Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Theism 249
of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions’, Science, 117, 1953)
pp. 528–9.
3 See A.G. Cairns Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
4 For a recent scientific account of the general issue of the origin of life see
S. Lifson, ‘On the Crucial Stages in the Origin of Animate Matter’, Journal of
Molecular Evolution, 44, (1997) pp. 1–8.
5 Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
6 See John Haldane, ‘The State and Fate of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind’,
American Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (2000) pp. 301–11; ‘A Return to Form in
the Philosophy of Mind’, Ratio, 11 (1998) pp. 253–77, and in in D. Oderberg
(ed.) Form and Matter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) pp. 40–64; and ‘Rational
and Other Animals’, in A. O’Hear (ed.), Verstehen and Humane Understanding
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 17–28.
7 For versions of this criticism and responses to it (including one by Davidson)
see the collection Mental Causation, edited by John Heil and Alfred Mele
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and for sustained criticism of Davidson’s
position, Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998).
8 D. Davidson, ‘Reply to Peter Lanz’, in R. Steoker (ed.) Reflecting Davidson
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), p. 303.
9 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1976) Part I, 432.
10 See John Haldane, ‘The Life of Signs’, Review of Metaphysics 47 (1994)
pp. 451–70.
11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne,
1912) Ia, q. 2, a. 3, responsio.
12 For an exploration of James’s concern at the spread of ‘teutonic metaphysics’,
see John Haldane, ‘American Philosophy: “Scotch” or “Teutonic”?’, Philosophy,
78 (2002) pp. 311–29.
13 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 14, a. 2: ‘sense or intellect is other than the
sensible or the intelligible only insofar as they are wholly in a condition of potentiality’.
In other words, the being (sensibly) hot of a hot thing is one and the same as
its being felt to be hot by a sensor; and the being actual of a universal nature, catness,
say, is one and the same as its being thought of by a thinker. The objective
grounds of these are, in the first case, the molecular motion of the object, and in
the second one or more individual natures: the catness of Molly or of Salem.
14 Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge in The Works of George Berkeley,
Bishop of Cloyne edited by A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (Edinburgh: Nelson,
1948–1957) paragraphs 4 and 6 (volume 2, pp. 42 and 43).
15 Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, The Works, p. 200.
16 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 85, a. 2.
17 See Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978);
The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,