In The Religious Teachers of Greece, James Adam investigates the religious ideas of ancient Greece and the development of such ideas out of the tensions that existed between those Greek philosophers and poets who were responsible for the religious teachings of those times.
This series of lectures, originally delivered at the University of St Andrews by the veteran analytic philosopher Hilary Putnam forms an excellent introduction to Putnam’s overall thought, especially for those not well versed in the analytic tradition. The title here is suggestive, as Putnam frames the lectures as a series of interventions against a number of trends within analytic philosophy that he wishes to contest.
Part I: Twice Twenty Centuries
Lecture 1: Pattern in Blind Alleys
In this series of Gifford Lectures, English philosopher Mary Midgely returns to some of her long—standing preoccupations; namely, the role and function of cultural myths, the proper place for science in public discourse and what might best be described as the necessity for a degree of epistemological humility. Midgely (who passed away recently at the age of 99) was somewhat unfashionable in English philosophy, which was dominated by issues of logical positivism, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age considers in detail the character of the various intellectual and social transformations in the West over the last five hundred years which have led to our current secular age.
Given the radical upheavals of the French revolution, the Enlightenment and the rise to prominence of philosophers and scientists a somewhat naïve view on history would be surprised to see religion still an issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Nietzsche to Marx to Darwin it would seem that the mind of the nineteenth century has no need for religion at all. Thankfully, Owen Chadwick’s fascinating and exhaustive piece of historical scholarship provides no such naivety.
Chapter 1 begins with a multi-disciplinary look at Western understandings of the nature of vision. Here, Pattison suggests that “vision and sight have become reified and separated off from the other senses. (p.
Macmurray’s primary criticism of the Western philosophical tradition is that it begins from a theoretical, rather from than a practical, standpoint. In The Self as Agent, he critiques and corrects Descartes’ ‘I think’ with the ‘I do’, a construction of the Self existing first and foremost as an agent of action in the world. In chapter 1, ‘The Crisis of the Personal’, he expresses his concern that philosophy’s emphasis on objectivity necessarily results in an atheistic approach.
The nature of knowing God Dr. Baillie describes as "a sense of the presence of God." He develops the subject touched upon over twenty years ago in "Our Knowledge of God" by taking account of the logical positivist, linguistic analytic and existentialist movements in philosophy as well as of the great names of Tillich, Barth, Bultmann and Kraemer. The quite fundamental issues which the discussion raises for philosophy and theology as well as for personal faith are treated here with all Dr.
This series of Gifford Lectures, from noted expert on the history of Scottish philosophy Alexander Broadie, is a short but hugely accessible introduction to the theological and philosophical history of pre-Reformation Scotland. What is particularly impressive, given the brevity of the volume, is the overall focus on the philosophical nature of the work produced by early Scottish writers. Here, Broadie emphasizes the ways in which faith and reason are entirely complimentary and that, in fact, it was only through faith that philosophical reasoning could occur.
In Shadows of the Mind, Roger Penrose explores the relation between consciousness and the current state of our scientific explanation of it. Penrose's aim is clear. He argues that the consciousness experienced by human beings is the kind of thing that can be explained by science but, as yet, we do not have the scientific tools to do so.
The product of his 2006 Gifford Lectures, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Silence takes a cross-section of Christian history, examining the theme of “silence” as a moral and spiritual act. Silence here stands in a dialectical relationship with “speech”, and acquires a wide range of different meanings and applications.
The Gifford Lectures delivered by Gregory Vlastos in 1981 at the University of St Andrews under the title ‘The Philosophy of Socrates’ have never been published in their original form. Many of the chapters in Vlastos’s landmark Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991) and the posthumous collection Socratic Studies (1993) began their life as Gifford lectures, but were subsequently revised. But while we do not have the Vlastos’s Giffords in their original form, we can reasonably claim to have their argument.
