A forum for exchange of bibliographical and historical information relating to
the life, times, reception of Joseph Butler (1692-1752), author of Fifteen Sermons (1726) and the Analogy of Religion (1736). The joseph-butler group recently sought and was awarded custody of the Bertrand Russell Revival of Rochester and Field-Being for Western NY.

My syllabus calls for placing philosophy in both the sciences and the humanities, for using the techniques of logical analysis common to professionals to address issues emerging out of the ordinary lives of ordinary people, and taking up in detail the effects of Eastern philosophy on the West and of Western philosophy on the East. I claim that differences of gender, sexual orientation, political ideology, or taste in music, should not be allowed to determine the shape of the syllabus, but should be subsumed under the big three divides: science and humanities, East and West, popular and professional. Our concern is to bring people on both sides of these divides, seemingly as impossible as inevitable, together into productive discourse.

My career has been in philosophy of religion, a professional discipline taking as its object the spiritual lives of ordinary people. Popular theism and popular atheism are scrutinized using formalized versions of the observations and retention implicit in ordinary language and the inferences we find convincing in daily conversation. Bertrand Russell could address professional and popular audiences in various fields. All Russell wanted was to empower people to think for themselves. And that they would not do. Bishop Butler wanted people to see that living with virtue and piety was in their best interest, but his means to this goal was to give people premises and leave them to draw their own conclusions. By adding Bertrand Russell to the mix, we balance theism and atheism, and with Lik Tong's Field Being, we get to look at this through an eastern window.