Religious Experience without Belief? Toward an Imaginative Account of Religious Engagement

It is commonly supposed that a certain kind of belief is necessary for religious experience. Yet it is not clear that this must be so. In this article, I defend the possibility that a subject could have a genuine emotional religious experience without thereby necessarily believing that the purported object of her experience corresponds to reality and/or is the cause of her experience. Imaginative engagement, I argue, may evoke emotional religious experiences that may be said to be both genuine and appropriate, despite not necessarily including beliefs of the aforementioned kind.I go on to maintain that such religious engagement is compatible not only with non-belief but also with disbelief

Two-hadron single target-spin asymmetries: first measurement by HERMES

Single target-spin asymmetries in semi-inclusive two-pion production were measured for the first time by the HERMES experiment, using a longitudinally polarized deuterium target. These asymmetries relate to the unknown transversity distribution function $h_1(x)$ through, also unknown, interference fragmentation functions. The presented results are compared with a model for the dependence of one of these interference fragmentation functions on the invariant mass of the pion pair.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contribution to the proceedings for the 16th international spin physics symposium (SPIN'2004

Geochemical reactivity of subsurface sediments as potential buffer to anthropogenic inputs: a strategy for regional characterization in the Netherlands

Geochemical reactivity of subsurface sediments as potential buffer to anthropogenic inputs: a strategy for regional characterization in the Netherland

Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen '(Nicht-)Metaphysik' der Religion: (Anti-)Realismus, (Non-)Kognitivismus und die religiöse Imagination

In this chapter, I first explore the possible meanings of the expression 'non-metaphysical religion' and its relation to the realism and cognitivism debates (as well as these debates' relation to each other). I then sketch out and defend the germs of an alternative semantics for religious language that I call 'religious imaginativism'. This semantics attempts to move us away from the realism-antirealism debates in Philosophy of Religion and in this sense might count as 'non-metaphysical'. At the same time, it allows that religious utterances may be truth-evaluable. This creates space for a "theism with God" (and for a "God of theism") without being running into the problems confronted by more metaphysical approaches

Sich in die eigene Tasche lügen? Selbsttäuschung als irrationales Projekt

This article for the PHILOKLES Journal for Popular Philosophy surveys a few common theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of self-deception before putting forward a thus far relatively unexplored intentionalist option, namely what the author calls the "project model of self-deception". On this model, self-deception is understood as a dynamic, diachronic activity, aimed at the preservation of a certain self-image, to which an agent is implicitly committed. The author shows how this model can make subjects responsible for their self-deceptions without running straightforwardly into the so-called "paradoxes" of self-deception

Contested modernity:Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt and the German Secularization Debate

This dissertation investigates the debate between Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt on the issue of ‘secularization’ and the problematic place of religion in modernity. Besides reconstructing their philosophical positions, this study also analyzes and evaluates the significance of their contributions in the historical development of the broader German secularization debate. It explores how ‘secularization’ functioned as a key concept in the German societal-intellectual discourse from the 1950s to the 1980s and how their accounts were involved in a grand intellectual struggle to either ‘re-root’ modern society in a religious past or to break free’ from past traditions. As it traces the development of the German secularization debate, this study also focusses on how, after the turbulent year of 1968, this discourse became more overtly political, centering now on Schmitt’s notion of political theology. The political-theological stage of the secularization debate will be exemplified in this investigation by an analysis of the dispute between Jacob Taubes and Odo Marquard. Finally, this study also aims to reflect on the philosophical significance of the contributions of these protagonists for any kind of theorizing on the issue of secularization and modernity. It does so by examining parallels between the German secularization debate and the more recent discourse of postsecularism, and by reflecting on what contemporary (post)secularization theories might gain from knowledge of this German debate