Philosophy

Before I delve into my argument, I would like to stress that I am not a scholar in Jewish Law, nor in Jewish theology (if there is such a thing). I am an analytically minded philosopher with an interest in Judaism, yet my references to Jewish sources are those of a layman. In order to make my point about ineffability, I will refer to a few select Jewish sources only. The fact that the vast body of Jewish literature may hold other cases of ineffability has no relevance for this talk. The goal of this talk is to show a way in which a certain kind of mysterious ineffability can be explained metaphysically, according to the standards of contemporary analytic philosophy. Let me begin the argument by making an initial distinction.

In this paper, I argue that religious belief is epistemically equivalent to mathematical belief. Abstract beliefs don’t fall under ‘naive’, evidence-based analyses of rationality. Rather, their epistemic permissibility depends, I suggest, on four criteria: predict- ability, applicability, consistency, and immediate acceptability of the fundamental axioms. The paper examines to what extent mathematics meets these criteria, juxtaposing the results with the case of religion. My argument is directed against a wide-spread view according to which belief in mathematics is clearly rationally acceptable whereas belief in religion is not. The paper also aims to make some of the implications of contemporary mathematics available to philosophers working in different fields.

In this ambitious and thought-provoking book, Fiona Ellis argues for the stunning claim that there is a way to expand philosophical naturalism in such a way that it becomes compatible with theism, and that this way is, in fact, already implicit in the concept of (a particular version of) naturalism. While naturalism and theism are usually understood as opposing, mutually exclusive views, Ellis shows that we can (and ought to) have it all: 'we should be naturalists' (p. 2) but nevertheless reject the view that 'believers in God are intellectually challenged' (p. 3).

I argue that recent attempts to deflect Access Problems for realism about a priori domains such as mathematics, logic, morality, and modality using arguments from evolution result in two kinds of explanatory overkill: (1) the Access Problem is eliminated for contentious domains, and (2) realist belief becomes viciously immune to arguments from dispensability, and to non-rebutting counter-arguments more generally.

This essay provides an overview of the ways in which contemporary philosophers have tried to make sense of ineffability as encountered in aesthetic contexts. Section 1 sets up the problem of aesthetic ineffability by putting it into historical perspective. Section 2 specifies the kinds of questions that may be raised with regard to aesthetic ineffability, as well as the kinds of answer each one of those questions would require. Section 3 investigates arguments that seek to locate aesthetic ineffability within the object of aesthetic experiences, i.e. within aesthetic content. Section 4 discusses arguments that seek to locate aesthetic ineffability within the subject of aesthetic experience.

According to Aristotle, what distinguishes humans from all other beings is their language – the ability to express and communicate their experiences of the world. However, it seems that there are areas of human reality that words fail to reach. Time and again people have reported experiences so extraordinary that they resist the grasp of language: aesthetic, religious, or drug-induced perceptual experiences are only the most common examples. The goal of this workshop is to explore what lies behind the limits of expression that we encounter in ineffable experiences. Discussing a selection of texts from contemporary analytic philosophy, we will try to find out what the meaning of such experiences consists in; what metaphysical structures underlie them; and what their epistemic implications are.

The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with an alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. However, mathematicians do in fact disagree on fundamental questions, for example on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and some philosophers have argued that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue that pluralist accounts of mathematics render fundamental mathematical disagreements compatible with mathematical realism in a way in which moral disagreements and moral realism are not.

Drawing an analogy between modal structuralism about mathematics and theism, I offer a structuralist account that implicitly defines theism in terms of three basic relations: logical and metaphysical priority, and epistemic superiority. On this view, statements like ‘God is omniscient’ have a hypothetical and a categorical component. The hypothetical component provides a translation pattern according to which statements in theistic language are converted into statements of second-order modal logic. The categorical component asserts the logical possibility of the theism struc- ture on the basis of uncontroversial facts about the physical world. This structuralist reading of theism preserves objective truth-values for theistic statements while remaining neutral on the question of ontology. Thus, it offers a way of understanding theism to which a naturalist cannot object, and it accommodates the fact that religious belief, for many theists, is an essentially relational matter