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2 results

Reason and Religion
  • Evaluating and Explaining Belief in Gods
  • Herman Philipse
  • Published online:
    21 April 2022
    Print publication:
    28 April 2022
  • Religion is relevant to all of us, whether we are believers or not. This book concerns two interrelated topics. First, how probable is God's existence? Should we not conclude that all divinities are human inventions? Second, what are the mental and social functions of endorsing religious beliefs? The answers to these questions are interdependent. If a religious belief were true, the fact that humans hold it might be explained by describing how its truth was discovered. If all religious beliefs are false, a different explanation is required. In this provocative book Herman Philipse combines philosophical investigations concerning the truth of religious convictions with empirical research on the origins and functions of religious beliefs. Numerous topics are discussed, such as the historical genesis of monotheisms out of polytheisms, how to explain Saul's conversion to Jesus, and whether any apologetic strategy of Christian philosophers is convincing. Universal atheism is the final conclusion.

  • 12 - The Cultural Brain as Historical Artifact

  • from Part II - Applications
  • Edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montréal, Carol M. Worthman, Emory University, Atlanta, Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Robert Lemelson, University of California, Los Angeles, Constance A. Cummings
  • Book:
    Culture, Mind, and Brain
    Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020, pp 367-374

  • Summary

    It has become manifest across the biological sciences that culture is a dynamic component of human brain–body formation and experience. Culture is essential to understanding questions of neuroplasticity, emotional development, interoception, epigenetics, predictive coding, facial recognition, empathy, and so on, yet culture itself is often reduced by those sciences that have come to depend on it. It is "the exterior," or it is "input." The "world," insofar as it introduces contingency to what it is to be human, is not in itself understood as contingent. What happens when culture – both a cause and an effect of human formation – is itself situated, disrupted, historicized? Historians hold the keys to a radical interdisciplinary engagement that complicates the question of culture in ways complementary to the biological disruption of interiority. The cultural brain is an historical artefact. Acknowledging this should change the kinds of questions asked by those who study the brain.