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Nielsen and Penelhum an agents outside space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John Farlow-King
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of East Alberta

Extract

‘For the inference involved in our knowledge of other minds is not, after all, an inference to them as bodily existences…’ (H. D. Lewis)

In his recent and typically thought-provoking paper, ‘On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism’, Kai Nielsen attacks those who, like Terence Penelhum, believe that ‘there is no good reason to think that we could not, with a little ingenuity, think up some non-theistic statements which would serve, if true, to put some theistic conclusions beyond reason-able doubt’.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

page 79 note 1 Religious Studies, XIV, 2 (1978), pp. 193204Google Scholar. Compare his books Scepticism (London: Macmillan, 1973)Google Scholar, Contemporary Critique of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1971)Google Scholar, also Martin, C. B. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1959)Google Scholar and Flew, A. G. N., God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966).Google Scholar

page 79 note 2 Nielsen, , p. 194, quoting Penelhum's Problems of Religious Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 64Google Scholar. Compare Penelhum's Religion and Rationality (New York: Random House, 1971).Google Scholar

page 79 note 3 Penelhum, Terence, Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 108.Google Scholar

page 79 note 4 Penelhum, , Religion and Rationality, pp. 136–9, etc.Google Scholar; discussion of Hick's views at Problems of Religious Knowledge, pp. 7986, etc.Google Scholar

page 81 note 1 Cf. Penelhum, , Survival and Disembodied Existence, p. 108Google Scholar; King-Farlow, John and Christensen, William N., Faith and the Life of Reason (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), pp. 112–22Google Scholar; Kellenberger, J., Religious Discovery, Faith and Knowledge (New York, 1972), pp. 41, 45, 191 and 193.Google Scholar

page 81 note 2 Lewis, H. D., The Elusive Self (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 256.Google Scholar

page 82 note 1 Some admirable arguments about the ill effects of confusing methods or criteria for verification with the meaning of judgments about personal identity are offered by Swinburne, Richard in The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: O.U.P., 1977), pp. 107–25Google Scholar. I offer further points against Nielsen, and Penelhum, in my Self-Knowledge and Social Relations (New York: Science History Publications, 1978), PP. 5981.Google Scholar