Playing the God game: the perils of religious fictionalism

To what extend can someone who treat religious discourse as fictional discourse live a religious life, that is, one that is informed by that discourse? To what extent can they be integrated into a religious community in which the realist approach is dominant, or at least significantly represented? This paper explores both the possibilities and limitations, of religious fictionalism, and compares it with other non-realist approaches. Finally, a certain kind of agnostic position is presented, one which has something in common with fictionalism, and it is suggested that this latter position may offer the best way of combining religious engagement with a retreat from traditional realism

'Once for all': the tense of the Atonement

Does a proper understanding of the Atonement--the restoration of mankind’s relationship with God as a result of Christ’s sacrifice--require a particular conception of time? It has been suggested that it does, and that the relevant conception is a ‘tensed’ or ‘dynamic’ one, in which distinctions between past, present and future reflect the objective passage of time. This paper examines two arguments that might be given for that contention, and finds that both may be answered by appeal to the asymmetry of causation. The Atonement leaves us free to think of all times as equally real, as traditionally they are for God

The Arrow of Mind

Episodic memory provides a peculiarly intimate kind of access to our experiential past. Does this tell us anything about the nature of time, and in particular the basis of time's direction? This paper will argue that the causal theory of temporal direction enables us to unify a number of the key features of episodic memory: its being about particular past experiences, its reliable representation of experiences as past, and the derivative nature of this kind of access to the past: that is, what the memory is about, and how reliable it is, depends on the content and reliability of the original experience on which the memory is based

Motion and the Futurists: capturing the dynamic sensation

The Italian Futurist painters who were active in the early years of the 20th Century sought to capture in a single image the experience of motion. Could such a project succeed? It might be thought that, insofar as the aim is to depict motion, it is doomed to fail, for (with the possible exception of optical illusions) no static image evokes the experience of movement. But we can discern a number of possible aesthetic projects here, and their chances of success will, in some cases, depend on our favoured account of motion and motion experience. Does Futurism simply reduce the experience of motion to a series of psychological ‘snapshots’, for example? Futurist paintings also provide an intriguing and revelatory case study in which we can examine the nature of depiction, and its connection to artistic realism. We need to supplement accounts of conventional depiction if we are to reconcile the evident non-realist nature of Futurist imagery with the thought that Futurism is somehow true to temporal experience