The influence of Wittgenstein’s work in the study of deep disagreements has been dominated by On Certainty. Since the metaphor of ‘hinges’ plays a central role in the scholarship of On Certainty, a Wittgensteinian theory of deep disagreements is assumed to be based on hinge epistemology. This means that a disagreement would be deep because it concerns parties with conflicting hinges. When we shift our attention to a different part of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, however, another picture of deep disagreements emerges. This (...) article proposes a new Wittgensteinian approach to disagreements through the analysis of the Lectures on Religious Belief. Some of the disagreements that Wittgenstein and his pupils discuss in these lectures are deep, but not because they are grounded in different hinges, but because they are disagreements about pictures. (shrink)

This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast but bias-mirroring (...) trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. It is important to keep the descriptive/explanatory and normative concerns properly separated, but philosophy of luck and risk are relevant to both. More specifically, inductive risky theological strategies,we have argued, are a relevant concern both descriptively and normatively. The descriptive/explanatory relevance of measures of high inductive risk connects it with cognitive and social psychology of religion, while its normative relevance connects with critical concerns with epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the ethics of belief. A research program to examine fideistic orientation and its relation to epistemically risky doxastic strategies is one of potentially numerous research programs on which philosophers and psychologists might work collaboratively. So this concluding chapter of our study culminates with the outline of a proposed research program at the intersection of shared concerns. I term this research program CICI, because it examines what lies at the intersection of CSR’s standing interest in the appeal of counter-intuitive ideas, and our own study’s focus on the fideistic penchant for counter-inductive thinking. Religious Studies scholars typically focus on particular traditions and teachings, while CSR scholars tend to eschew such content-focused approaches in favor of a study of evolutionary and hence generic or trans-religious functions and processes. I argue that CICI has the added benefit of effectively mediating this generic-specific contrast between CSR and Religious Studies, allowing CSR research to be more closely connected with and relevant to comparative fundamentalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Dormandy’s ‘True Faith’ presents two views on the proper epistemological stance towards faith: doxastic-partialism and evidentialism. Here, I argue for a third option that cuts across the evidentialism/partialism distinction. I first analyze the Pascalian conception of faith, arguing that Pascal begins with the cognitive attitude of acceptance rather than belief. Next, I discuss Dormandy’s case for evidentialism, and contend that some evidence—the kind gained through transformative experiences—presents a difficulty for her argument. Finally, I offer my proposed view—Partialist Evidentialism—and argue (...) that this approach is necessary for acquiring some unique kinds of evidence for religious faith. (shrink)

My interest is in the relationship between the contemporary account of the epistemology of religious belief, known as quasi-fideism, and the sceptical fideism that has been so important, historically, in motivating fideistic ideas. I argue that we can profitably construe quasi-fideism along sceptical fideist lines, in that it is a proposal that is naturally understood as both arising within the context of a sceptical investigation and as exhibiting core features that it shares with Pyrrhonian scepticism. Moreover, I suggest that sceptical (...) fideism, properly rendered, is inclined towards the kind of restricted fideism that is essential to quasi-fideism. (shrink)

O tema central do artigo que se segue diz respeito a uma abordagem que Heinrich Heine faz quanto à religião e seu encontro com a filosofia, em específico o tratado no Livro II da obra Contribuições à História da Religião e Filosofia na Alemanha publicada em 1835. Nesse sentido, será explicitada em um primeiro momento uma espécie de fideísmo heiniano que serve como instrumento para a motivação de sua tese da realização do declínio religioso quando aliado à filosofia. O método (...) empregado pelo poeta utiliza-se da análise de elementos sócio-históricos observando a conjuntura de diversos momentos, dentre eles a revolução filosófica como resultado do protestantismo luterano. Por fim, como pretende-se demonstrar, a religião desfrutada na Alemanha contemporânea de Heine, qual seja o cristianismo, tem uma destituição de seu caráter teísta, fazendo com que a religião se transforme em um puro deísmo. (shrink)

