Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Dan Laidler, who introduces the notion of hagioptasia and explains why it points to something interesting about how humans interact with their environment. Hagioptasia (meaning 'holy vision') is our natural tendency to imagine an otherworldly quality of 'specialness' in certain places, people or things. It is an evolved, adaptive psychological mechanism, which evokes in us a deep sense of longing. “That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End , the opening lines of Kubla Khan , the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.” C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress Like Lewis, I had also wondered a great deal on these deep, enigmatic feelings, which everyone appeared to share in a very similar manner from early childhood onwards. Although, rather than strengthen my notions of spirituality, this inquiry...

Today's post is written by Helen de Cruz . Helen is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University , UK. Her publications are in empirically-informed Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Religion, Social Epistemology, and Metaphilosophy.  Helen's overarching research project is an investigation of how human engage in thinking about abstract domains such as Theology, Mathematics, and Science, what it means for limited, embodied beings like us to think about these topics, and what epistemic conclusions we can draw from this. Here, she introduces her new book " Religious Disagreement ". I find myself frequently in disagreement about religion with academic colleagues and friends and family. Given that I'm a philosopher of religion, this is not surprising. But my experiences are far from unique: religious disagreement is widespread even among quite homogeneous religious communities. There is disagreement both between and within religi...

This post is by  Tim Crane . I am Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. I was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and he taught at UCL for almost twenty years. I founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London , and I am the philosophy editor of the TLS .  I have written five books on the nature of the mind, which is my principal area of interest in philosophy. But I also have a long-standing interest in the nature of religion and religious belief, and The Meaning of Belief is my first serious attempt to write on this subject. The Meaning of Belief attempts to give a description of the phenomenon of religion from an atheist’s point of view — that is, on the assumption that there is no god, supernatural or transcendent reality or being. The book’s aim is not to argue for this atheism, but to give a description of religious belief which makes sense to believers themselves. In t...

In this post, Piers Benn presents his book entitled Commitment . Piers (pictured above) is a Visiting Lecturer at Heythrop College , University of London, and Adjunct Professor at Fordham University New York, based at its London Centre. He was a lecturer in philosophy and in medical ethics in previous posts. The title I chose for my book for the  Acumen Press  Art of Living series was Commitment (2011) but in many ways it could equally well have been Doubt . Thinking about it afresh after a few years away from it, I can see that it was largely a philosophical attempt to defend various forms of doubt, as a state forced upon us by judicious reasoning rather than desirable in itself. I focused on three main areas where the tension between commitment and doubt felt particularly powerful: love, work and faith. I wanted to uphold the value of commitment, but only when properly thought through. Commitment can be energising, morally improving and conducive to a deeply s...

Helen De Cruz In today's post Helen De Cruz reports from The Philosophy and Psychology of Afterlife Beliefs workshop which took place on 10 March 2015 at the VU University Amsterdam. Most religions affirm an explicit belief in an afterlife, that is to say, that biological death is not the end of a human being’s existence. Recent research in the cognitive science of religion indicates that the cross-culturally widespread belief in a life after death is cognitively natural for humans: it arises spontaneously, without explicit instruction, and sometimes even in the absence of any cultural input. By contrast, the belief that everything (including a person’s beliefs and desires) ends at death is cognitively effortful and emerges later in development than the belief that at least some processes, such as psychological processes, continue.