Conventional monotheist religious believers commonly believe that God will sometimes assist them, will be on their side. God, in other words, they believe, is an asset. Conceptually an asset is anything (such as a person or an object) that can assist one, something that is prima facie good to possess or to have on one's side, that is likely to or can assist one to make one's life go better, overall. Having assets can have weighty implications, including moral ones. I argue that here the implications are quite surprising, and indeed paradoxical. In particular, the religious will have in certain circumstances good reasons, and sometimes even moral obligations, to give up their interests for those who lack such assets, namely secular non-believers. The claim is not that religious people actually see things in this way but that, normatively, given their beliefs, many of them should, in the sense of the subjective ‘ought’. This can be relevant both in this world and concerning the next. Moreover, in many situations plausible religious replies are not sufficient to block the move. This topic has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been seriously analysed philosophically.

Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) left for posterity an impressive and astonishingly contemporary corpus of philosophical creativity. Not only does it cover numerous topics of theoretical and practical philosophy, from a panentheistic-cosmopolitan point of view, but, in terms of the history of philosophy, it may be seen as one of the first works from a European pen which also appreciates the Indian roots of European thinking in their systematic importance. It combines them with Platonic metaphysics and Kant's transcendental philosophy to form a system of philosophy that is truly intercultural. In what follows, Krause's fundamental argument for panentheism is presented before it is argued that Krause's panentheism entails a cosmopolitan theory of human society according to which it is a postulate of practical reason to realize a cosmopolitan global league of humanity.

I argue that Grim's diagonalization argument against the possibility of omniscience is not sound by arguing that the properties of being a proposition or a truth are not legitimate sortal properties. Thus, the fact that there can be no set corresponding to the extension of these properties does not imply that there is no completed totality of the things possessing it. First, I demonstrate that a correspondence theory of truth implies that propositions are non-linguistic representations of a type that resist determinate and uniform individuation into units and allow for arbitrary division into parts that are also propositions. The property is, therefore, an abstract mass property with no determinate cardinality of individuals that possess it. I then sketch a new theory of omniscience with this as its basis.

According to Carolyne Larrington, legends of the past ‘offer particular kinds of answers – beautiful and mysterious answers. . . – to very large questions through a kind of metaphorical thinking . . . which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what's really important in an unfamiliar light’. The claim that ‘what is really important [is disclosed] by casting it in an unfamiliar light’ I take into a philosophical engagement with the figure of the ghost. Far from being of dubious interest for the philosopher of religion, the continuing fascination with ghosts and hauntings offers promising ground for the discussion of religion, for the study of ghosts holds out the possibility of engaging with the wonder and terror of the human condition. The figure of something that is dead yet alive is a creative representation of the fact that we who are alive are also mortal, destined to die. The resulting confrontation with death arouses anxiety, but also has the potential to enrich life. The wisdom of the ghost thus enables the possibility of returning philosophy of religion to the great themes of human existence – birth, suffering, loss, and death – which provide rich resources for understanding religion and its relation to the experience of being human.

This article addresses the theme of ‘death and immortality’ from the perspective of consciousness, and takes as its starting point a root text of Hindu philosophy, the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. fourth century ce). The text posits a dualist ontology in which consciousness is separate and autonomous from a material reality that includes body and mind. The goal is to be ontologically situated in a ‘pure’ consciousness (non-objective), which signifies existential liberation. There are mundane ways to understand this claim, such as referring to cognitive states that produce affective dissociation, or more radical interpretations, such as a post-death state. This article explores the question of what Sāṃkhya's consciousness is like: it is said to be immortal, plural, individuated, and contentless. What is the motivation for and implication of engagement with a system that describes an existential freedom that may only be known in a dualist reality or after death? And how can Sāṃkhya's concepts be brought into conversation with contemporary investigations into mind–body questions? Sāṃkhya rationality counters the argument of eternal oblivion or of consciousness as an illusion confined to the brain. Yet there are resonances with Chalmers's notion of consciousness as fundamental. This article concludes that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion can be enhanced by adding Sāṃkhya thought to its purview.

