Responding to a perceived lack of theological literacy in political theory, Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Sovereignty: God, State, and Self suggests that sovereignty, as a theo-political concept, has migrated across the social and disciplinary divides.
In volume 1, which is divided into books 1 and 2, Alexander begins with a review of mind, analysing the experience of experience itself, and concludes that minds and external things are co-ordinate members of a world. The analysis leads to the suggestion that space and time may, in a strange way, be the foundation of all being. In book 1, ‘Space-Time’, and book 2, ‘The Categories’, Alexander examines in detail the relation between space and time and thereafter focuses on the categories.
In volume 2, containing book 3, ‘The Order and Problems of Empirical Existence’, and book 4, ‘Deity’, Alexander conducts a philosophical investigation of various types of existents, expounds their relations to one another within space and time, and finally discusses the nature of deity.
Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, one of the foremost aristocratic gentleman academics of the early twentieth century, delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews in 1960 and 1961. Runciman used his extensive wealth and contact to spend time within archives across Europe, and his gift for languages ensured he brought a wealth of material into English across his long career. The book here is a split volume collecting the Gifford Lectures he delivered as well as the 1966 Birkbeck Lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 1966.
Reviewing Tillich in terms of content and execution is an exercise in repetition. As one of the foremost theologians of his generation, his work has been analyzed and applied in a variety of contexts and to a variety of ends. Here, I will address the major functions of the first volume of his Systematic Theology as an enduring text by way of four commonly referenced themes: 1) the form and function of apologetics, 2) the idea of God as the Ground of Being, 3) the concept of Faith as “Ultimate Concern” and 4) the face and means of theology.
The seemingly intractable conflict between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ is one of the best-known cultural narratives in the contemporary West. In this account of his 2011 Gifford Lectures, however, Peter Harrison convincingly exposes it as a myth.
Theism and Humanism is the first of two courses of Gifford Lectures delivered by Arthur Balfour at the University of Glasgow. The printed volume represents an expanded and slightly modified form of the original lectures, which per Balfour’s customary style were delivered extempore. In the book, the ten lectures are spread over four main parts.
Theism and Thought is based upon Balfour’s second course of Gifford Lectures given in 1922–23, and is the conclusion of an argument started nine years prior in his first course given in 1914 (published as the volume Theism and Humanism). Balfour had intended to present his second course in closer proximity to the first course, but was prevented from doing so by his involvement in the war effort as the First Lord of the Admiralty.
Arthur Peacocke’s Gifford Lectures, (published here as part three of the book as a whole) represent a hugely successful attempt to reframe the debate between science and theology away from old-fashioned antagonisms and towards a more open conversation. The expanded edition, which in three parts could easily have been a trio of monographs or books rather than one book, deepens the content of the lectures to make this a remarkable and impressive volume that highlights Peacocke’s importance as a scientist and theologian.
Having discussed, in historical and philosophical light, mankind’s discovery of the objective Infinite in nature, i.e., God, Creator (in Physical Religion), and the discovery of the subjective Infinite in man, i.e., the soul (in Anthropological Religion), Müller’s final course of lectures, delivered under the title Theosophy, or Psychological Religion, treats mankind’s discovery of the oneness of the objective God and the subjective soul which, according to the author, ‘forms the final consummation of all religion and all philosophy&rs
Christina Larner’s small—and sadly rare—volume of collected lectures, originally delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1982 form a fascinating exposition of the link between sociology and natural theology as well as introducing the sociology of religion more generally.
In Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a detailed analysis of the epistemology of Thomas Reid, the famous Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, against the backdrop of his own context and modern epistemological theory. In it he seeks to explain why Reid has so often been misunderstood and neglected by philosophers and what it is that lies at the heart of his epistemology.
This short series of Gifford Lectures from veteran analytic British philosopher Michael Dummett is both an excellent introduction to Dummett’s own work as well as an entry level work on some of the main concerns of British philosophy within the analytic tradition – particularly reflecting the turn away from a focus on philosophy of language and towards metaphysics. Written in Dummett’s typically clear and precise style, the book consists of eight chapters, splitting the four lectures in two.
In The Transcendence of the Cave, John Niemeyer Findlay continues the project he embarked upon in The Discipline of the Cave. Having already investigated the realm of bodies and the realm of minds, Findlay opens this series of lectures with a consideration of the realm of reason and spirit. The first lecture, ‘Foundations of the Realm of Reason and Spirit’, reviews the material covered in the previous series of lectures.
In Upheavals of Thought Martha Nussbaum mounts an elegant and exhaustive defence of the role and centrality of emotion to human experience and ethics. In a work that manages to synthesize both literature and philosophy, without reducing either to a tool of the other discourse, Nussbaum makes the argument that any proper theory of ethics must have a substantive account of the role and function of emotion in cognition.
