divine organism is like a phoenix. Just as new cosmic epochs are born from the ashes of old cosmic epochs, so new deities are born from the ashes of old deities. The result is a process polytheism.
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The Existence of SoftwareRutherford Journal 5. 2018.Many ontologies posit levels of existence. A whole exists at a level above its parts; a set exists at a level above its members. Hardware objects are at the lowest level in a computational ontology. Software objects exist at higher levels. The game of life illustrates a stratified computational ontology. The cells in the life grid are the hardware objects. An event is a function from cells to values 0 or 1. A process is a series of events. A process contains a software object iff its con…Read more
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Spiritual NaturalismIn R. Nicholls & Heather Salazar (eds.), The Philosophy of Spirituality, Brill. pp. 312-328. 2018.Spiritual naturalists say that spirit is a natural force. Far from being novel or unconventional, spiritual naturalism spans the entire history of Western thought, from the Stoics, through leading modern thinkers, to the transhumanists. Spirit drives the self-organization of matter. The spirituality of any thing is just its degree of self-organization, which is its evolved complexity. But self-organization is self-regulation and self-control. Many spiritual naturalists, especially the trans…Read more
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Some deities are better than othersIn Kirk Lougheed (ed.), Value Beyond Monotheism: The Axiology of the Divine, Routledge.. pp. 46-63. 2022.A deity is a superhuman person. Since deities are persons, they are axiologically comparable with each other. They are comparable in terms of their moral, political, and other axiological qualities. I regard all deities as contingent concrete worldbound particulars. To compare deities is to compare possible objects across worlds. I aim to compare the axiological qualities of deities taken from the entire Western ecosystem of deities. I will compare deities in terms of their moral and poli…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Religion |