If you were to take a time machine and travel back to the 1980s, Catholic epistemology would look drastically different than it does today, at least in analytic circles. One of those drastic changes relates to whether Catholic epistemology is consistent with Reformed epistemology. Another issue relates to whether St. Thomas Aquinas was a classical evidentialist. In this paper, I survey recent developments in Catholic epistemology. I do this by first looking at Gregory Stacey's recent work arguing the Catholic Church's (...) teaching on faith is best situated in a Reformed epistemological framework. I then engage decades old objections to Reformed epistemology from a Catholic perspective. I respond to these objections partly by surveying recent work by Catholic epistemologists. The paper then takes a turn to look at the recent scholarship on Aquinas' epistemology. I show that there is now an emerging consensus that Aquinas belongs not to a hard evidentialist camp as it was previously thought, but rather an externalist friendly tradition. (shrink)

This article considers the role of emotion in John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent by distinguishing five different ways (or ‘models’) in which the emotions play a positive epistemic role in relation to cognition. The most important of these, the Cognitive-Emotion Model, offers a new account of Newman's crucial idea of real assent, one that stresses the primary role of the emotions in real assent rather than imagination. This model helps to explain the nature of real assent by highlighting Newman's (...) portrayal of an emotional way of knowing an object that is personal or individual, incommunicable, vivid, and motive. In this study of the relations between emotion and cognition I hope to highlight unexplored aspects of the nature of real assent and the importance of the role of emotion in it and hope to show how Newman's epistemology offers a rich framework for exploring the positive epistemic contributions of the emotions. -/- . (shrink)