https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/26891 2026-04-10T23:51:15Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/138124 Title: Melita Theologica : volume 75 : issue 1 : 2025 Authors: Micallef, Martin; Mangion, Claude Abstract: Table of contents:; 1. Claude Mangion: Editorial Note; 2. Graham Harman: The True Flaw in the Ontological Proof: Anselm, Kant, Husserl; 3. Kevin Hart: The Problem of Evil; 4. Steven Shakespeare: The Logic of Expression in the Philosophy of Religion: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty; 5. Mark Sultana: On Taking the ‘Five Ways’ Seriously as Ways; 6. Robert Farrugia: “Apart From Me You Can Do Nothing”: The Phenomenological Unity Between Affectivity, Truth, and Action; 7. Michael Grech: Giovanni Franzoni’s Non-Teleological Interpretation of the Kingdom of God and Jean-François Lyotard’s Critique of Grand Narratives; 8. Keith Pisani: Are Religious and Non-Religious Justifications of Coercive Laws Qualitatively Different?; 9. François Zammit: The Theological Thinking in Lippmann’s and Hayek’s Justification of the Market Order; 10. Stefan M. Attard: The Relevance of Biblical Archaeology to Biblical Scholarship; 11. Guidelines For Contributors 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/138123 Title: Editorial note [Melita Theologica, 75(1)] Authors: Mangion, Claude Abstract: Philosophical theology is a branch of philosophical investigation that examines questions relating to God and religion by deploying rational argumentation and debate rather than the authority of the Scriptures. This special edition of Melita Theologica attests to the upsurge in interest in questions related to philosophical theology. While this is now taken for granted, it has not always been the case, and for a good number of years, this interest, at least within certain philosophical circles, waned. The various themes covered in this issue reflect the breadth of the field of philosophical theology, with the authors engaging in the classical debates concerning the existence of God and the problem of evil to contemporary existential and political questions. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/138122 Title: The true flaw in the ontological proof : Anselm, Kant, Husserl Authors: Harman, Graham Abstract: God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. The Fool hath said in his heart that there is no God, and the Fool understands what he is saying. Thus, he thinks that God is only in the understanding but does not exist in reality. But since existing is greater than not existing, a God found in the understanding alone would not be a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, which contradicts the definition of what we are speaking about. Therefore, God is not only in the understanding, but exists. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/138119 Title: The problem of evil Authors: Hart, Kevin Abstract: Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as ‘the problem of evil.’ There are responses to evil experienced as something awful that is thrown in one’s face, and these divide into the phenomenologically distinct categories of blame and lament; and there are also arguments from evil, framed in individual ways, not all of which have the same end in view. There is no one ‘evil.’ When the Psalmist recoils in the face of wickedness (Ps. 10), or when William Cowper cries out in pain in his “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” or when Paul Celan speaks of the “Schwarze Milch der Frühe” in “Todesfuge,” each is answering to a separate thing: the persecution of the poor by the unrighteous, a dramatic breakdown of mental health, and the murder of Jews in the Shoah. ‘Evil’ is a notoriously slippery word: it can denote moral evil (sin as it is known in Judaism and Christianity) or mental and physical evil (suffering); and some philosophers would wish to add to these one or more of metaphysical evil (original imperfection), intellectual evil (error, ignorance and even mistakes) and aesthetic evil (ugliness). [excerpt] 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z