Is the everyday understanding of belief susceptible to scientific investigation? Belief is one of the most commonly used, yet unexplained terms in neuroscience. Beliefs can be seen as forms of mental representations and one of the building blocks of our conscious thoughts. This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of what we currently know about the neural basis of human belief systems, and how different belief systems are implemented in the human brain. The chapters in this volume explain how the neural correlates of beliefs mediate a range of explicit and implicit behaviours ranging from moral decision making, to the practice of religion. Drawing inferences from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, religion, and cognitive neuroscience, the book has important implications for understanding how different belief systems are implemented in the human brain, and outlines the directions which research on the cognitive neuroscience of beliefs should take in the future. The Neural Basis of Human Belief Systems will be of great interest to researchers in the fields of psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience.

Recent years have seen a number of high profile scholars converting to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy while a trend in the laity expresses an eclectic hunger for tradition. The status and role of confessions stands at the center of the debate within evangelicalism today as many resonate with the call to return to Christianity's ancient roots. Carl Trueman offers an analysis of why creeds and confessions are necessary, how they have developed over time, and how they can function in the church of today and tomorrow. He writes primarily for evangelicals who are not particularly confessional in their thinking yet who belong to confessional churches—Baptists, independents, etc.—so that they will see more clearly the usefulness of the church's tradition.

This book is a wide-ranging treatment of central topics in epistemology. It provides conceptions of belief and knowledge, offers a theory of how they are grounded in our experience and in the social context of testimony, and connects them with the will and with action, moral responsibility, and intellectual virtue.

The Aim of Belief is the first book devoted to the question: 'what is belief?' Eleven newly commissioned essays by leading authors reflect the state of the art and further advance the current debate. The book will be key reading for researchers working on philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and meta-ethics.

Is the everyday understanding of belief susceptible to scientific investigation? Belief is one of the most commonly used, yet unexplained terms in neuroscience. Beliefs can be seen as forms of mental representations and one of the building blocks of our conscious thoughts. This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of what we currently know about the neural basis of human belief systems, and how different belief systems are implemented in the human brain. The chapters in this volume explain how the neural correlates of beliefs mediate a range of explicit and implicit behaviours ranging from moral decision making, to the practice of religion. Drawing inferences from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, religion, and cognitive neuroscience, the book has important implications for understanding how different belief systems are implemented in the human brain, and outlines the directions which research on the cognitive neuroscience of beliefs should take in the future. The Neural Basis of Human Belief Systems will be of great interest to researchers in the fields of psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience.

Offers a new perspective on international law and international legal argumentation: to what event is international law a belief system?

Epistemological theories of knowledge and justification draw a crucial distinction between one’s simply having good reasons for some belief and one’s actually basing one’s belief on good reasons. While the most natural kind of account of basing is causal in nature—a belief is based on a reason if and only if the belief is properly caused by the reason—there is hardly any widely accepted, counterexample-free account of the basing relation among contemporary epistemologists. Further inquiry into the nature of the basing relation is therefore of paramount importance for epistemology. Without an acceptable account of the basing relation, epistemological theories remain both crucially incomplete and vulnerable to errors that can arise when authors assume an implausible view of what it takes for beliefs to be held on the basis of reasons. Well-Founded Belief brings together 16 essays written by leading epistemologists to explore this important topic in greater detail. The chapters in this collection are divided into two broad categories: (i) the nature of the basing relation; and (ii) basing and its applications. The chapters in the first section are concerned, principally, with positively characterizing the epistemic basing relation and criticizing extant accounts of it, including extant accounts of the relationship between epistemic basing and propositional and doxastic justification. The latter chapters connect epistemic basing with other topics of interest in epistemology as well as ethics, including: epistemic disjunctivism, epistemic injustice, agency, epistemic conservativism, epistemic grounding, epistemic genealogy, practical reasoning, and practical knowledge.