What is the traditional relation of religion to politics in India? Recent scholarly debate has generated at least two divergent answers. According to one view there is a long standing traditional opposition between religion and politics in India because its highest value (moksa) is renunciatory and asocial. According to another view a separation of religion from politics is contrary to Indian ways of thinking and the present currency of such a picture is the product of various colonialist strategies.

I want to address the question from the perspective of classical Indian philosophy. To be able do so, however, I shall also need to utilize some work in Western philosophy. In particular, I need to say something about the crucial terms ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and their relevance to the classical Indian tradition. My theoretical approach will be influenced by Western philosophy but my historical focus will be on the Sanskrit philosophical tradition. In this sense there are two distinct philosophical perspectives offered here.

Our Western society has been much shaped by scientific thought and discoveries. We not only depend practically on science in our ways of living. Our thinking and attitudes are also shaped by the theories and methods of science. The overwhelming intellectual and practical successes of science that lie behind this impact of science on our culture have led some people to think that there are no real limits to the competence of science, no limits to what can be achieved in the name of science. Or, if there are limits to the scientific enterprise, the idea is that science, at least, sets the boundaries for what we humans can ever achieve or know about reality. There is nothing outside the domain of science, nor is there any area of human life to which science cannot successfully be applied. This view (or similar views) has sometimes been called scientism. (It has also been labelled scientific naturalism or scientific materialism. I will, however, try to show why we should not attribute the same meaning to these three terms.)

In this essay I analyse and criticize George Lindbeck's treatment of truthand meaning in his book The Nature of Doctrine. After an explication of his general project in this work, I turn specifically to his discussion of truth and of its interaction with his understanding of meaning. Although he is primarily concerned with these issues as they relate to religious doctrines and language, he insists that the distinctions he makes are not religiously derived. Rather, he borrows and adapts widely from philosophy, anthropology and social theory, bringing the insights adopted to bear on the issues of religion generally, and the development and change of religious doctrines in particular.

I argue that his treatment of truth and meaning is very problematic on several counts: on truth, his theory fails as an adequate theoretical description of our pretheoretic intuition of truth, and it is finally parasitic on this intuition. On meaning, his reduction of meaning (and sometimes truth) to use or usefulness leads him to an incorrect categorization of doctrines as (essentially) performative utterances and second-order, non-assertive discourse, rather than as propositional attitude statements. I contend that they most properly fit in the latter category. Finally, I suggest the inadequacy of his treatment of truth and meaning redounds to the failure of his theory of religion and doctrine as a whole.

Anselm begins his famous ontological argument by describing God as the being greater than which none is conceivable. His description seems coherent and intelligible. Consequently a divine being thus described may be spoken of as existing in the understanding. But if so, He must actually exist as well, otherwise a being greater than Him could possibly exist, namely, one of whom the additional great-making-term ‘actual existence’ may also be predicated. The result would be a contradiction, for we would now have to concede, that contrary to our initial claim, the being harbored in our understanding is inferior to the greatest since another being who had actual existence would be greater. To avoid the contradiction we must concede actual existence to the absolutely perfect being.

Opinions differ on the importance of epistemology for Tillich. While Dorothy Emmet suggests that epistemology is in the centre of Tillich's thinking, Henel believes that Tillich did not take any serious interest in epistemology proper. Since Tillich tries to downplay the relevance of epistemological concerns, it would seem that Henel's judgement is closer to the truth. Yet, as a consequence of his German philosophical education, Tillich employs a rather specific notion of ‘epistemology’ which relies heavily on (Marburg Neo-) Kantian usage. But if we utilize a notion of ‘epistemology’ that is not informed by this rather specific philosophical background, as I intend to do, we will come to classify several tenets of the Tillichian approach to be epistemological ones that he himself might not have labelled thus. Given such a notion of ‘epistemology’, epistemological concerns cannot be denied to play an important role in Tillich's approach.

