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31 results

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  • What is Wrong with the Recent Semiological Interpretation of Kant’s Religion
  • Lawrence Pasternack
  • Journal: Kantian Review / Volume 27 / Issue 1 / March 2022
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2022, pp. 91-99
  • Print publication: March 2022
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    In this article, I challenge the semiological interpretation of Kant’s Religion, particularly as advanced in recent years by James DiCenso and Allen Wood. As I here argue, their interpretations are neither compatible with broader aspects of Kant’s positive philosophy of religion, nor with how Kant himself describes the project of the Religion. Kant wrote the Religion in order to explore the compatibility between his theologically affirmative pure rational system of religion and Christian doctrines, particularly as understood by the Lutherans and Lutheran Pietists of his era, rather than as a treatise on how to make Christian theology compatible with contemporary secularism.

  • On the Alleged Augustinianism in Kant’s Religion
  • Lawrence Pasternack
  • Journal: Kantian Review / Volume 25 / Issue 1 / March 2020
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2020, pp. 103-124
  • Print publication: March 2020
  • View abstract

    Both critics and defenders of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason have raised worries about its alleged employment of an ‘Augustinian’ conception of moral evil as well as the accounts of grace and moral regeneration consequent to it. Combined, these aspects of the Religion are often seen as responsible for its principal ‘wobble’, ‘conundrum’ or ‘internal contradiction’, and are likewise among the key reasons why the Religion is commonly seen as at odds with the epistemic strictures and moral principles which shape Kant’s broader Critical corpus. It is the purpose of this article to reassess these charges and to show thereby that rather than accepting this alleged Augustinianism, Kant engages with and ultimately rejects its core tenets.

  • 5 - Kant
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book: Ontological Arguments
  • Published online: 01 November 2018
  • Print publication: 08 November 2018, pp 99-120
  • View extract

    Summary

    Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason contains four distinct objections to the Ontological Argument (OA), only one of which contends that existence is not a predicate (E ~ P). After some preliminary discussion of Kant’s treatment of the ens realissimum, this chapter will turn to his four objections to the OA. As will be seen, of Kant’s four objections to the OA, two are based upon an analytic reading of the statement ‘God exists’ while the other two follow a synthetic reading of the statement. Moreover, the first two grant for the sake of argument that existence is a predicate. This will lead us to two related issues: whether Kant’s division between real and logical predicates adequately captures all subject–predicate relations; and whether or not Kant has taken proper account of the difference between the ‘marks’ (Merkmalen) of concepts versus the properties of objects. After some discussion of these issues and their bearing on his famous hundred-dollar example, we will turn to three recent strategies used to defend Kant’s case for (E ~ P). It will be argued that none of these strategies succeeds, and that, in the end, there may be no definite argument for establishing whether or not existence is a predicate.
  • 8 - The Wager as Decision under Ignorance: Decision-Theoretic Responses to the Many-Gods Objection
  • from Part II - Assessment
  • Edited by Paul Bartha, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Lawrence Pasternack, Oklahoma State University
  • Book: Pascal's Wager
  • Published online: 28 September 2018
  • Print publication: 18 October 2018, pp 168-186
  • View extract

    Summary

    In chapter 8, Lawrence Pasternack challenges many of the most common strategies used to defend the Wager against the Many Gods Objection. He worries that these strategies either compromise the status of the Wager as a decision under ignorance or carry over beyond the “cooked-up” hypotheses and “philosopher’s fictions,” which are their intended targets, to atheism as well. As such, Pasternack wonders whether the standard rebuttals to the Many Gods Objection broadly undermine the Wager, for they may have the unintended consequence of not only blocking “cooked-up” hypotheses and “philosopher’s fictions,” but also removing atheism from the decision matrix. Pasternack then suggests an alternative approach which more adequately preserves the Wager as a decision under ignorance. Rather than following the most common strategies against the Many Gods Objection, which draw upon considerations independent of the Wager, Pasternack moves through a series of characteristics already built into the Wager’s decision-theoretic structure, showing how they can be leveraged against an array of “cooked-up” hypotheses and “philosopher’s fictions.”
  • Introduction
  • Edited by Paul Bartha, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Lawrence Pasternack, Oklahoma State University
  • Book: Pascal's Wager
  • Published online: 28 September 2018
  • Print publication: 18 October 2018, pp 1-24
  • View extract

    Summary

    The Introduction begins with a brief outline of Pascal’s Wager and a review of the many reasons why this celebrated argument has enduring importance both to philosophers and to the public at large. These include its significance to the origins of decision theory, its dramatic approach to one of the core issues in Christian theology, and the questions it inspires about prudential and evidential reasoning, infinite utility, and the nature of religious assent. The next two sections provide an overview of standard (finite) decision theory and its extension to a simple version of infinite decision theory, one that plausibly approximates Pascal’s own views and the framework used in most philosophical discussions of Pascal’s Wager. The authors then employ this framework by presenting (in translation) the main texts of the Pensées in which Pascal develops his Wager argument, together with their decision-theoretic analysis. Following a brief review of major objections to Pascal’s argument, old and new, the Introduction concludes with a full set of summaries for all contributed chapters.
Pascal's Wager
  • Pascal's Wager
  • Edited by Paul Bartha, Lawrence Pasternack
  • Published online: 28 September 2018
  • Print publication: 18 October 2018
  • View description
    In his famous Wager, Blaise Pascal (1623–62) offers the reader an argument that it is rational to strive to believe in God. Philosophical debates about this classic argument have continued until our own times. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of Pascal's Wager, including its theological framework, its place in the history of philosophy, and its importance to contemporary decision theory. The volume starts with a valuable primer on infinity and decision theory for students and non-specialists. A sequence of chapters then examines topics including the Wager's underlying theology, its influence on later philosophical figures, and contemporary analyses of the Wager including Alan Hájek's challenge to its validity, the many gods objection, and the ethics of belief. The final five chapters explore various ways in which the Wager has inspired contemporary decision theory, including questions related to infinite utility, imprecise probabilities, and infinitesimals.

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