‘Listen, I'm against sin. I'll kick it as long as I've got a foot; I'll punch it as long as I've got a fist; I'll butt it as long as I've got a head; and I'll bite it as long as I've got a tooth’ (Billy Sunday). Billy Sunday was a revivalist preacher in the early half of the twentieth century. I take it that Billy's approach to sin will be taken by most to be more theologically acceptable than the following. ‘I figure I'll go for the life of sin, followed by the presto-change-o deathbed repentance’ (Bart Simpson). Bart Simpson is a character in the animated TV Show, The Simpsons. In the vignette from which this quotation of Bart's is abstracted, Bart is actually in conversation with a Billy-Sunday-like preacher. The preacher, on hearing of Bart's theology (Bartian theology, we may call it; not, NB Barthian theology), replies in a slightly stunned way, as if he had never himself considered Bartianism prior to that particular moment, ‘Wow! That is a good angle. . .’ However, he quickly collects himself and adds definitively, ‘But it's not God's angle.’ In this article, I wish to explore Bart's angle; could it, or something like it, after all, be a prudent angle?

Mark Murphy has recently defended a novel account of divine agency on which God would have very minimal requiring reasons and a wide range of merely justified reasons. This account grounds his response to the problem of evil. If God would not have requiring reasons to promote the well-being of creatures, Murphy argues, then the evil we observe would not count as evidence against theism. I argue that Murphy's conclusion, if successful in undermining the problem of evil, also undermines probabilistic arguments for theism. However, there is good reason to resist his conclusion. Even if God does not have requiring reasons, but merely has justifying reasons, to promote creaturely well-being, God may nevertheless have most motivating reason to do so, and this would be enough to predict divine action, at least given Murphy's further assumption that God is perfectly free. It does not follow from the rational permissibility of God's Φ-ing that it is possible for God to Φ.

A meta-theology makes claims about the structure of theological claims: it identifies a single, fundamental claim about God, and shows how other theological claims are derivable from the fundamental claim. In his book Depicting Deity and other articles, Jon Kvanvig has identified three distinct meta-theologies: Creator Theology, Perfect Being Theology, and Worship-worthiness Theology. In this article, we argue that the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna's views about God have the structure of a meta-theology, and that it is distinct from the three projects Kvanvig identifies. This view is Necessary Existent Theology.

I examine two related arguments for the claim that if God is omnipotent, God cannot lack abilities such as the ability to do evil or to act irrationally. Both arguments concern the idea that omnipotence is inconsistent with being dominated with respect to abilities. I raise new issues in the formulation of such dominance principles about ability, and attempt to solve them. I also discuss and reject existing objections to these arguments. I conclude that these arguments are promising but not conclusive, and that important work remains to be done in formulating the relevant dominance principles.

According to Jeff Speaks, one sort of perfect being theology takes its rise from a description of God as the greatest conceivable being. Speaks offers two problems for this project. One is finding a suitable sense of ‘conceivable’. The other concerns what he calls ‘troublemakers’, attributes that seem to show that God cannot be the greatest conceivable being. Speaks brings these together in a dilemma.

This article explores the notion of immortality in Jaina philosophy by focusing on the problem of the persistence of the self. It considers the concept of persistence within the broader context of Jaina metaphysics and its specific application to living beings. The article analyses the relationship between the immaterial self and its material body to determine which aspects of living beings can be deemed immortal or persisting beyond death. It also investigates the state of liberation as an immortal condition. Drawing from the Tattvârtha-sūtra and four of its commentaries, the article demonstrates the complexity of the Jaina treatment of the issue of the self's persistence over time and its commitment to the doctrine of non-one-sidedness. It also shows that Jaina philosophers deal with this critical philosophical problem in a way that reflects their engagement with the intellectual debates of their time.

This article explores the structure of cultivated religious experience. For the Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980–1040), the religious experience of the Buddhist yogin (yogipratyakṣa) is not spontaneous or sporadic but must be intentionally and rationally cultivated. I argue that Jñānaśrīmitra's picture parallels certain contemporary constructivist accounts of religious experience, according to which the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the practitioner shape the character of the experience in question. Despite this, however, Jñānaśrīmitra maintains that religious experience is direct, non-conceptual, and ineffable. Even though cultivation begins by focusing on rationally understood, effable conceptual content (the Buddha's teaching of the Four Nobles' Truths, for instance), the yogin's relation to that content is transformed through cultivation (bhāvanā). Cultivation makes awareness-events with conceptual content vivid (spaṣṭa) in such a way that they lose their conceptual character, coming to affect the practitioner's mind as if they were external to it. In this way, precisely in virtue of beginning the process of cultivation with certain expectations about the Buddha's teaching, Buddhist yogins come to have a direct and non-conceptual experience of the breakdown of their own mental streams and the dissolution of the sense of self.