I will proceed in three steps, each representing one section of the paper. First, I will begin with what I call Tillich's attempt to ground the transcendent on the transcendental in his German period. Second, I will demonstrate in which way Tillich's epistemology undergoes changes after his emigration to the U.S., utilizing his ‘critical phenomenology’ as a paradigmatic case. Third, I will provide a critical evaluation of Tillich's epistemology and suggest ways of reconstructing it.

Berkeley's system, whatever may be the right textbook label to apply to it, was plainly a piece of religious apologetics, the outline of a constructive natural theology, of a theistic metaphysic. From the Principles onwards he was fashioning a reasoned case for the existence of God, of a certain kind of God with a certain kind of relation to the world.

Berkeley's introductory remarks to several of his treatises verify Jessop's evaluation. Berkeley saw his task to be the defence of the central tenets of classical theism, achieved through ‘a plain demonstration of the immediate Providence of an all-seeing God, and the natural immortality of the soul...’. At the foundation of this defence, as is well known, lies the metaphysic commonly called ‘immaterialism’, which holds that, contrary to popular belief, physical objects are not enduring material substances, but rather ideas inhering in finite and infinite spirit.

It is undeniable that the influence of Kantian ethics has been monumental in illuminating the significance of persons as free moral agents. By virtue of being bearers of reason and responsibility, a dignity is conferred upon humans on account of their status as unique persons. Kaufman emphasises this point in his recent work, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology in the context of the relationship between individual and collective ethics;

persons – as free and responsible agents and thus in important respects self-determining and with projects of their own – should never be dealt with as mere ‘things’, mere instruments for the purposes of others; they are always entitled to special respect.

Terence Penelhum, Reason and Religious Faith Pp. 166. (Colorado and Cumnor Hill: Westview Press (Focus Series), 1996.) £32.50 hb, £10.95 pb.

A little boy at Sunday School once defined ‘faith’ as ‘believing firmly what you know isn't true’. The religious believer does not normally take himself to be in quite that desperate epistemic plight, even if he accepts Tertullian's motto credo quia absurdum. All the same, an uncomfortable tension is apt to appear between his religious beliefs and their rationality, and his other beliefs and their rationality. Like this: if ‘God exists’ seems or feels true, nonetheless it does not feel true in the same way that ‘There are nine planets in the solar system’ feels true. There are at least five contrasts. First, that there are nine planets in the solar system is not a belief that any sensible person will ever feel great fervour about (outside such improbable scenarios as those where they are struggling to resist being brainwashed by the Flat Earth Society). Second, it is immediately clear how the belief about the planets might be shown to be false. Third, no one is accounted morally praiseworthy for believing that there are nine planets in the solar system; that belief is even epistemically praiseworthy only in a very minimal sense. Nor (fourth) is someone worthy of moral blame, exactly, if they don't believe that there are nine planets – unless perhaps they refuse to believe it in the teeth of clear evidence. By contrast (a fifth point) some have apparently thought that praiseworthiness or importance of believing in God's existence is not only not dependent on the evidence, but actually inversely proportional to it.

I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Dr Chappell for the encomia he has so kindly included in his notice of my book. It was especially kind of him to include them when we appear to disagree so fundamentally on the two issues he has chosen to discuss. First, he does not think, as I do, that the world is religiously ambiguous. Second, he thinks that religious beliefs can be, and are, chosen, and I do not.

Before beginning, I should perhaps say that I do not see the book as an attempt to steer a middle course between literalist and anti-realist extremes. From the outset I assume, with believers and their critics, that faith is, at the core, a matter of having certain beliefs about the cosmos and our relationship to it, and that it is especially controversial because the way in which these beliefs are held by those who have them does not seem to conform to the standards of rationality that both groups agree in applying to other beliefs. I think the words ‘literalist’ and ‘realist’ are appropriate enough to apply to this assumption. I also happen to think that anti-realist philosophers of religion like Cupitt and Phillips have responded to the criticisms that faith has generated by trying to replace its cognitive core of belief by other elements, like serenity or personal liberation, that are in actual faith combined with it. The book presents no arguments for this opinion, but I would be distressed if anything I have said in it savours of an attempt to lean towards an anti-realist view.