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Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable. Another definition provided is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist."
Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing. Existence is often contrasted with essence: the essence of an entity are its essential features or qualities, which can be understood even if one does not know whether the entity exists.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality. This includes studies of the first principles of: being or existence, identity, change, consciousness, space and time, necessity, actuality, and possibility. It can also include questions about the existence of God, as well as relationships between foundational philosophical ideas such as between mind and matter, cause and effect, substance and attribute, or potentiality and actuality.
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms. He raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Platonic Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism.
Skepticism, also spelled scepticism in British English, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the person doubts that these claims are accurate. In such cases, skeptics normally recommend not disbelief but suspension of belief, i.e. maintaining a neutral attitude that neither affirms nor denies the claim. This attitude is often motivated by the impression that the available evidence is insufficient to support the claim. Formally, skepticism is a topic of interest in philosophy, particularly epistemology.
Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art (1938) and the posthumously published The Idea of History (1946).
In metaphysics, the distinction between abstract and concrete refers to a divide between two types of entities. Many philosophers hold that this difference has fundamental metaphysical significance. Examples of concrete objects include plants, human beings and planets while things like numbers, sets and propositions are abstract objects. There is no general consensus as to what the characteristic marks of concreteness and abstractness are. Popular suggestions include defining the distinction in terms of the difference between (1) existence inside or outside space-time, (2) having causes and effects or not, (3) having contingent or necessary existence, (4) being particular or universal and (5) belonging to either the physical or the mental realm or to neither. Despite this diversity of views, there is broad agreement concerning most objects as to whether they are abstract or concrete. So under most interpretations, all these views would agree that, for example, plants are concrete objects while numbers are abstract objects.
"The Unreality of Time" is the best-known philosophical work of the Cambridge idealist J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925). In the argument, first published as a journal article in Mind in 1908, McTaggart argues that time is unreal because our descriptions of time are either contradictory, circular, or insufficient. A slightly different version of the argument appeared in 1927 as one of the chapters in the second volume of McTaggart's greatest work, The Nature of Existence.
Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical basis for science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, metaphysical naturalism rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.
In Hinduism, the concept of God varies in its diverse religio-philosophical traditions. Hinduism comprises a wide range of beliefs about God and Divinity, such as henotheism, monotheism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism, pandeism, monism, agnosticism, atheism, and nontheism.
William F. Vallicella is an American philosopher.
Stephen Dean Mumford is a British philosopher, who is currently Head of Department and Professor of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. Mumford is best known for his work in metaphysics on dispositions and laws, but has also made contributions in the philosophy of sport.
Philosophy is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions.
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.
Agnostic atheism or atheistic agnosticism is a philosophical position that encompasses both atheism and agnosticism. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do not hold a belief in the existence of any deity and are agnostic because they claim that the existence of a divine entity or entities is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact.
Michael Cannon Rea is an American analytic philosopher and, since 2017, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He delivered the 2017 Gifford Lecture on divine hiddenness.
Tim William Eric Maudlin is an American philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic.
Relations are ways in which several entities stand to each other. They usually connect distinct entities but some associate an entity with itself. The adicity of a relation is the number of entities it connects. The direction of a relation is the order in which the elements are related to each other. The converse of a relation carries the same information and has the opposite direction, like the contrast between "two is less than five" and "five is greater than two". Both relations and properties express features in reality with a key difference being that relations apply to several entities while properties belong to a single entity.
John L. Schellenberg is a Canadian philosopher, best known for his work in philosophy of religion. He has earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Cornell University. He specializes in free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and the work of Immanuel Kant.
References
- ↑ "Robin Le Poidevin (University of Leeds) - PhilPeople". philpeople.org. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
- ↑ "Cambridge University Reporter Special". www.admin.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
- ↑ University, Durham. "Alan Richardson Fellowship - Durham University". www.durham.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
- ↑ "Editorial board". Cambridge Core. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
- ↑ "Committee - The British Society for the Philosophy of Religion". www.thebspr.org. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
- ↑ Le Poidevin, Robin (28 October 2010). Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957526-8.
- ↑ Le Poidevin, Robin (2019). Religious Fictionalism. Elements in the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-45747-7.
- ↑ Poidevin, Robin Le; Poidevin, Robin Le (22 October 2009). The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957551-0.
- ↑ "The Experience and Perception of Time". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2019.
- ↑ The Rowman and Littlefield Handbook of Philosophy and Religion.
