Famously, in the Canon of Pure Reason, Kant present a practical argument to the effect that our beliefs in God and immortality are justified. I argue that reading the Critique of Pure Reason as the doctrine of method of metaphysics provides a straightforward explanation of the systematic place of Kant’s practical argument in the Canon. Customarily, the relevance of the Critique for the practical part of metaphysics is restricted to proving the theoretical undecidability of God and immortality, but the Canon clearly goes beyond establishing that. According to its positive task as the doctrine of method of metaphysics, the Critique must establish that metaphysics can achieve ‘architectonic unity’. I argue that showing that this unity is possible for metaphysics requires showing that there is conceptual space for coherently accommodating our commitment towards the existence of God and immortality within it.

This chapter discusses the right to freedom of religion, thought, conscience and belief as it is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. Attention is paid to both the forum internum and the forum externum (religious manifestations). In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

Bolaño may justifiably be considered among the least religious writers in the Spanish language, although not necessarily an antireligious one. Simultaneously, his areligious stance made it possible, even necesssary, for him to write works in which links between religion, literature, and Latin American culture are exposed and subjected to scathing critique. His narrative foregoes the use of religion as an artifice, as a “partial magic” to sacralize both the novel and the nation and endow them with a transcendent aura. However, Bolaño’s “romantic anarchism,” with its cynicism about politics and society in general, is counterbalanced by ethics. Bolaño’s reflections on religion and politics explore the worldly aspect of religion and the role of belief and credulity in politics, but also reflect on the dual religiopolitical aspect of literature itself, which is made particularly visible in and by the profession of literary criticism. In our postmodern age, Bolaño suggests, even as art and religion merge in their discourses, there is a further merger of both art and religion with politics. Contemporary art (including literature, of course) is for Bolaño a potentially perverse fusion of religion’s invocation of belief, politics’s thirst for power, and art’s own inherent powers of deceit and manipulation.

Irrational beliefs are often associated with poor mental health and are seen as costly beliefs that should be eliminated or replaced when possible. Building on decades of empirical research, we argue that irrational beliefs are widespread in human cognition and not confined to people with poor mental health. Moreover, recent philosophical research has emphasized that irrational beliefs can be beneficial to the person holding them, not only psychologically but also epistemically, which suggests that in some cases elimination or replacement is not the most appropriate course of action. The problem emerging is how we decide when an agent’s irrational belief needs to be challenged: in this chapter, we point to the importance of the social context surrounding the agent by discussing one case of everyday confabulation whose effects vary across contexts.

Accounts of religious beliefs are often based on the assumption that these constitute a special domain, with cognitive processes of acquisition and communication that would be different from other domains of belief. Against this, I argue that religious beliefs are only a special class of meta-represented or reflective beliefs. The contents of religious beliefs are not unified, either, as there is a stark contrast between the beliefs conveyed by doctrinal, organized religious traditions and those found in small-scale, pragmatic traditions aimed at palliating misfortune. These conceptual clarifications make it possible to provide a better account of the transmission of religious beliefs and their effects, including their use as coalitional signals.

Whether it concerns moral attitudes across cultures or claims about what people deserve, human rights, in theory and practice, involves beliefs. Yet, inquiries about belief, such as community-wide dispositions toward human rights claims and (more importantly for legal and cultural systems of rights) what it means to support human rights and how that support is increasing worldwide, are often marginalized. That marginalization is due, in part, to the reluctance of some social scientists to consider the concepts of universality or belief, since these have often been considered western concepts that are wrongfully imposed on others. As this chapter shows, however, the prospective universality of human rights, or what advocates typically describe as an overlapping consensus, remains a critical issue in the field. Moreover, skepticism about belief across cultures is usually grounded in misconceptions about the very concept of belief. All of this entails that belief in human rights is an important topic that is open to research in the brain and behavioral sciences. This chapter considers how human rights beliefs relate to the transdisciplinary study of belief and offers opportunities for cross-cultural cognitive science.

