Raymond Smullyan: Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness.
Sun, Jun 25, 2017./noise/books | LinkI've had this dead-tree book for an age. It's a bit disappointing. The first part is a review/critique of a book where Martin Gardner defends his Christian beliefs. I hadn't heard of it and won't seek it out now. The relatively long and interminable second part is trench warfare against Christian theology, specifically attitudes toward hell as esposed by the Jesus of the Scriptures and later traditions and interpretations. I don't think of this as "religious consciousness" (which I now see I read as "spiritual consciousness") and was a bit astonished that Smullyan expended so much concern on it.
The last is perhaps what I came for: an exploration of "cosmic consciousness"; the idea that there is a higher state of consciousness and some people have achieved it over the millenia. Again it takes the form essentially of an endorsement of Richard Maurice Bucke's book on the subject, and the long excerpts of it and other texts often occlude Smullyan's own voice. At times I heard echoes of Kant's Universal History though of course one is immanent (though not revelatory) and the other more worldly; I guess it was the teleology that brackets them so strongly in my mind. (Smullyan rubbishes Kant's ethics.) I also wonder how this stuff fits with Nietzsche et al's ruminations on Man's construction of God. This whole area is firmly in Emerson et al's tradition of American pragmatism, and the more out-there considerations of Miss Nha Trang and William Pensinger, stopping just short of the New Age. Too much to read, too many other things to think about, so I'll leave it there.
In contrast to his say-it-once book First Order Logic, Smullyan really needed an editor post-retirement.