Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The objective accent falls on what is said, the subjective accent on how it is said … Objectively the interest is focussed merely on the thought-content, subjectively on the inwardness. At its maximum this inward ‘how’ is the passion of the infinite, and the passion of the infinite is the truth. But the passion of the infinite is precisely subjectivity, and thus subjectivity becomes the truth.
Why consider the significance of the emotions in religious contexts? In the course of this book, I hope to provide quite a number of reasons for doing so, by showing how the landscape of philosophical theology and philosophy of religion looks rather different from the perspective of a reconceived theory of emotion. But even casual reflection will reveal that arguments about the cognitive status of religious belief often turn on some understanding of the significance of the emotions. Here, for example, is John Macquarrie's summing up of a central strand of the naturalistic critique of religious belief in the nineteenth century and later: ‘In the nineteenth century the drift of philosophy had been increasingly in the direction of a mechanistic and materialistic world view, and in England this was powerfully advocated by such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, and, later, Alfred Ayer. The natural sciences were taken to furnish the only basis for assured knowledge, and anything that smacked of religion or mysticism was treated as non-cognitive and banished to the region of “mere emotion”.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emotional Experience and Religious UnderstandingIntegrating Perception, Conception and Feeling, pp. ix - xiiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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