Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue

ISBN-13: 9780199672158 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 352 str.

Laura Frances Callahan; Timothy O'Connor

Opis

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker?
In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? Can it be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires?
The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above.

Recenzje

This collection of new philosophical essays explores the connections among the concepts of religious faith (in most cases, Christian faith), trust, testimony, knowledge, rationality, disagreement and virtue(s). The authors are well-known practitioners of philosophical epistemology or philosophy of religion. Some are highly sympathetic to Christianity and others are in varying degrees critical of religious faith.

O autorze

Laura Frances Callahan is a Clarendon Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Oxford University, formerly a Wells Scholar at Indiana University. Her primary interests are in epistemology. Timothy O'Connor is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University. He is the author of Persons and Causes (Oxford 2000) and Theism and Ultimate Explanation (Blackwell 2008) and the editor of five other volumes in the philosophy of mind and action and metaphysics.