In his Lectures on Religious Belief, Wittgenstein presents us with a view of the nature of religious discourse according to which religious claims are non-cognitive and not verifiable or assessable for correctness by means of evidence. I argue that, contrary to what is implied in LRB, these features do not follow from an analysis of the language game of religion, given that such an analysis is carried out on Wittgenstein's own terms. A natural suggestion is that his assessment of the status of religious language is guided in part by implicit acceptance of a verification criterion of meaning held independently of any analysis of language games. While Wittgenstein could thereby combine his view of language games and his use theory of meaning with this verification condition in assessing the meaning of religious statements, such a move comes at considerable philosophical cost.

More than two decades ago, Richard Swinburne and Robert Adams put forth an argument for theism that they aptly labeled the argument from consciousness . 1 A thumbnail sketch of the argument goes like this: Th ere are facts involving correlations between brain states and conscious states of persons for which rational inquiry demands a satisfying explanation. Th ere are but two broad forms such a possible explanation may take: the correlations can be explained either through more basic scientifi c laws or by the intentions and actions of a powerful personal agent. Since the correlations' facts cannot be given an adequate scientifi c explanation, the best explanation is that they are the result of the work of a purposeful agent.Our aim in what follows is twofold. First, we consider sophisticated recent attempts in the philosophy of mind to defend a robustly physicalist account of the phenomenal character of experience, accounts that, if successful, would undercut the core premise of the argument from consciousness (AC). We will try to show, however, that these accounts fail. We then consider the version of AC advanced by Swinburne and Adams. We contend that their versions are defective, since they overlook a naturalistic form of explanation that is available even on a robustly dualistic view of conscious states. However, we go on to show that the argument may more plausibly be recast by treating the very form of explanation of conscious states we outline as a further datum in the currently popular fi ne-tuning version of the design argument. We do not attempt to determine whether the fi ne-tuning argument is ultimately successful.

Sensory states have a subjective, qualitative element that constitutes the phenomenal character of experience, and at the same time they have an intentional or representational component that we can describe as their phenomenal content. The main question that will occupy us throughout this essay is the question of how these two elements are related. The logical space with respect to this question is mapped out by introducing various views of phenomenal content in order to clarify the precise nature of the relationship between phenomenal character and the representational aspects of experience. After setting out two desiderata for an acceptable theory of phenomenal content, a thought experiment by David Lewis was discussed which suggests a certain view about the nature of sensory experience. Such a view underscores the importance of requiring any plausible representationalist theory to satisfy the proposed desiderata.

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The Medieval problem of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and contingent truths about the future can be expressed by posing two closely intertwined questions: (1) how can God infallibly know causally indeterminate future events? (2) how is divine foreknowledge, which is fixed and infallible, to be reconciled with the contingency of future events? Molina’s doctrine of scientia media (middle knowledge) is an attempt to provide a substantive and plausible answer to these questions. I briefly sketch Molina’s theory of the scientia media and then go on to assess the extent to which his approach satisfactorily answers the two questions about divine foreknowledge.