When we encounter a disagreeing interlocutor in the weighty domains of religion, philosophy, and politics, what is the rational response to the disagreement? I argue that the rational response is to proportion the degree to which you give weight to the opinion of a disagreeing interlocutor to the degree to which you and your interlocutor share relevant beliefs. I begin with Richard Fumerton's three conditions under which we can rationally give no weight to the opinions of a disagreeing peer. I argue that his conditions are incomplete; I propose a fourth condition that maintains that disagreeing interlocutors (whether they are peers or not) need not give weight to each other's opinions when the interlocutors do not share rationally held relevant beliefs. By contrast, when rationally held relevant beliefs are shared, rationality demands that we re-evaluate and even moderate or change beliefs in the face of disagreement. I then defend my condition against two objections. First, I argue that the condition does not entail a coherence theory of justification. Second, I consider the charge that my condition recommends operating within an epistemic bubble.

In this article I show how David Hume's works provide the ingredients for a conception of religiosity understood as a feeling of wonder concerning nature or existence, accompanied by a playful attitude regarding the imaginative shapes that can be given to this emotion. Hume serves as an inspiration rather than an object of study: I respect the spirit and values of his work, while going beyond his own explicit points. My reading accounts for Hume's aversion to traditional religions (‘superstition’), and for his acknowledgement of the universal attraction of the idea of invisible intelligent power and his own fascination with it. I argue first that superstition is a natural reaction to existential uncertainty. Second, I argue that uncertainty fuels activity, creativity and morality, and thus may be left untended. Though it always involves a measure of pain, too, human happiness is found in challenge and activity. Traditional monotheist religions respond to this need by generating experiences of wonder, thus, however, stimulating passive devotion and dogmatism. Opposing this, the suggestion of Hume's works is to respect the mystery of nature rather than shrouding it in unfounded convictions. The fictional character Philo illustrates how the longing for an answer by is itself can already be a profoundly religious feeling. Hume's descriptions of ancient polytheism and Philo show how this can be accompanied by a playful, imaginative interaction with the world.

The Buddhist doctrine of transmigration (saṃsāra) offers a coherent model of a cycle of existence wherein a sentient being continues throughout life, survives death, traverses the afterlife, and is, sooner or later, reborn, thus inaugurating another lifecycle as a new life-form. The Buddhist tenets of no-self (anātman) and impermanence, however, deny the possibility of a self, soul, or any form of spiritual substance that persists throughout the cycle of transmigration. This article examines the argumentation developed by the Indic Buddhist philosopher, Saṅghabhadra (fl. fifth- century ce), as part of his effort to reconcile the doctrines of no-self and karmic continuity. In his *Nyāyānusāraśāstra and the *Samayapradīpikāśāstra, two seminal, yet vastly understudied, doctrinal treatises of Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma Buddhism that survive only within the translation corpus of the Sinitic scholar-monk Xuanzang (602?–664 ce), Saṅghabhadra defines the antarābhava, the ‘intermediate state of existence’, as the interstitial space and interim time-period existing between the locus wherein the sequentially reproducing psychic constituents of an individual sentient being, including consciousness, desert the no-longer viable body at the moment of biological death, and the locus wherein these psychic constituents become associated with a new gross physical body in the form of a new viable embryo at the moment of rebirth. By instantiating the antarābhava as an actual interval with real extension in space and time, necessarily traversed by the vast majority of sentient beings after dying in order to reach the next gross physical body, Saṅghabhadra provides, for Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma Buddhism, a rigorous account for how karma is transmitted, via the psychic constituents of a sentient being, beyond biological death into future lives, as well as future afterlives.

Materialists about human persons say that we are, and must be, wholly material beings. Substance dualists say that we are, and must be, wholly immaterial. In this article, I take issue with the ‘and must be’ bits. Both materialists and substance dualists would do well to reject modal extensions of their views and instead opt for contingent doctrines, or doctrines that are silent about those modal extensions. Or so I argue.

Religious expressivism is the view that religious sentences, like ‘God is all-loving’ and ‘God offers us the gift of salvation’, are devoid of cognitive meaning. Such sentences are not truth-evaluable: they cannot be judged as true or false. In Religious Language, Michael Scott asked what explains the seeming logical behaviour of religious sentences if they are not truth-evaluable, as religious expressivists claim. In particular, religious expressivists need to explain (i) how a given religious sentence and its negation seem inconsistent and (ii) how religious sentences could figure in logically valid arguments. In this article, I develop a version of Weak Kleene semantics that could address these two ‘logic’ challenges.

There exists wide methodological diversity in philosophy of religion and many of the ways of responding to it are inadequate. This article argues that resources from virtue epistemology can help respond better, specifically connecting the issue to the notion of wisdom. A framework for this is articulated and then applied to Aquinas and Wittgenstein, chosen as utilizing starkly different methodologies in dealing with problems from philosophy of religion.