This article examines the philosophical and theological implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and the technological singularity for core religious concepts. The predictive capacities of AI challenge traditional accounts of divine omniscience, raising critical questions about the distinction between algorithmic foreknowledge and theological models of perfect knowledge. The increasing determinacy of human behaviour through data-driven systems complicates classical formulations of human freedom and moral responsibility. Additionally, the potential for artificial suffering demands an expansion of theodicy and a reassessment of the creator-creature relationship in light of human technological agency. Finally, emerging technological eschatologies, promising digital immortality and transcendence, confront religious soteriology with novel anthropocentric models of salvation.

This study argues that the philosophy of religion must critically rearticulate its categories of knowledge, suffering, and eschatological hope to remain conceptually viable in a world mediated by intelligent systems.

What gives the benefit principle its moral appeal as an idea of tax justice? And what can count as a benefit for that purpose? My claim is that we can trace the moral force of various versions of the principle to five ideas: individual justification, causal feedback, reciprocity, opposable valuation and non-objectionable baseline. I develop those ideas into an account of the moral permissibility of benefit-based taxation, and explain how that account addresses problems about the quantification and valuation of benefits and the relationship between benefit and the justice of the background distribution.

The oeuvre of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d.1973) pivots on the audacious thesis that political esoterism – the protective covering of truth through an exoteric shell – has been central to Islamic intellectual life. Strauss’s work focusses on philosophy, but this article argues that it can be productively extended – while not applied integrally - to Sufism, Islam’s similarly contested, primary esoteric tradition. It investigates the Straussian thesis in a Sufi discussion on valāyat, “spiritual authority” or “Friendship with God,” which idea is central both to Shiite Sufism and Shiism generally. The discussion concerns the Valāyat-nāme, an Iranian treatise of the early twentieth century by the Neᶜmatollāhī master Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909), revealing the dilemmas that Shiite Sufis have faced in simultaneously retaining identity and acceptance to the juristically dominated canon. Four sub-topics are elaborated to assess the validity of Straussian analysis in rendering the treatise and its author: persecution as a context for esoterism; esoterism as a veil for dangerous knowledge; the drive for epistemic subordination; and the political nature of religious knowledge. It is proposed that rather than as “between the lines” dissimulation, as per Strauss, the Neᶜmatollāhīs’ political esoterism ought to be read more subtly as accommodation “along the lines” of Shiite orthodoxy.

This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive evaluation of Carl Gustav Carus’s writings on race and human inequality. We demonstrate that Carus, an eminent nineteenth-century physician emblematic of romantic medicine, was deeply engrossed in racial science, exploring anatomical, anthropological, and craniological dimensions of race across no less than twenty-five works spanning three decades. Carus’s engagement with race stemmed from naturphilosophisch anatomical and physiological considerations, which evolved into physiognomic and psychological inquiries. While previous research has construed Carus as a precursor of Arthur de Gobineau, we argue that he was intellectually much more closely aligned with the ‘American School’ of ethnology, represented by figures such as Samuel G. Morton, George R. Gliddon, and Josiah C. Nott. Closely monitoring international discourses of scientific racism, Carus sought to propagate these notions among German readers and position himself within international debates. The international reception, however, was limited by the Romantic framework of Carus’s scientific racism, which was unintelligible to contemporaries. While sharing an implicit methodological bias with Morton and his followers, affirming white superiority and legitimising colonisation, the Romantic underpinning of his race treatises made it difficult for mid-nineteenth-century race theorists to fully endorse him. Nonetheless, Carus, often lauded as polymath with a humanistic orientation, besides his achievements, helped to create a theoretical basis for the othering and dehumanisation of large parts of the global population.

Unlike with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in clinical research, little has been said about the ethical principles that should regulate the use of RCTs in experimental development economics. One well-known principle in clinical research ethics is the principle of clinical equipoise. Some recent commentators suggest that an analogue of clinical equipoise should play a role in experimental development economics. In this article, I first highlight some difficulties with importing the concept to experimental development economics. I then argue that MacKay’s (2018, 2020) notion of policy equipoise avoids these difficulties and has a role to play in experimental development economics.

From the thought of mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla (1919–1964), I develop a three-prong existentialist response to the problem of evil. One prong is granting that a version of the problem of evil is successful: no theodicy is credible while beholding innocent suffering. A second prong involves an affective engagement with evil that facilitates a loving human flourishing grounded in solidarity with sufferers, compassion, loving self-sacrifice, and taking responsibility for one’s own culpability. The final prong is the capacity of this affective engagement with evil to permit a belief in God as an existential commitment to a suffering God as a transcendental ideal of self-sacrificing love that guides one’s perpetual project of self-creation.