Beliefs are, or at least appear to be, integral to cognition and action. Though there are scarcely features of human psychology more intuitive to their bearers, beliefs are surprisingly elusive targets of study. In this chapter, we consider some perennial questions about beliefs and suggest that some clarity might be achieved by viewing beliefs through the lens of cognitive psychology. We discuss psychological findings and evolutionary considerations which seem to imply that the mind is not designed to form true beliefs, but beliefs that are instrumentally useful. This issue is redolent of debates over whether people are rational or irrational and whether beliefs aim at truth or serve other psychological functions. We survey a series of practical tradeoffs and computational constraints that limit the attainment of true beliefs, and which may be responsible for apparent irrationality. Additionally, the origin of false or irrational-seeming beliefs may be inadequately specified by behavioral data, which implies that a deeper understanding of processes and prior knowledge inside the head is essential for a science of beliefs. We conclude by noting that a view of irrational beliefs as the result of prior knowledge, rather than irrational processes, may have optimistic implications for improving people’s beliefs.

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts.

What concept does the word ‘belief’ express, and how does it fit into the Theory of Mind? In its repertoire of syntactic niches (some not noticed in the literature) and in its range from stereotypical to marginal cases, "believe" is quite a typical word. The analysis offered here reveals striking grammatical and semantic parallels to expressions that denote depictions, such as "picture," "map," and "performance." These parallels provide unexpected solutions to classical philosophical puzzles about "belief." The analysis is extended to other propositional attitude predicates, to speech–act predicates, to predicates of actional attitude such as "intend" and "vow," and to commitment to norms of all sorts. These conclusions provide a sense of the richness of folk psychology and of how detailed linguistic analysis can uncover it, presenting challenges for future research.

Beliefs have been studied across disciplines using a variety of approaches. In the human memory literature, expectations and beliefs drawn from prior knowledge are characterized and studied as schematic knowledge. In this chapter, we will discuss the role schematic knowledge plays in guiding the formation and retrieval of memories. A central focus will be placed upon understanding why retrieved memories are biased toward prior beliefs or schematic knowledge. Through a review of computational models and empirical findings, this chapter will convey that even though prior beliefs generate memory biases, these memory biases ultimately maximize the average memory accuracy – giving rise to optimal behavior. In the last section of the chapter, I will connect these modeling frameworks to more recent empirical results on the role of schematic knowledge, identifying potential future directions for updating the models and venues for conducting new experiments.

The accelerating development of technological power over ourselves and our environment raises the stakes of getting our beliefs right. I suggest that we can significantly improve our processes of belief formation by increasing actively open-minded thinking (AOT). Actively open-minded thinking helps us form more accurate and well-rounded beliefs by increasing the depth and – more importantly – the breadth of information search and inference. Because individuals do not always have time for adequate investigation, AOT is also a valuable indicator of which epistemic authorities are most likely to have reached accurate conclusions via effective methods. It is associated with better reasoning across a wide variety of contexts, leading to beliefs that are more accurate, more complete, and less biased. Yet it is not regularly taught in schools, nor is it a feature of typical public discourse. I suggest several strategies for increasing this cognitive habit in school and society.

Chapter 1 introduces the major themes of the book. I argue that the idea of divine revelation does not make much sense in the contemporary world, because it is primarily thought about in terms of beliefs rather than experience. Philosophically, experience is (i) what happens at the point of opening in the world, which is a given instance of life, as well as (ii) conscious reflection on that experience as it is lived. For both senses of the word, using a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology, it is possible to speak of prepredicative experience – that is, what takes place (or 'events') prior to thematisation in language. I argue that it is the prepredicative sense of experience that is engaged in revelation. This is because God cannot be made an 'object' of experience. Now, since in modern life, the word ‘belief’ risks coming to mean simply what is untrue or subjective, it is no longer very helpful in communicating something about God. In contrast, 'the event' can be used to consider the possibility of encountering a God who reveals Godself in person. To conclude the introduction, I set out how my argument about experience and the 'event' is carried through each chapter.