Christopher J Insole
Biographic Data
| ID | 459772 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher J Insole |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher J |
| FAMILY NAME | Insole |
| SIGNATURE | INSOLE C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Negative Natural Theology: God and the Limits of Reason
How can we live in harmony with the universe, and not just in it? What is it to feel at home in the world? Some thinkers who feel the force of these questions reach for the concept of God. Others do not. This book asks what might be at stake in the choice of whether or not to speak about God: not just in terms of abstract reasoning or arguments about God, but in relation to deeper undercurrents of motivation and yearning. The book is interested i…
A Kantian Response to the Problem of Evil: Living in the Moral World
James Sterba has presented a powerful and existentially sincere form of the problem of evil, arguing that it is logically impossible for God to exist, given that there are powerful moral requirements to prevent evil, where one can, and that these requirements would bind an all-powerful and good God, who would indeed be able to prevent such evil. The ‘Kantian’ argument that I set out, if accepted, would undermine the following stage of Sterba’s ar…
Author’s Reflections on the Responses and Questions from the Book Launch
This is the author’s reflections on formal responses, and a discussion, which took place at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. Topics covered include: the aesthetic properties of Kant’s philosophy, the difference betw…
Conversation between Jennifer Herdt and Christopher Insole
This is a conversation held at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The conversation covers the claim made by Insole that Kant believes in God, but is not a Christian, the way in which reason itself is divine for Kant, …
Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law
The book offers a definitive study of the development of Kant’s conception of the highest good, from his earliest work, to his dying days. It is argued that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western philosophy. Kant is not a Christian, because he cannot accept Christianity’s traditional claims about the relationship between divine action, grace, human freedom, and …
Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion
Kant, Divinity and Autonomy
I suggest that in Kant’s conception of autonomy, we have a faithful variant of a perennial philosophical conception of divinity, distinctively re-configured by Kant’s own preoccupations and system, but still recognisably oriented around some philosophical conceptions of the divine, which have their origins in deep classical wells, with dreams and memories of thought-thinking-itself, and joyously diffusing itself, generating plenitude and harmony.…
A Thomistic Reading of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Searching for the Unconditioned
Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem
Kant actively struggles with the problem of how to conceive of God’s creative action in relation to human freedom. Kant comes to the view that human freedom can only be protected if God withdraws in certain ways from the created world. The two pillars of Kant’s mature philosophy—transcendental idealism and freedom—are in part shaped and motivated by Kant’s need to provide a solution to his theological problem. The medieval and early modern theolo…
Intellectualism, Relational Properties and the Divine Mind in Kant's Pre-Critical Philosophy
I demonstrate that the pre-Critical Kant is essentialist and intellectualist about the relational properties of substances. That is to say, God can choose whether or not to create a substance, and whether or not to connect this substance with other substances, so as to create a world: but God cannot choose what the nature of the relational properties is, once the substance is created and connected. The divine will is constrained by the essences o…
Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Freedom and the Divine Mind 1
Without denying the importance of a range of independent epistemic and metaphysical considerations, I argue that there is an irreducibly theological dimension to the emergence of Kant's transcendental idealism. Creative tasks carried out by the divine mind in the pre‐critical works become assigned to the human noumenal mind, which is conceived of as the (created) source of space, time and causation. Kant makes this shift in order to protect the p…
Kant's Transcendental Idealism and Newton's Divine Sensorium
When Kant read Newton (and Clarke) the following conceptual space could have been opened up for him: space is neither a substance nor an accident, but is the way in which objects are present to the (divine) mind. Space is the divine sensorium, the means by which God is present to the creation. That objects have a spatial form occurs insofar as objects are dependent upon and known by (divine) mind. Such a conceptual space, transposed (with some mo…
The Irreducible Importance of Religious Hope in Kant's Conception of the Highest Good
Kant is clear that the concept of the ‘highest good’ involves both a demand, that we follow the moral law, as well as a promise, that happiness will be the outcome of being moral. The latter element of the highest good has troubled commentators, who tend to find it metaphysically extravagant, involving, as it does, belief in God and an afterlife. Furthermore, it seems to threaten the moral purity that Kant demands: that we obey the moral law for …
Two Conceptions of Liberalism: Theology, Creation, and Politics in the Thought of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke 1
Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship …
“Beyond Glass Doors . . . The Sun No Longer Shining”: English Platonism and the Problem of Self‐love in the Literary and Philosophical Work of Iris Murdoch 1
Certain oddities of Iris Murdoch's Platonism have a significance beyond that of being the personal and idiosyncratic opinion of one author, of interest only to Murdoch enthusiasts. First of all, they provide richly suggestive indications of what can happen to Platonism when it is brought into interaction with a mechanical and deterministic model of the physical universe. Secondly, Murdoch's work acts as a particularly perspicuous theological flas…
Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh's Reimagining of Political Space
(2006). Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh's Reimagining of Political Space. Political Theology: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 323-335
Against Radical Orthodoxy: The Dangers of Overcoming Political Liberalism
