51 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Cicero's philosophical dialogue presenting and defending Academic Skepticism — the view that certainty is unattainable and the proper attitude is suspension of judgment (epoché).
Non-dualist school of Hindu philosophy associated with Adi Shankaracharya holding that Brahman — pure consciousness — is the only reality, and that the individual self (Atman) is identical with Brahman.
British-American philosopher and prolific writer who became the primary interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta for mid-20th-century Western audiences — dissolving the Eastern/Western philosophical boundary for a generation of countercultural seekers.
American philosopher who translated Lorenz Puntel's major works into English and collaborated with him on extending the structural ontology to philosophy of religion.
English philosopher who developed a vitalist monadological metaphysics — all things are spirit-matter monads capable of transformation — which influenced Leibniz's concept of monad.
English philosopher (3rd Earl of Shaftesbury) who developed the moral sense — an innate natural capacity for distinguishing virtue from vice analogous to aesthetic taste — and identified virtue with natural affection and harmony.
British deist and freethinker who argued for the necessity of free inquiry in matters of religion and denied libertarian free will.
Yoruba philosophical concept denoting the divine energy, vital force, or power that permeates all things — both natural phenomena and human persons — and is cultivated through ritual, ethical conduct, and communal life.
Dutch philosopher who developed a rigorous geometric metaphysics in which God and Nature are identical — the single infinite substance with infinite attributes — and derived a naturalistic ethics and liberal political theory.
Lorenz Puntel's extension of his structural ontology to the question of God — arguing that the systematic ontological framework implies the reality of an absolute Being.
Czech mathematician, logician, and philosopher who anticipated Frege and Husserl by positing abstract propositions and ideas in themselves (Sätze an sich), independent of any mind.
The ultimate, impersonal reality or ground of being in Hindu philosophy — particularly in Advaita Vedanta, where Brahman is pure undifferentiated consciousness beyond all qualities.
Afro-Brazilian religious tradition derived primarily from Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu traditions, featuring initiation into relationships with orixás (divine forces) and possession rituals.
John Toland's deist manifesto arguing that genuine Christianity contains nothing contrary to or above reason, effectively denying the legitimacy of supernatural mysteries.
Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher who synthesized Greek philosophy for a Latin audience and whose translations and adaptations transmitted Greek philosophical terminology to the Western tradition.
English philosopher and daughter of Ralph Cudworth who was a close associate of John Locke and developed a Lockean rational virtue ethics emphasizing women's education.
American philosopher who developed the intentional stance — attributing beliefs and desires to systems as a predictive strategy — and argued that consciousness, free will, and the self are useful illusions generated by the brain's narrative processing.
Scottish philosopher who pushed empiricism to its skeptical limits, arguing that reason cannot justify belief in causation, induction, the external world, or a persistent self — and developed a sentiment-based moral philosophy.
American metaphysician who has defended presentism and worked on God's relationship to time, material constitution, and persistence through change.
American philosopher who has worked on divine omniscience, foreknowledge, and freedom — arguing for a sophisticated account of how God can know future free actions.
Spanish-American philosopher who developed a naturalistic philosophy combining a robust aesthetic sensibility with skepticism about knowledge — arguing that knowledge rests on 'animal faith' rather than certain foundations.
Israeli-American philosopher who argued for the metaphysical reality of the present moment (the now) and the special status of the future.
German philosopher and mathematician who invented calculus independently, developed monadology — the view that reality consists of simple, immaterial, windowless monads — and argued this is the best of all possible worlds.
British philosopher who has worked on the problem of evil, the moral significance of evolutionary debunking, and population ethics.
English Cambridge Platonist philosopher who developed the concept of the spirit of nature — a lower providential agent in the world — and argued that space is the divine sensorium.
Irish freethinker and deist who argued in Christianity not Mysterious that genuine Christianity contains nothing contrary to reason, effectively reducing revealed religion to natural religion.
