God and Cosmos in Stoicism

Adam Smith's Stoicism and Self-command

With different nuances, the Stoics’ influence on Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment is generally taken for granted. The many references to the Stoics, mainly in Smith’s TMS, and the importance of this classical tradition within the Scottish Enlightenment, have led scholars to acknowledge this apparently obvious influence. However, this influence is at times more elusive than obvious. If ...

In Matters of Faith: Christianity vs. Stoicism

God Knows (But does God Believe?)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (forthcoming) report that a non trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, ...

God, Love, and Interreligious Dialogue

The monotheistic religions that valorize love typically believe that their love for God should be extended to God's creatures and, in particular, to one's fellow human beings. Yet, in practice, the love of the Christian or Muslim or Hindu monotheist doesn't always extend to the love of the religious other. Precisely how, then, should the adherents of the major monotheistic religions respond to ...

Cosmos and Its Furniture

In this note I shall continue the study of the geometry of the moduli-space of pairs of points in 3 dimensions. I show that this space, H̃, is the base space of a canonical family of associative k -algebras in dimension 4. The study of the corresponding family of derivations leads to a natural way of introducing an action of the gauge Lie algebras of the Standard Model, in H̃. The results fit wel...