European Journal of Philosophy 

About: European Journal of Philosophy is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Metaphysics & Argument. It has an ISSN identifier of 0966-8373. Over the lifetime, 1225 publications have been published receiving 13945 citations.

Religion in the Public Sphere

Abstract: Religious traditions and communities of faith have gained a new, hitherto unexpected political importance since the epochmaking change of 1989–90. Needless to say, what initially spring to mind are the variants of religious fundamentalism that we face not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Southeast Asia, and in the Indian subcontinent. They often lock into national and ethnic conflicts, and today also form the seedbed for the decentralized form of terrorism that operates globally and is directed against the perceived insults and injuries caused by a superior Western civilization. There are other symptoms, too. For example, in Iran the protest against a corrupt regime set in place and supported by the West has given rise to a veritable rule of priests that serves other movements as a model to follow. In several Muslim countries, and in Israel as well, religious family law is either an alternative or a substitute for secular civil law. And in Afghanistan (and soon in Iraq), the application of a more or less liberal constitution must be limited by its compatibility with the Sharia. Likewise, religious conflicts are squeezing their way into the international arena. The hopes associated with the political agenda of multiple modernities are fueled by the cultural self-confidence of those world religions that to this very day unmistakably shape the physiognomy of the major civilizations. And on the Western side of the fence, the perception of international relations has changed in light of the fears of a ‘clash of civilizations’—‘the axis of evil’ is merely one prominent example of this. Even Western intellectuals, to date self-critical in this regard, are starting to go on the offensive in their response to the image of Occidentalism that the others have of the West. Fundamentalism in other corners of the earth can be construed, among other things, in terms of the long-term impact of violent colonization and failures in decolonization. Under unfavorable circumstances, capitalist modernization penetrating these societies from the outside then triggers social uncertainty and cultural upheavals. On this reading, religious movements process the radical changes in social structure and cultural dissynchronies, which under conditions of an accelerated or failing modernization the individual may experience as a sense of being uprooted. What is more surprising is the political revitalization of religion at the heart of the United States, where the dynamism of modernization unfolds most successfully. Certainly, in Europe ever since the days of the French Revolution we have been aware of the power of a religious form of traditionalism that saw itself as counter-revolutionary. However, this evocation of religion as the

Kant and Nonconceptual Content

Abstract: The informational states which a subject acquires through perception are non-conceptual, or non-conceptualized. Judgements based upon such states necessarily involve conceptualization: in moving from a perceptual experience to a judgement about the world (usually expressible in some verbal form), one will be exercising basic conceptual skills. But this formulation (in terms of moving from an experience to a judgement) must not be allowed to obscure the general picture. Although the judgments are based upon his experience (i.e. upon the unconceptualized information available to to him), his judgements are not about the informational state. The process of conceptualization or judgment takes the subject from his being in one kind of informational state (with a content of a certain kind, namely, non-conceptual content) to his being in another kind of cognitive state (with a content of a different kind, namely, conceptual content). (Evans 1982: 227)

Perception and Content

Abstract: formulation of a truth-evaluable content as that things (or the relevant realm of reality) are (is) thus and so (as opposed to some other way), displays the particular/ general combination. 9 An important line of reply at this point would appeal to the direct presentation in experience of the properties of things out there in the world, as a way to capture the generality in perception. These properties are elements of physical reality, it may be said. Hence their presentation in experience does nothing to threaten the idea of perception as a direct openness to the world. Of course physical objects have all the properties which they have. I deny, though, that these are features of the physical world on a par with the objects themselves which have them, in the way in which this reply requires. Thanks to Tim Crane for this suggestion. Far more is necessary than I can provide here adequately to respond to it. 10 Many thanks to Steve Butterfill, John Campbell, David Charles, Bill Child, Tim Crane, Imogen Dickie, Naomi Eilan, Anil Gupta, Christoph Hoerl, Hemdat Lerman, John McDowell, Jennifer Nagel, Johannes Roessler, Nick Shea, Paul Snowdon, Matt Soteriou, Helen Steward, Charles Travis, Ralph Wedgwood, Michael Williams, and Tim Williamson, for helpful comments on previous versions of this material.