On the assumption that theistic religious commitment takes place in the face of evidential ambiguity, the question arises under what conditions it is permissible to make a doxastic venture beyond one’s evidence in favour of a religious proposition. In this paper I explore the implications for orthodox theistic commitment of adopting, in answer to that question, a modest, moral coherentist, fideism. This extended Jamesian fideism crucially requires positive ethical evaluation of both the motivation and content of religious doxastic ventures. I (...) suggest that, even though the existence of horrendous evil does not resolve evidential ambiguity in favour of atheism, there are reasonable value commitments that would preclude those who hold them from satisfying extended Jamesian fideist conditions for committing themselves to classical theism. I then begin a discussion of a possible revisionary theistic alternative (in the Christian tradition) which – one might hope – may meet those conditions. An earlier, shorter, version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

In the second installment of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation,” Donne's religious poetry is set in dialogue not only with the “Great Controversy” of the 1560s over the nature of the eucharistic sign but also with pre-Christian semiotic discourses. From the perspective of contextualist scholarship, which recognizes in any temporal context a limited number of discourses available, Donne's religious poems of the period from about 1607 to 1620 register many contradictory conceptions, but contradictory only in (...) the sense that no contextualist map of religious identities allows for their miscibility or even collocation. Notoriously resistant to psychological and phenomenological interests, contextualism has no place for an early seventeenth-century Christian writer whose concern is less to join a school of thought on the Real Presence in the Eucharist than to dismiss the issue as vexingly trivial in comparison with the question of whether God thinks that each or any of us adequately loves him. For the questions that concern Donne, there are no determinate answers available, and no standard vocabulary. But the poet's alternating acquiescence in and fretfulness about indeterminacy and incomprehensibility constitute an intellectual and affective identity as much as does the attachment to any one or other more recognizable set of arguments and ways of framing them. (shrink)

The controversy over law and morality between positivists and normativists is largely a result of failure on both sides to understand the idea of authority. The author argues that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Hobbes held a common notion of legal authority that was distinctively moral. They all saw the virtue of law (and the source of legal obligation) in the equal protection it provides for all against the disorder to which passion makes men vulnerable, and not in the justice of (...) its provisions. Michael Oakeshott, among contemporary theorists, best illustrates this approach to a resolution of the differences between positivists and normativists. (shrink)