Philosophy and Theology

This paper is a comprehensive examination of the ethical issues surrounding artificial insemination. The interests of parents, AI children and society are identified and compared, and a variety of arguments for and against AIH and AID are examined. Although various criticisms of the natural law position are offered, this paper comes to the similar conclusion that donor artiricial insemination is not morally justified.

Beginning with an examination of Lukasiewicz’s remarks on the logical status of the law of contradiction, I examine several systems of modal logic in which the law is said to fail. This raises the issue of hypercontradiction and bivalence in the semantics of modal systems, and these are examined in the context of constructing senses for ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ within systems where the law no Ionger holds. FoIlowing an examination of the work of several later logicians and similar efforts on their part, I conclude that the notion of ‘truth’ is not part or any system of format logic or metalogic.

Critics’ praise of Woody Allen as an artist is increasing. No other comedian includes within his humour so many references to God. Philosophers interested in contemporary culture should take Allen’s comedy seriously. Accepting Albert Camus’s vision of reality, Allen has been artistically handling the absurdity of reality by use of humour. Through comedies, Allen’s films deal with important questions. His finest film may contain an argument for God.

This article offers further exploration of themes first presented in Habits of the Heart. Following an analysis of Tocqueville’s critique of social and political individualism, I examine more positive views of individualism in the writings of Emerson and several contemporary thinkers. The closing section deals with the concept of individualism as it emerges in contemporary American society. This paper is a revised version of a talk delivered at Marquette University in the fall of 1987.

Thinking about the first coming and how it relates to visions of a second coming is one of the most important ways for the Christian tradition to contribute to serious reflection on the structure of history, the significance of anticipation, and their importance for the structure of action. This paper draws on two texts, Flannery O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood, and Thomas Sheehan’s historical and theological study, The First Coming, to lay a groundwork for such reflection. Rather than treating the texts sequentially, this article intertwines them, following the structure of Sheehan’s book but illuminating it with O’Connor’s story.

The head and the heart, the hermeneutics of finitude and the hermeneutics of suspicion, Descartes and Jeremiah, idealism and faith: is the “Know thyself” but an epistemological project, a matter of attention, or is there a deceit in the human heart beyond pure reason? Perhaps Socrates’ way is an alternative between Jeremiah and Descartes, a significant revision of the boundary between human and divine.

The once marginal theological question of Christ’s unique status has today entered into general consciousness. Increasing friendly dialogue among religions is one factor contributing to the urgency of the question. Another is the critical nature of the question within Christian theology. This article examines a broad range of responses and calls for a foundational approach based on Karl Rahner. It shares the advantage of this approach in addressing the suggestion that the Christian religion plays a unique role in a “liberation theology of religions.”

I argue that Spinoza’s concept of “intuitive knowledge” is rooted in his notion of experienced unity. Following an analysis of this notion of unity, and its general application to human emotional life, I provide an analysis of intuitive knowledge designed to integrate Spinoza’s notion of “Iiberation” with his theory of emotions. Two shorter sections are provide which deal with the Spinozistic concept of love, and the fact-value distinction within a Spinozistic framework.

[Grace as God’s Self-giving and Respect] Employing the methods of formal and transcendental analysis, the topic is introduced by departing from the experience of love between human beings. Love proves itself to be a unity of self-giving and respect. Both of these related elements of the notion of love are then put to the test in the light of that mode of divine loving called ‘grace’. By studying the history of dogma, this notion of grace is brought to a full definition.

In this essay I offer a criticism of David Tracy’s work, The Analogical Imagination, in Iight of my reading of Alice Walker’s fiction. I propose that Tracy’s analysis of the contemporary theological scene is flawed because his portrait of theology bypasses important aspects of liberation theology. In particular, I suggest that despite Tracy’s rccognition of liberation theology, his work is imperiled by a residue of privilege that clings to his hermeneutic model of theology. As a consequence, opportunities for substantive dialogue with Iiberation theology are missed. The core of my criticism focuses on aspects of privilege that attend Tracy’s discussion of the religious classic. As I examine Alice Walker’s work. I suggest that Tracy would be disinclined to acccpt The Color Purple as a religious classic. His disinclination, I argue, may be attributed to three privileges: texts, time, and tradition. As I offer an alternative reading of the religious significance of The Color Purple, I suggest means by which explorations of a broader definition of “religious classic,” inclusive of works such as The Color Purple, might lead to productive dialogue between Tracy and liberation theologians.

