Mikel Burley

Immortality and Meaning: Reflections on the Makropulos Debate

This article reflects upon the debate, initiated by Bernard Williams in 1973, concerning the desirability of immortality, where the latter expression is taken to mean endless bodily life as a human or humanoid being. Williams contends that it cannot be desirable; others have disputed this contention. I discuss a recent response from Timothy Chappell and attempt to pinpoint the central disagreement between Chappell and Williams. I propose that neither side in the debate has firm grounds for its claims, and then proceed to consider four reasons for suspecting that the whole debate has yet to be placed on a conceptually coherent footing.

Harry Silverstein’s Four‐Dimensionalism and the Purported Evil of Death

Abstract In his article ‘The Evil of Death’ (henceforth: ED) Harry Silverstein argues that a proper refutation of the Epicurean view that death is not an evil requires the adoption of a particular revisionary ontology, which Silverstein, following Quine, calls ‘four‐dimensionalism’.1 In ‘The Evil of Death Revisited’ (henceforth: EDR) Silverstein reaffirms his earlier position and responds to several criticisms, including some targeted at his ontology. There remain, however, serious problems with Silverstein’s argument, and I shall highlight five major ones below. I conclude that Silverstein has not shown that an appeal to four‐dimensionalism facilitates a refutation of Epicurus, although a consideration of some of Silverstein’s points helps to indicate the limited scope of the Epicurean thesis.

The Happy Side of Babel

Philosophers and other scholars of religion are increasingly recognizing that if philosophy of religion is to remain relevant to the study of religion, its scope must be expanded well beyond the confines of a highly intellectualized and abstract “theism.” Means of engendering this expansion include methodological diversification—drawing upon thickly described accounts of religious life such as those afforded by ethnographies and certain narrative artworks. Focusing on the latter, this article engages with the question of whether works of narrative fiction—literary or cinematic—can do philosophy of religion in ways that illuminate what D.Z. Phillips characterizes as the “radical plurality” of contemporary religion. Closely examining the examples of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and especially Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman , my discussion is contextualized within broader debates over whether philosophy’s purpose is to advocate certain religious and moral perspectives or to elucidate those perspectives in more disinterested terms.

Epicurus, Death, and the Wrongness of Killing

Abstract This article questions the assumption, held by several philosophers, that the Epicurean argument for deaths being “nothing to us” must be fallacious since its acceptance would undermine the principle that killing is (in general) wrong. Two possible strategies are considered, which the Epicurean-sympathizer might deploy in order to show that the non-badness of death (for the person who dies) is compatible with killings being wrong. One of these is unsuccessful; the other is more promising. It involves arguing that the wrongness of killing is a “basic moral certainty” and hence requires no underpinning by the judgement that death is bad. Problems for this proposal, and possible responses to those problems, are considered. Though the strategy is not decisive, it is deemed to be one that the Epicurean could plausibly adopt.

A DIALOGUE ON IMMORTALITY

The fictional case of Elina Makropulos has been a focus for philosophical reflections on immortality. Here Mikel Burley presents a conversation between Elina and two imaginary philosophers (some, but not all, of whose views bear a passing resemblance to those of Bernard Williams and John Martin Fischer respectively).

KARMA AND REBIRTH IN THE STREAM OF THOUGHT AND LIFE

This essay explores the concepts of karma and rebirth in the light of some key themes from the later work of Wittgenstein. After clarifying what it means to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” it is considered how certain Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers, notably İlham Dilman and D. Z. Phillips, have sought to recover the meaning of “soul” from metaphysical misappropriations by invoking Wittgenstein’s notion of a “picture” The sort of conceptual recovery involved in this task resembles, in some respects, the “demythologizing” and “psychologizing” approaches of certain interpreters of the doctrine of karma and rebirth, especially within the context of Buddhist studies. Illustrative examples of these approaches are compared and contrasted and discussed in relation to instances of individuals articulating their belief in karma and rebirth. On the basis of this discussion, it is concluded that the interpretive approaches in question fail to account for the sense of individual responsibility for one’s own present circumstances that is central to how talk of karma and rebirth frequently operates “in the stream of thought and life.”

Atheisms and the purification of faith

Philosophers of religion have distinguished between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ atheism. This article considers further conceptions of atheism, especially the idea that atheism can facilitate a faith in God purified of idolatrous assumptions. After introducing Bultmann’s contention that a ‘conscious atheist’ can find something transcendent in the world, this contention is interpreted through reflection on Ricoeur’s claim that the atheisms of Nietzsche and Freud serve to mediate a transition to a purified faith – a faith involving heightened receptivity to agapeic love. The troubling question of what differentiates atheism from belief in God is then discussed in the light of Simone Weil’s meditations on God’s secret presence.

Prioritizing practice in the study of religion: normative and descriptive orientations

ABSTRACT Calls to prioritize practice in the study of religion typically claim that attention to lived practices rather than merely to ‘belief’ is needed if a given religious tradition or instance of religiosity is to be understood. Within that broad ambit, certain empirical researchers, as well as some Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers of religion, investigate the diversity of religious practices without passing judgement, whereas certain other philosophers foreground a narrower selection of examples while deploying moral criteria to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable religion. Characterizing this methodological divergence in terms of descriptive versus normative orientations, the present article argues that while attention to practice is indeed vital, the imposition of normative evaluation is liable to inhibit an appreciation of the radical plurality of religious phenomena.

Conundrums of Buddhist Cosmology and Psychology

Despite the Buddha’s renowned aversion to metaphysical-cum-cosmological speculation, ostensibly cosmological systems have proliferated in Buddhist traditions. Debates persist over how to interpret these systems, a central puzzle being the relation between apparently cosmological and psychological aspects. This article critically analyzes three main interpretive orientations, namely psychologization, literalism, and the one-reality view. After examining a tendency in the third of these to equivocate between talk of two co-referential vocabularies and talk of two corresponding orders , I discuss at length the debate between literalist and psychologizing approaches. The latter emphasize how accounts of “realms of existence” are most cogently read as figurative descriptions of mental states, whereas literalists argue that at least some of the accounts should be understood cosmologically, as descriptions of spatiotemporal regions. Notwithstanding weaknesses in some literalist arguments, the importance to Buddhist soteriology of a conception of rebirth beyond one’s present life counts against psychologizing approaches that either ignore or downplay this importance. Returning to the one-reality view, I develop the idea that it is the existential state being described that constitutes the common factor between “cosmological” and “psychological” passages. Treating the texts in an overly literal-minded manner, I suggest, risks missing these descriptions’ affective and conative significance.

Imagining Philosophy of Religion Differently: Interdisciplinary Wittgensteinian Approaches

Despite a growing interest in philosophy of religion in secondary level education , especially in the United Kingdom, courses at undergraduate level frequently fail to build upon the preliminary understanding that students have gained. A fixation on the evaluation of religious “truth-claims” tends to detract from an appreciation of the variegated nature of religious forms of life and practice , while a limited palette of examples constrains the cross-cultural reach of the subject . After outlining weaknesses in the approach often taken to teaching philosophy of religion , this chapter considers both how increased interdisciplinary engagement can deepen and expand the cultural range of philosophy of religion and how Wittgenstein -inspired modes of investigation can facilitate such interdisciplinarity. The influence of Wittgenstein’s ideas in the study of religion outside philosophy is concisely surveyed, and examples are given from my own teaching of how to integrate Wittgensteinian and interdisciplinary dimensions into an undergraduate course.