In this chapter, I argue for an account of worship as real union. To worship the Divine is to participate in the goodness of God, in an ontological way. But how can we really participate in God? The answer depends on the coherence of an important distinction between the essence and divine energies of God. We cannot participate in the essence of God, otherwise the distinction between creature and creator breaks down. Rather, we participate in the divine energies of God. Although there is a difference between the divine essence and the divine energies, the divine energies are not something distinct from God. God interacts with us and reveals himself to us through the divine energies. The divine energies are the activities of God that can penetrate our inner being and change us from potentially being good to actually being good. Thus, worship, in the proper and strict sense, divinizes us.

Does the conception of worship – in expressing, as it does, a direct relationship with God – prevent an understanding of love for God as mediated by love for humans? Taking the latter to be an existential model of one’s relationship with God, in this chapter I answer in the negative to the above question by demonstrating the role that worship plays in such a model. To do so, I turn to Kierkegaard’s image of “resting transparently” in God. For Kierkegaard, this image represents what he perceives as the highest possible state of the believer’s relationship with God; a state that is achieved, according to Kierkegaard, when one becomes the self – the individual – that God intends one to be. And how does one become this self? By loving properly the neighbour (that is, another individual). The suggestion I develop in this chapter is that it is the worshipping of God – that is, by being in a state of respect and attendance to God’s will – that directs one in loving properly the neighbour. Hence, it is worship of God that paves the way to fully loving the neighbour and thus to fully loving God.

Kierkegaard’s thesis that lacking faith is necessarily a state of despair leads to the conclusion that Either/Or’s fictional character Judge William, who belongs to the “ethical” rather than the “religious” stage of life, is, despite the many virtues of his position, in a state of despair. What does his despair amount to, then? Relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, I claim that the failure in the Judge’s view of life is rooted in his misguided understanding of what it is to be a “self.” By taking himself to have ultimate control over the way he is (in a manner akin to what Sartre’s means by “radical freedom”), the Judge fails to acknowledge that he possesses what I term an individual essence, bestowed upon him by God in a state of potential. This chapter explains the conception of individual essence and demonstrates how it applies to the Judge’s despair.

Chapter four concentrates on a close analysis of Aquinas’s understanding of creation, which is undeniably crucial for any attempt at constructing and evaluating a Thomistic version of theistic evolutionism. The exposition of Aquinass philosophical theology of creation and his commentary on the work of six days in Genesis is preceded by an analysis of Augustine’s reading of the Hexameron, his use of the concept of rationes seminales, and the debate on whether his notion of creation can be interpreted as evolution-friendly.

Chapter seven addresses the difficulty of the theological interpretation of evolutionary biology in delineating a precise account of the concurrence of divine and contingent causes engaged in speciation. Invoking Aquinas’s famous distinction between God’s primary and principal causation and the secondary and instrumental causation of creatures, a constructive model of the concurrence of divine and natural causes in evolutionary transformations is offered.

This chapter offers a broad overview of the dominant views of personhood and selfhood in ancient Mesoamerica. It begins with a discussion of the conception of social personhood, then turns to the issue of essence and selfhood, finally culminating in the “embedded identity” theory of personal identity that relies on these previous views.

Aristotle has the resources to solve the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness and thus to vouchsafe the necessity of ethically virtuous activity while clarifying the kind of priority that contemplation has. Among these resources is his theory of predication as articulated in the Organon, his toolkit for all sorts of philosophical inquiry. This theory allows us to understand the coherence of what have appeared to many to be fundamentally discrepant answers to the question about what kind of activity happiness is.

This chapter explores Heidegger’s challenge to the claim that logic is authorative in the following sense: Putative logical propositions demand assent and serve to constrain our thinking about nonlogical subject areas such as metaphysics, and they do so because these logical truths are true in virtue of the essence of the logical. The chapter argues that, given Heidegger's metaphysics, his rejection of the authority of logic so construed is defensible. Specifically, it discusses how his nonpropositional theory of the fundamental bearers of truth and his ontological pluralism undercut this construal of the authority of logic. On this view, Heidegger is less interested in revising or rejecting principles such as the law of noncontradiction than he is in defending his right to revise or reject these principles if his metaphysical investigations demand that he does so.

Inherited discussions of ‘science and religion’ too much assume an interaction between two historically constant phenomena in terms of stories of ‘progress’ and ‘conflict’. Instead, it is better to recognise long-term and varying modes of tension between three different approaches to nature, pivoted about attitudes to ‘enchantment’ and to transcendence versus immanence. Within such a perspective, it appears that the dominant model of science as ‘disenchanted transcendence’ is a Newtonian one that historically quickly proved inadequate. Alternative and earlier traditions of ‘natural magic’ later returned under new guises and are closer to the essence of the ‘ergetic’ or experimental attitude that lies at the real core of ‘science’. The Newtonian model also implausibly suppressed the realities of motion, time, change, substantial form and secondary qualities. But contemporary physics points towards their restoration and to nature as a vital habit and form-shaping process, as well as to the ‘magical’ character of powers and causes. Magic, rightly understood, is a necessary mediator between religion as theory and science as practice and is a crucial aspect of an ergetic understanding of ‘enchanted transcendence’ which is the most promising perspective for today.

The chapter focuses on the methodological debate between Empiricist and Rationalist schools of medicine, as portrayed in Galen’s early treatise On Medical Experience (Med.Exp.). This dense and philosophically-sophisticated text, preserved for the most part only in an Arabic translation, supposedly presents the substance of a dispute, witnessed by the young Galen, between his Rationalist teacher Pelops and an Empiricist opponent, about the respective roles of experience and reason in medicine. Analysing the arguments on both sides, in particular as they concern the question of inductive generalisation and the nature and validity of the empirical procedure known as epilogimos, the chapter shows how Galen’s presentation of a sequence of responses and counter-responses between the two protagonists serves to prefigure his own complex and hugely influential synthesis of the empirical and rationalist procedures in his own mature methodology.