The article considers the critique of political liberalism offered by the Radical Orthodoxy movement. The first part deals with the claim that the underlying framework for the “secular” human condition ‐which would include political liberalism‐ is ontological violence and ethical nihilism. The second part of the article deals with the charge that liberalism leads to a social atomism and individualism which can be overcome with the help of a parti…
Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God
This paper is a warning‐shot across more sloppy contemporary invocations of an apophatic God. Such apophatic approaches are thought to avoid anthropomorphic projections onto God of parochial and problematic notions of the human subject. Developing an analysis of two views of the human subject given by Charles Taylor, I suggest that modern constructions of the apophatic God look very much like a projection of an intellectually‐compromised and cult…
Why John Hick cannot, and should not, stay out of the jam pot
John Hick uses a distinction between the formal and the substantial properties of the Real an sich , the noumenal God. Hick claims that substantial properties, such as ‘being good’ or ‘being personal’, cannot be ascribed to the Real an sich . On the other hand, according to Hick, formal properties – such as ‘being such that none of our concepts apply’ – can be predicated of the Real an sich . I argue, first of all, that many of the properties Hic…
Seeing off the Local Threat to Irreducible Knowledge by Testimony
I commit myself to the ‘common‐sense restraint’ that testimony is in fact an important source of knowledge. This has the consequence of making the dispute between reductionists and anti‐reductionists a question of the possibility of reducing the epistemic status of testimony to that of other epistemic resources such as perception, memory and inference. I accept arguments (from Coady and Stevenson) against the possibility of global reductionism, b…
Seeing off the Local Threat to Irreducible Knowledge by Testimony
I commit myself to the ‘common‐sense restraint’ that testimony is in fact an important source of knowledge. This has the consequence of making the dispute between reductionists and anti‐reductionists a question of the possibility of reducing the epistemic status of testimony to that of other epistemic resources such as perception, memory and inference. I accept arguments (from Coady and Stevenson) against the possibility of global reductionism, b…
Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem
Kant actively struggles with the problem of how to conceive of God’s creative action in relation to human freedom. Kant comes to the view that human freedom can only be protected if God withdraws in certain ways from the created world. The two pillars of Kant’s mature philosophy—transcendental idealism and freedom—are in part shaped and motivated by Kant’s need to provide a solution to his theological problem. The medieval and early modern theolo…
Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh's Reimagining of Political Space
(2006). Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh's Reimagining of Political Space. Political Theology: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 323-335
Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law
The book offers a definitive study of the development of Kant’s conception of the highest good, from his earliest work, to his dying days. It is argued that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western philosophy. Kant is not a Christian, because he cannot accept Christianity’s traditional claims about the relationship between divine action, grace, human freedom, and …
Kant, Divinity and Autonomy
I suggest that in Kant’s conception of autonomy, we have a faithful variant of a perennial philosophical conception of divinity, distinctively re-configured by Kant’s own preoccupations and system, but still recognisably oriented around some philosophical conceptions of the divine, which have their origins in deep classical wells, with dreams and memories of thought-thinking-itself, and joyously diffusing itself, generating plenitude and harmony.…
Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Freedom and the Divine Mind 1
Without denying the importance of a range of independent epistemic and metaphysical considerations, I argue that there is an irreducibly theological dimension to the emergence of Kant's transcendental idealism. Creative tasks carried out by the divine mind in the pre‐critical works become assigned to the human noumenal mind, which is conceived of as the (created) source of space, time and causation. Kant makes this shift in order to protect the p…
Kant's Transcendental Idealism and Newton's Divine Sensorium
When Kant read Newton (and Clarke) the following conceptual space could have been opened up for him: space is neither a substance nor an accident, but is the way in which objects are present to the (divine) mind. Space is the divine sensorium, the means by which God is present to the creation. That objects have a spatial form occurs insofar as objects are dependent upon and known by (divine) mind. Such a conceptual space, transposed (with some mo…
Why John Hick cannot, and should not, stay out of the jam pot
John Hick uses a distinction between the formal and the substantial properties of the Real an sich , the noumenal God. Hick claims that substantial properties, such as ‘being good’ or ‘being personal’, cannot be ascribed to the Real an sich . On the other hand, according to Hick, formal properties – such as ‘being such that none of our concepts apply’ – can be predicated of the Real an sich . I argue, first of all, that many of the properties Hic…
Seeing off the Local Threat to Irreducible Knowledge by Testimony
I commit myself to the ‘common‐sense restraint’ that testimony is in fact an important source of knowledge. This has the consequence of making the dispute between reductionists and anti‐reductionists a question of the possibility of reducing the epistemic status of testimony to that of other epistemic resources such as perception, memory and inference. I accept arguments (from Coady and Stevenson) against the possibility of global reductionism, b…
Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God
This paper is a warning‐shot across more sloppy contemporary invocations of an apophatic God. Such apophatic approaches are thought to avoid anthropomorphic projections onto God of parochial and problematic notions of the human subject. Developing an analysis of two views of the human subject given by Charles Taylor, I suggest that modern constructions of the apophatic God look very much like a projection of an intellectually‐compromised and cult…
Against Radical Orthodoxy: The Dangers of Overcoming Political Liberalism
