Willem B. Drees

What are the humanities for? The question has perhaps never seemed more urgent. While student numbers have grown in higher education, universities and colleges increasingly have encouraged students to opt for courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) or take programs in applied subjects like business and management. When tertiary learning has taken such a notably utilitarian turn, the humanities are judged to have lost their centrality. Willem B. Drees has no wish nostalgically to prioritize the humanities so as to retrieve some lost high culture. But he does urge us to adopt a clearer conception of the humanities as more than just practical vehicles for profit or education. He argues that these disciplines, while serving society, are also intrinsic to our humanity. His bold ideas about how to think with greater humanistic coherence mark this topical book out as unmissable reading for all those involved in academe, especially those in higher educational policy

How should we think about religion, science, and their relationship in modern society? Some religious groups oppose evolution; some atheists claim science is on their side. Others reconcile their beli

Can nature be evil, or ugly, or wrong? Can we apply moral value to nature?From a compellingly original premise, under the auspices of major thinkers including Mary Midgley, Philip Hefner, Arnold Benz

This book considers the consequences of the natural sciences (physics, biology, neurosciences) for our view of the world. Willem Drees argues that higher, more complex levels of reality, such as religion and morality, are to be viewed as natural phenomena and have their own concepts and explanations, even though all elements of reality are constituted by the same kinds of matter (ontological naturalism). Religion and morality are to be understood as rooted in our evolutionary past and our neurophysiological constitution. The book takes a more radical naturalist position than most on religion and science. But religion is not dismissed: religious traditions remain important as bodies of wisdom and vision, and the naturalist view of the world does not exclude a sense of wonder and awe, since at the limits of science questions about the existence of natural reality persist.

Reflecting their theme by the very breadth of their views, European intellectuals explore diversity in creation from scientific and theological perspectives. Their topics include the concept of life a

This collection of substantial essays explores the question of how to relate environmental engagement in the context of religious convictions. In the first part of the book, ‘A Diversity of Visions of