Dewey’s A Common Faith has been variously interpreted, both in terms of its relation to Dewey’s corpus and internally in terms of its leading ideas. I argue for its crucial relevance in understanding Dewey and undertake an analysis of the key idea of “religious experience” as an “attitude of existence.” This distinguishes religious experience from other types of qualitative experience and shows the unique place this concept has for Dewey.

Scott Aikin recently claimed that pragmatism and phenomenology are incompatible. Pragmatic naturalism is incompatible with phenomenology’s anti-naturalism. Therefore, pragmatists trying to appropriate insights from phenomenology encounter a dilemma: either reject naturalism and thereby pragmatism, or reject anti-naturalism and thereby phenomenology. I will argue that Aikin’s dilemma is unmerited, especially in the case of John Dewey, because he has misidentified its horns. Given his definition of pragmatic naturalism, the classical pragmatists are neither naturalists nor pragmatists. His discussion of “phenomenology” misconstrues phenomenological method as subjective self-reporting, which hamstrings his assessment of phenomenology and its prospects of reconciliation with pragmatism. I hope to engage and dispel not only Aikin’s dilemma, but also common preconceptions about the intersection of pragmatism and phenomenology. They may be reconciled, although there are antipathies, of which I will discuss Dewey’s principle of continuity.

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Art as Language, G. L. Hagberg presents an argument against Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and other advocates of the Institutional Theory (IT), arguing that a tension exists within the theory. Through conferral, a spokesperson declares what artifacts are accepted into the artworld. Hagberg finds this problematic because, while the criterion one uses is something that the later Wittgenstein would endorse, it points back to an essentialism that he clearly rejected. But Hagberg believes he can avoid this problem by applying Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty to specific artifacts in aesthetics. By relying on Wittgenstein’s notion of certitude, however, he exposes himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty: is certainty natural, or is it social? Although the propositions Hagberg uses have the potential to become certain, he treats them as if they begin that way. In this paper I present two ways in which Wittgenstein classifies or understands certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our natural and instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement. I believe Hagberg fails to appreciate this distinction as well as the consequences for his claim.

In this paper I take up the claims of a number of recent commentators who have argued that there is no rational basis for a moral judgment against cannibalism because no successful argument against it can be articulated within the dominant consequentialist or neo-Kantian deontological approaches in normative ethics. While I think cannibalism is clearly morally repugnant, it is surprisingly difficult to explain why. I argue not only that a rational justification of the moral wrongness of cannibalism can be given in terms of a broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics, but also that this requires a broader conception of moral value, and corresponding moral obligations, than is typical within the dominant approaches.

The problem of divine hiddenness has in the recent literature joined the problem of evil as one of the principal positive arguments for atheism. My chief goal here is to mine Aquinas’s metaphysics and natural theology for a distinctively Thomistic response, making particular use of a neglected text in which he considers a similar issue. Towards the end of the paper I also consider some resources provided by Aquinas’s interpretation of revealed theology.

Recently, William Desmond’s metaxological philosophy has been gaining popularity since it proposes a powerful counterweight to the dominance of deconstruction in certain areas of contemporary philosophy of religion. This paper serves to introduce Desmond’s philosophy and confront it with one specific form of Postmodern theology, namely John Caputo’s “weak theology.” Since Desmond’s philosophy is—while thought-provoking and refreshing—not well known, a substantial part of this paper is devoted to fleshing out its central concepts: perplexity, metaxology, and hyperbolic indirection. Afterwards, I argue for the advantages of a metaphysical (Desmond) over a deconstructive (Caputo) approach to philosophy of religion/God.

The idea of the soul, though once common in discussions of human nature, is rarely considered in contemporary philosophy. This reflects a general physicalist turn; but besides commitment to various forms of materialism there is the objection that the very idea of the soul is incoherent. The notion of soul considered here is a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic one according to which it is both the form of a living human being and something subsistent on its own account. Having discussed the conceptual issues of how the soul may be conceived of, and set aside certain neo-Cartesian lines of response to materialism, an argument to the existence of a non-material principle is presented. Certain implications are then explored leading to the conclusion that it is possible for the intellectual soul to survive the death of the body.

This paper seeks to provide a phenomenological articulation of the Scotist notion of haecceitas, interpreting Scotus’s principle of individuation at once as an ontological as well as a moral principle. Growing out of certain suggestions made by James Hart in his Who One Is, this interpretation is meant to provide the phenomenological ethics of both Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler with a useful theoretical tool in the Scotist notion of haecceitas interpreted as a horizon of value in order more fully to develop the phenomenological idea of the ethical life as a task that specifically seeks to realize as its highest goal the vocation of the person to his or her ideal, true self. The main implication of Scotus’s thought, here, for phenomenology will be the ability to further delimit haecceitas as an objective moral principle that refutes the frequent charge of relativistic subjectivism in the phenomenological theory of ethics.

In this essay I present two cases for what I term an “unobjectionable” or weak version of metaphysical realism, the first based on a commitment to a version of pragmatism, and the second based on a commitment to theism. I argue that it can be reasonable to accept such a version of realism even if there are no arguments that definitively prove its truth, and that both pragmatists and theists have good reasons to accept it. Although I conceive of these grounds as independent lines of justification, I see no reason in principle why one could not hold both simultaneously. This is not to suggest that there are not versions of pragmatism or theism that are incompatible with each other, but rather only that pragmatism and theism as such are not mutually exclusive views.

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Søren Kierkegaard, I review in this essay the relationship between Kierkegaard and the Catholic tradition. First, I look back to consider both Kierkegaard’s encounter with Catholicism and the influence of his work upon Catholics. Second, I look around to consider some of the recent work on Kierkegaard and Catholicism, especially Jack Mulder’s recent book, Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition, and the many articles that examine Kierkegaard’s relation to Catholicism in the multi-volume Kierkegaard Research series edited by Jon Stewart. Finally, I look ahead to consider possible directions in which the conversation between Catholics and Kierkegaardians might continue.

Thomistic dualism, based on the Aristotelian view of the soul as the form of the body, presents us with a conception of the person as part of the natural world in a way that deserves our attention. The view is outlined, following Eleonore Stump’s exposition, and some objections to it are noted. Consideration is then given to a modified version of Thomistic dualism developed by J. P. Moreland. Finally, attention is directed at the theory of “emergent dualism,” which obtains many of the benefits aimed at by the Thomistic view without its drawbacks.