The article considers the critique of political liberalism offered by the Radical Orthodoxy movement. The first part deals with the claim that the underlying framework for the “secular” human condition ‐which would include political liberalism‐ is ontological violence and ethical nihilism. The second part of the article deals with the charge that liberalism leads to a social atomism and individualism which can be overcome with the help of a parti…
“Beyond Glass Doors . . . The Sun No Longer Shining”: English Platonism and the Problem of Self‐love in the Literary and Philosophical Work of Iris Murdoch 1
Certain oddities of Iris Murdoch's Platonism have a significance beyond that of being the personal and idiosyncratic opinion of one author, of interest only to Murdoch enthusiasts. First of all, they provide richly suggestive indications of what can happen to Platonism when it is brought into interaction with a mechanical and deterministic model of the physical universe. Secondly, Murdoch's work acts as a particularly perspicuous theological flas…
Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh's Reimagining of Political Space
(2006). Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh's Reimagining of Political Space. Political Theology: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 323-335
The Irreducible Importance of Religious Hope in Kant's Conception of the Highest Good
Kant is clear that the concept of the ‘highest good’ involves both a demand, that we follow the moral law, as well as a promise, that happiness will be the outcome of being moral. The latter element of the highest good has troubled commentators, who tend to find it metaphysically extravagant, involving, as it does, belief in God and an afterlife. Furthermore, it seems to threaten the moral purity that Kant demands: that we obey the moral law for …
Two Conceptions of Liberalism: Theology, Creation, and Politics in the Thought of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke 1
Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship …
Intellectualism, Relational Properties and the Divine Mind in Kant's Pre-Critical Philosophy
I demonstrate that the pre-Critical Kant is essentialist and intellectualist about the relational properties of substances. That is to say, God can choose whether or not to create a substance, and whether or not to connect this substance with other substances, so as to create a world: but God cannot choose what the nature of the relational properties is, once the substance is created and connected. The divine will is constrained by the essences o…
Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Freedom and the Divine Mind 1
Without denying the importance of a range of independent epistemic and metaphysical considerations, I argue that there is an irreducibly theological dimension to the emergence of Kant's transcendental idealism. Creative tasks carried out by the divine mind in the pre‐critical works become assigned to the human noumenal mind, which is conceived of as the (created) source of space, time and causation. Kant makes this shift in order to protect the p…
Kant's Transcendental Idealism and Newton's Divine Sensorium
When Kant read Newton (and Clarke) the following conceptual space could have been opened up for him: space is neither a substance nor an accident, but is the way in which objects are present to the (divine) mind. Space is the divine sensorium, the means by which God is present to the creation. That objects have a spatial form occurs insofar as objects are dependent upon and known by (divine) mind. Such a conceptual space, transposed (with some mo…
Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem
Kant actively struggles with the problem of how to conceive of God’s creative action in relation to human freedom. Kant comes to the view that human freedom can only be protected if God withdraws in certain ways from the created world. The two pillars of Kant’s mature philosophy—transcendental idealism and freedom—are in part shaped and motivated by Kant’s need to provide a solution to his theological problem. The medieval and early modern theolo…
A Thomistic Reading of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Searching for the Unconditioned
Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion
Kant, Divinity and Autonomy
I suggest that in Kant’s conception of autonomy, we have a faithful variant of a perennial philosophical conception of divinity, distinctively re-configured by Kant’s own preoccupations and system, but still recognisably oriented around some philosophical conceptions of the divine, which have their origins in deep classical wells, with dreams and memories of thought-thinking-itself, and joyously diffusing itself, generating plenitude and harmony.…
Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law
The book offers a definitive study of the development of Kant’s conception of the highest good, from his earliest work, to his dying days. It is argued that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western philosophy. Kant is not a Christian, because he cannot accept Christianity’s traditional claims about the relationship between divine action, grace, human freedom, and …
Author’s Reflections on the Responses and Questions from the Book Launch
This is the author’s reflections on formal responses, and a discussion, which took place at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. Topics covered include: the aesthetic properties of Kant’s philosophy, the difference betw…
Conversation between Jennifer Herdt and Christopher Insole
This is a conversation held at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The conversation covers the claim made by Insole that Kant believes in God, but is not a Christian, the way in which reason itself is divine for Kant, …
A Kantian Response to the Problem of Evil: Living in the Moral World
James Sterba has presented a powerful and existentially sincere form of the problem of evil, arguing that it is logically impossible for God to exist, given that there are powerful moral requirements to prevent evil, where one can, and that these requirements would bind an all-powerful and good God, who would indeed be able to prevent such evil. The ‘Kantian’ argument that I set out, if accepted, would undermine the following stage of Sterba’s ar…
Negative Natural Theology: God and the Limits of Reason
How can we live in harmony with the universe, and not just in it? What is it to feel at home in the world? Some thinkers who feel the force of these questions reach for the concept of God. Others do not. This book asks what might be at stake in the choice of whether or not to speak about God: not just in terms of abstract reasoning or arguments about God, but in relation to deeper undercurrents of motivation and yearning. The book is interested i…
Epistemology (19 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Theology (10 works) · Theology and Philosophy of Evil (10 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · War, Ethics, and Justification (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works)