Richard Swinburne’s Concept of Religious Experience. An Analysis and Critique

The so-called ”argument from religious experience’ plays a prominent role in today’s analytical philosophy of religion. It is also of considerable importance to richard Swinburne’s apologetic project. However, rather than joining the polyphonic debate around this argument, the present paper examines the fundamental concept of religious experience. The upshot is that Swinburne neither develops a convincing concept of experience nor explains what makes a religious experience religious. The first section examines some problems resulting mainly from terminology, specifically Swinburne’s use of appear-words as success-verbs. While these problems might be resolved by a recurrence to the observer, the second and third part of our paper present problems not so easily resolved: namely, that Swinburne’s concept of experience as conscious mental events is too broad and inaccurate for its role in the argument given ; and that Swinburne does not even attempt to figure out which features of an experience, when present, turn an experience simpliciter into a distinctly religious experience. Section 4, in conclusion, outlines possible reasons for this unusual and remarkable inaccuracy in conceptualisation

Influence of the enclosed fluid on the flow over a microstructured surface in the Cassie state

Analytical expressions for the flow field as well as for the effective slip length of a shear flow over a surface with periodic rectangular grooves are derived. The primary fluid is in the Cassie state with the grooves being filled with a secondary immiscible fluid. The coupling of both fluids is reflected in a locally varying slip distribution along the fluid-fluid interface, which models the effect of the secondary fluid on the outer flow. The obtained closed-form analytical expressions for the flow field and effective slip length of the primary fluid explicitly contain the influence of the viscosities of the two fluids as well as the magnitude of the local slip, which is a function of the surface geometry. They agree well with results from numerical computations of the full geometry. The analytical expressions allow investigating the influence of the viscous stresses inside the secondary fluid for arbitrary geometries of the rectangular grooves. For classic superhydrophobic surfaces, the deviations in the effective slip length compared to the case of inviscid gas flow are are pointed out. Another important finding with respect to an accurate modeling of flow over microstructured surfaces is that the local slip length of a grooved surface is anisotropic.Comment: submitted to the Journal of Fluid Mechanic

First-principles approach to thin superconducting slabs and heterostructures

We present a fully first-principles method for superconducting thin films. The layer dependent phonon spectrum is calculated to determine the layer dependence of the electron-phonon coupling for such systems, which is coupled to the Kohn-Sham-Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, and it is solved in a parameter free way. The theory is then applied to different surface facets of niobium slabs and to niobium-gold heterostructures. We investigate the dependence of the transition temperature on the thickness of the slabs and the inverse proximity effect observed in thin superconducting heterostructures

Why there is no fact of reason in the Groundwork : three arguments

Endless disagreements as to whether Kant defends this or that particular claim in this or that particular text have accompanied the work of Kant interpretation from the very beginning. Would one have to be regarded as disreputable and ill-disposed to think that these disagreements simply spring from the nature of the texts themselves? I think so. For while we cannot deny that there are different opinions about the question, for example, of whether Kant is already claiming the existence of a “fact of reason” in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GMS) before he explicidy makes this claim in the Critique of Practical Reason (KpV), it would be a genetic fallacy to conclude from this that the question is unanswerable and simply arises from the unfathomable character of the texts

Non-invasive extracellular recordings of electrical activity from whole intact islets of Langerhans and the development of the medium throughput BetaScreen device

Type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a tremendous health problem worldwide. The present work demonstrates that the microelectrode array (MEA) technique is an excellent tool to study in vitro the molecular basis of functional changes in beta-cells during the development of T2DM. I have provided the “proof-of-principle” that electrical activity can be reproducibly recorded using intact single islets and extracellular electrode arrays. The results revealed with the MEA technology are comparable to results obtained with traditional electrophysiological techniques, like e.g. the patch clamp technique or recordings with intracellular electrodes (Pfeiffer et al., 2011). Moreover, I established an in vitro model that allows for the first time long-term investigations of beta-cell function through repetitive electro-physiological recordings of the same culture using the MEA technology (Schönecker et al., 2014). Further, I have shown that the application of oxidative stress which is crucial in the development of T2DM has a strong effect on the electrical behaviour of the single islets in vitro and that a SOD mimetic protects beta-cells against acute oxidative stress demonstrating the central role of SOD as an antioxidant defence mechanism within pancreatic islets (Schönecker et al., 2014). The next fundamental achievement was to show for the first time that the MEA technique allows measurements of electrical activity of islets isolated from human biopsies. Human islets exhibit glucose-dependent electrical activity and the electrical activity was increased by tolbutamide and inhibited by diazoxide. The Na+ channel inhibitor tetrodotoxin markedly reduced electrical activity in hu-man islets, but does not affect electrical activity of mouse islets (Schönecker et al., 2015). Within the scope of the BMBF-program KMU innovative (Biotechnol-gie-BioChance, #0316162B) and in cooperation with the company Multi Channel Systems (MCS) this study presents for the first time the development of the Be-taScreen device which allows to record semi automatically from up to 25 islets simultaneously. Importantly, the throughput of the acute recordings is now in-creased by a factor of 25 and paves the way for pharmaceutical medium-through-put drug screenings. Furthermore, I could show that the BetaScreen device is also suitable to record electrical activity from human islets

The deliverances of warranted Christian belief

After more than 2500 years of philosophy, it is very hard to leave a new and lasting trace in this perennial human enterprise. A pretty sure sign of such a trace is that people begin to wonder what exacdy it is that the philosopher claims. To ask such a question is to do historiography of philosophy; its task is not to figure out whether what is being claimed is true and whether how it is argued for is valid. Rather, the task is to decipher what is being claimed; after all, how are we to say whether a given proposition is true or an argument sound, if we don’t know what the proposition says or the argument is in the first place