استدلالِ شرط‌بندی پاسکال، به عنوان یکی از استدلال‌های مشهور بر اثبات وجود خداوند و یا دست‌کم، لزومِ ایمان به خدا، همواره در معرض بحث و بررسی‌های فراوان بوده است. این استدلال در فضای فکری جهان اسلام نیز مطرح بوده و از طریق امام محمد غزالی، به ائمه اطهار نسبت داده شده است. دقت در صورت‌بندی این استدلال آن‌گونه که پاسکال ارائه داده است و نص‌حدیثی که می‌توان آن را ریشۀ این استدلال تلقی کرد، نشان می‌دهد که این دو، تفاوت‌های بنیادین (...) با یک‌دیگر دارند؛ تفاوت‌هایی که سبب می‌شود اشکالات وارد بر شرط‌بندیِ پاسکال به صورت‌بندی حدیثی آن وارد نباشد. در این مقاله تلاش شده تا در مرحلۀ اول، به برخی اشکالات وارد شده بر شرط‌بندی پاسکال جواب داده شود و در مرحلۀ دوم، نشان داده شود که چگونه تفاوت‌های موجود در صورت‌بندی دو استدلال، آن‌ها را از هم متمایز می‌کند و اشکالاتی که بی‌جواب می‌مانند به صورت‌بندی حدیثیِ استدلال وارد نمی‌شوند. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As the most famous critic of John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen has often been assumed to have been a religious conservative or even reactionary. In contrast to these assessments, this article shows that Stephen's most consistent enemies were what he took to be the two most significant religious forces of the modern world: Ultramontane Catholicism and Comtean Positivism. The article explores his objections to these two religious ideologies, which he saw as sharing certain harmful features. It then shows (...) that his famous critiques of John Stuart Mill and liberalism had much in common with his attacks on Ultramontanism and Positivism; for example, he charged that they rested on an implausible philosophical anthropology and that they degraded the state. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar se a Epistemologia Reformada constitui um tipo de fideísmo. Por Epistemologia Reformada entende-se a tese filosófica de que a crença em Deus pode ser intelectualmente justificada, racional ou avalizada, mesmo que o teísta não disponha de qualquer evidência em favor da existência de Deus. Primeiro, contudo, vou caracterizar precisamente a posição da Epistemologia Reformada a fim de entender como a crença teísta pode ser intelectualmente bem-sucedida, mesmo na ausência de provas ou evidências. Em seguida, (...) buscarei compreender o que se quer dizer por fideísmo e em que sentido essa posição seria uma acusação ou demérito contra a Epistemologia Reformada. Por fim, vou verificar se é correto classificar a Epistemologia Reformada como uma forma de fideísmo. (shrink)

People have become suspicious of authority, including epistemic authorities, i.e., knowledge experts, even on matters individuals are unqualified to adjudicate. This is problematic since most of our knowledge comes from trusting a speaker—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or pedestrians inquiring of strangers—such that the knowledge transmitted is rarely personally verified. Despite the recent development of social epistemology and theories of testimony, this is not a new problem. Ancient and Medieval philosophers largely took it (...) for granted that most human knowledge primarily comes from listening to a trustworthy speaker whose virtuous character serves to mitigate against the twin concerns of inaccuracy and dishonesty. Thus, unlike contemporary Social Epistemology, few testimonial theories were explicitly laid out despite the crucial role testimony plays throughout a wide range of topics and teachings. To date, the working theory of testimony underpinning the works of medieval philosophers are just now being codified. This is particularly relevant for the Abrahamic faiths since they originate with testimony from God himself. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how the generation and transmission of religious knowledge appears in an exemplary thinker from each faith: Saadya Gaon of Judaism, al-Ghazālī of Islam, and Thomas Aquinas of Christianity. While not contemporaries, these exemplars are theological philosophers who are like-minded in their desire to maintain an orthodox faith while possessing philosophical approaches to truth. Thus, they maintained sophisticated epistemological theories of generation and transmission within their own religious contexts. Cataloguing these medieval testimonial theories reveals a historical incongruity with the current contemporary concept of testimony and its frameworks. Based on the testimonial theories of these three thinkers, I argue for a "transhistorical" concept of testimony that does not presume an evidentialist framework to account for pre-modern theories of testimony which predominantly rely on virtue theoretic frameworks. To test the proposed neutral framework, I offer a virtue epistemological account of testimony in which trust is not an intellectual virtue, but the intellectual aspect of the historic virtue of autonomy. I argue that intellectual autonomy and trust are inversely related in one's interactions with authority. (shrink)