German-Swiss philosopher and psychiatrist who developed existential philosophy as a mode of clarifying the conditions of human existence and introduced the concept of the Axial Age — the period of simultaneous spiritual transformation across civilizations.
American philosopher who developed one of the principal versions of epistemic contextualism, arguing that knowledge attributions are context-sensitive in ways that dissolve the skeptical paradox.
American philosopher who has worked on natural law theory, philosophy of information, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Canadian philosopher who has worked on the relationship between God and possible worlds — whether God chose to actualize the best possible world.
American philosopher who has argued for atheism and contributed to the epistemology of religious belief.
Canadian philosopher who has worked on postmodern challenges to Christian apologetics and the epistemology of religious belief.
Buddhist concept of liberation — the cessation of craving, aversion, and ignorance, and the extinction of the conditions that generate suffering and rebirth.
American philosopher and Wittgenstein's closest American disciple who contributed to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion — defending a version of the ontological argument and critiquing the possibility of a private language.
Cicero's dialogue presenting the three major Hellenistic positions on the divine — Epicurean (gods exist but are indifferent), Stoic (divine providence permeates the world), and Academic Skeptic (suspension of judgment).
American metaphysician who developed the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism about free will and an austere ontology of material beings — only simples and organisms, no tables or chairs.
American philosopher who defended the A-theory (tensed) of time and argued that the Big Bang undermines the cosmological argument for God's existence.
Australian philosopher who has contributed to the analysis of the trolley problem and the sorites paradox.
American philosopher who has developed a sophisticated divine command theory of ethics, a modal metaphysics of essences, and contributed to the study of Leibniz.
Afro-Cuban religion (Lucumí, Regla de Ocha) originating among the Yoruba people, syncretizing orishas (divine forces) with Catholic saints, emphasizing divination, initiation, and communal ritual.
Danish philosopher and theologian who developed the existentialist account of authentic selfhood through the three stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious) and attacked the systematic philosophy of Hegel as irrelevant to the individual's infinite passion.
Albert Camus's philosophical concept denoting the confrontation between human beings' drive to find clear meaning and the world's unreasonable silence in response to that demand.
In Neoplatonism, the One is the first hypostasis — the absolute, ineffable source from which all being emanates — beyond all predication, thought, and being itself.
Afro-Caribbean religious tradition originating among Fon and Ewe peoples of West Africa, developed in Haiti, combining African spirit veneration with Catholic elements and emphasizing communal possession rituals.
American Jesuit philosopher who developed a relational Thomism — integrating Aquinas's act-of-being metaphysics with a personalist understanding of being as essentially self-communicating.
American philosopher who developed the evidential problem of evil — the probability argument from evil against theism — and wrote a widely used textbook in philosophy of religion.
Defeating the Evil God Challenge (2023) by Dr. Jack Symes is a philosophical work that engages and attempts to refute Stephen Law's 'Evil God Challenge' — the argument that if the evidential problem of evil defeats belief in an omnibenevolent God, it should equally defeat belief in an omnimalevolent God, symmetrically undermining theism.
Robert Barron is an American Catholic bishop, theologian, and founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, one of the most prominent Catholic new media organizations. He is known for his accessible, intellectually serious engagement with Catholic theology, classical philosophy, and cultural criticism, drawing on figures like Thomas Aquinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and G.K. Chesterton.
The Omega Point is a concept developed by Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955, posthumous) describing the hypothesized end-state of cosmic evolution: a maximum point of complexity and consciousness toward which the entire universe tends. Teilhard saw God — the Omega — as both the source and the final attractor of all evolutionary development. Physicist Frank Tipler later secularized and formalized the concept in cosmological terms.
Daniel Dennett's naturalistic investigation of religion, arguing that religious belief and practice can and should be studied scientifically as evolved phenomena rather than treated as exempt from rational inquiry.
Canadian iconographer and symbolist (born 1978), brother of Jonathan Pageau. Author of The Language of Creation, which develops a systematic theory of biblical symbolic language. Works in the Orthodox Christian iconographic tradition and applies its principles to biblical hermeneutics.