Charles Taliaferro

John Dewey once said of philosophical problems that they are quite different from old soldiers. Not only do they never die, but they do not even fade away. Something similar might be said about the unfavourable Divine attributes of the 1950s and 60s, timelessness or eternity, necessary existence, foreknowledge of creaturely free choices, and immutability. All have contemporary defenders. Even the puzzling, traditional tenet that God is metaphysically simple now has formidable apologists. Perhaps the least popular of the traditional theistic canon, the most likely to fade away, is the tenet that God is impassible. The recent appearance of Richard Creel's Divine Impassibility has shown that even this least popular of attributes can be powerfully articulated and defended. Roughly, the impassibility thesis is the claim that God does not undergo sensory experience including suffering and pain, nor is God subject to corruption, substantial essential change or to external agency. Creel's defence of Divine impassibilism is certainly the most balanced and sophisticated in the current literature. Any argument for passibilism must take Creel's work seriously. I intend to do just that in the course of defending the thesis that the God of Christian theism is passible in an important respect. There are substantive moral and religious reasons to believe God suffers

Phenomenological realism, in the tradition of Dietrich von Hildebrand, is advanced as a promising methodology for a theistic philosophy of divine and human agency. Phenomenological realism is defended in contrast to the practice of historicalism -- the view that a philosophy of mind and God should always be done as part of a thoroughgoing history of philosophy, e.g. the use of examples in analytic theology should be subordinated to engaging the work of Kant and other great philosophers. The criticism of theism based on forms of naturalism that give exclusive authority to the physical sciences is criticized from a phenomenological, realist perspective.

This work addresses the challenge of contemporary materialism for thinking about God. The book examines contemporary theories of consciousness and defends a non-materialist theory of persons, subjectivity and God. A version of dualism is articulated that seeks to avoid the fragmented outlook of most dualist theories. Dualism is often considered to be inadequate both philosophically and ethically, and is seen as a chief cause of denigrating the body and of promoting individualism and scepticism. Charles Taliaferro defends a holistic understanding of the person-body relationship in which the two are distinguishable yet integrally related. This integrated dualism is spelled out in a way that avoids the ethical and philosophical problems associated with other dualistic accounts, especially in its Platonic and Cartesian forms. A defence is then made of the intelligibility of thinking about God as non-physical, yet integrally present to creation. Charles Taliaferro is co-editor of the forthcoming A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, with Philip Quinn. He has had work published in, among others, The Philosophical Quarterly, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophia.

There is much to appreciate in Samuel Fleischacker’s Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion. In the tradition of Tolstoy, Fleischacker argues that secular philosophy does not have the resources to provide for a meaningful life; a life of meaning is to be found principally through revealed religion. In the end, however, his concept of revelation seems very thin, ruling out even the intelligibility of experiencing God. We critically assess his atrophied concept of revelation and his views on historical truth, science, and theism.