Professor John Cottingham
John Cottingham is the sort of professor our Heythrop lecturers get excited about, and not without good reason. His research interests include Heythrop friendly topics such as the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, in particular the relation between reason and the emotions; he is also a dab hand at Descartes (he wrote the Cambridge Companion), and of late has turned his attention to the meaning of life - a question many professors shy away from for fear of cliché.
Talk Abstract:
"Much contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, impressive in quality though much of it undoubtedly is, risks loosing sight of the nature of its subject matter, by construing religious belief as a hypothesis, to be assessed and evaluated in purely rational terms. Richard Dawkins, the current self-appointed scourge of theism, constantly speaks of the God-hypothesis, as if religious belief was just like another scientific theory. Richard Swinburne, perhaps our leading analytic philosophical defender of theism, is an ideal foil for Dawkins, since he too construes valid belief in God as hinging on the probability of the evidence. Both positions, I believe, are seriously flawed. In this paper, I want to look at three philosophical approaches which seem to me to give a better account of the nature of religious belief than much of the work found in the analytic tradition. I begin with Pascal, then move on to various writers in the mystical and apophatic traditions. Finally, I say something about Wittgenstein, whose views on religion I think are often misinterpreted, but who seems to me to offer, once the misinterpretations are cleared away, a highly persuasive picture of the nature and genesis of religious belief."
Medals:
John Cottingham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, where he holds an Established Chair of Philosophy and is Departmental Director of Research. He is also an Honorary Fellow of St†Johnís College, Oxford. He is (since 1993) Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy. In 2002-4 he was Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University. He is currently Director of a three-year research project on Impartiality and Partiality in Ethics at Reading University, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council; and he was recently (2007) elected President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. Professor Cottinghamís recent books include Philosophy and the good life: reason and the passions in Greek, Cartesian and psychoanalytic ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998), On the Meaning of Life (Routledge, 2003), and The Spiritual Dimension (CUP, 2005).
Recent work :
The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value
Western Philosophy: An Anthology
Other links of interest :