In this study I propose that John E. Smith’s years-long argument for the importance of, and indeed his prolonged focus on, the notion of experience provides a particularly useful point of entry into the classical North American philosophical tradition and specifically into more pragmatist understandings of experience. Thisstudy of Smith on experience will proceed in three steps. After a brief reference in Part One to the Roycean background and context to Smith’s efforts toward a more adequate understanding of experience, it will continue in Part Two with a review of the three-stage development of Smith’s own transformation, in a more distinctly pragmatist direction, of Royce’s idealist-pragmatist notion of experience as interpretation. This review of Smith’s thought lays the groundwork for a suggestion, in Part three of this study, toward the continuing formulation of a more explicitly developed philosophy of experience. The basic proposal will be to affirm the need, while profiting from Smith’s important contributions, to pay renewed attention to more idealist concerns for structure and totality.

The heart of Book Two of De Iibero arbitrio is devoted to a lengthy argument that concludes that God is and is truly and sovereignly. This argument rests upon two crucial principia that have been called the principles of subordination and participation. An examination of their function in the argument reveals that Augustine could hardly have thought that he had produced a demonstration of God’s existence.

This study is divided into three parts. In the first I survey various incidents in which the oscillating friend/foe pattern between philosophy and religious consciousness is played out, and seek to determine the nature of this alternating complicity and conflict. In the second part, the implications of attributing a posture to thinking are examined. Here I argue that human thought always occurs within, and is shaped by, a fundamental will and feeling toward reality. In the third part I argue that rational consciousness has a structural tension built into it: the tension between acknowledgement and conformity to the other and assertion and enactment of the self.

Women have been stigmatized in androrentric psychology by a deficiency model and in patriarchal theology by a domination model. Neither health nor whoIeness has been available to women in these frameworks. Feminist liberation theologians have posited alternative views of the human which take women’s experience seriously. Similarly, the “self-in-relation” approach to women’s development being proposed by feminist psychotherapists centers on women’s experience as normative for women. These two discussions of what it means to be a female converge in many dimensions. One such convergence, a growth-enhancing relationship, is explored in some depth for its applicability to a feminist pastoral counseling.

In the first part of this paper, I argue that the sentiment of compassion is a factor of the first importance in moral theory. This sentiment, which causes us to act well toward persons in need, is an essential element in the psychology of the morally well-developed person. Moral rationalists such as Epictetus and Kant, who contend that the source of moral value is reason rather than compassion, produce a distorted picture of our moral lives. Hume’s moral psychology gives compassion the place it deserves as a motivating factor in moral action.In the second part of the paper, I study the impact of moral rationalism, as manifested in the work of Peter Singer, on the question of the treatment of mentally handicapped humans. Singer’s advocacy of euthanasia for such people is a consequence of his adoption of rationalist assumptions about the value of human life, and shows the unacceptable implications of those assumptions.

The following paper is a modified version of Ihe Edward S. O’Donnell, S.J., Distinguished Lecture, delivered at Marquette University in November of 1986, The original title of the lecture was, “The Fare of Theology 1986, or the Painful Process of Doctrinal Development.” Following a historical exegesis of the notion of responsibility for theologians. I offer a summary of dominant factors underlying the issue of doctrinal development in theology, and conclude with some recommendations relating to the present tasks facing theologians.

After distinguishing three kinds of pluralism, an individualist pluralism at one pole, a communalist pluralism at the other, and a third more complex concept ofpluralism, I address the meaning of commitment in America as iIIuminated by these distinctions. This continues a line opened up in Habits of the Heart. An earlierversion of this paper was presented at Marquette University in the Edward J. O’Donnell, S.J., Distinguished Lecture Series.