This unique textbook--the first to offer balanced, comprehensive coverage of all major perspectives on the rational justification of religious belief--includes twenty-four key papers by some of the world's leading philosophers of religion. Arranged in six sections, each representing a major approach to religious epistemology, the book begins with papers by noted atheists, setting the stage for the main theistic responses--Wittgensteinian Fideism, Reformed epistemology, natural theology, prudential accounts of religious beliefs, and rational belief based in religious experience--in each case offering a (...) representative sample of papers by leading exponents, a critical paper, and a substantial bibliography. A comprehensive introductory essay and ample cross-references help students to contrast and evaluate the different approaches, while the overall arrangement encourages them to assess the full range of philosophical positions on the issue. Carefully selected to provide both a comprehensive overview of current work and a series of modern perspectives on many classic sources--Swinburne's detailed discussion of Hume's critique of the design argument, for example, as well as an entire section evaluating and extending Pascal's famous Wager--the essays also provide a uniquely readable survey that will be useful in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of religion and epistemology. (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyMary Warnock's book is an attempt to address in a short space a large theme: ‘some aspects of the role of religion, and therefore the idea of God, in the twenty‐first century, as it relates to legislation and politics’. Along the way she raises many subsidiary themes, including the historical influence of religion on the law, the tension between religion and liberalism, the difficulty of providing a philosophical foundation for secularist ethics, and the (...) problems of pluralism and relativism that have pervaded such discussions. Her approach to these timely but complex topics is through the lens of various pieces of legislation that came through the British Parliament over the past 40 years or so, including in the House of Lords, of which she was a member for more than twenty years. In particular, she discusses legislation relating to abortion, research... (shrink)

This book illustrates the profound implications of Gabriel Marcel?s unique existentialist approach to epistemology not only for traditional themes in his work ...

This article examines Gabriel Marcel’s unique approach to the existence of God, and its implications for traditional philosophy of religion. After some preliminary remarks about the realm of “problems”, and about the question of whether Marcel thinks God’s existence admits of a rational argument, Part I explains his account of how the individual subject can arrive at an affirmation of God through experiences of fidelity and promise-making. Part II proposes a way in which Marcel’s own philosophical and phenomenological approach could (...) be regarded as a type of argument for the existence of God. The last section suggests that Marcel’s approach offers an advance upon the views of William Alston and John Hick concerning the analysis of religious experience. (shrink)

A one-stop resource for undergraduate students examining the many complexities of the relationship between religion and science.

Presents a convincing argument as to why religion should be mixed with politics, ascertaining that certain religious beliefs should be made public and ...

This paper considers two related claims in the work of D. Z. Phillips: that commitment to God precludes a distinction between the commitment and the grounds for the commitment, and that belief and understanding are the same in religion. Both these claims motivate Phillips’s rejection of natural theology. I examine these claims by analyzing the notion of commitment, discussing what is involved in making a commitment to a worldview, why commitment is necessary at all in religion, levels of commitment, and (...) commitment and justification. I show that Phillips fails to distinguish between adopting a hypothesis, where justification would be germane, and committing to the hypothesis after one has adopted it, where justification is not so pressing. This failure fatally undermines his rejection of natural theology. (shrink)

This work, translated from the German, is divided into nine chapters with a preface plus a very helpful introduction by the translator. There is also a postscript by Habermas, as well as a reprinting of two earlier papers on related topics. The book is intended as a contribution to contemporary political philosophy, and, as such, Habermas accepts certain assumptions in advance and does not attempt to argue for them at any length. The first is the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, the (...) antirealist view that all knowledge is in some sense constructed by human culture and language. The second is the failure of natural law theory. Hence, his task is to engage in political philosophy in a “post-metaphysical age,” an age which requires a “procedural reason... that puts itself on trial”. Against this background, the political philosopher must avoid the twin pitfalls of subordinating law to a transcendentally grounded morality and of identifying law with a particular tradition’s view of the good life. (shrink)

This book contains a thorough and balanced series of dialogues introducing key topics in philosophy of religion, such as: the existence and nature of God, the ...

Act Three of Gabriel Marcel’s play, The Emissary, is presented here in English for the first time. The introductory essay introduces Marcel and several of his best known themes, especially the distinctions between problem and mystery, and primary and secondary reflection. Focusing on the relationship between experience and conceptual knowledge, it discusses Marcel’s attempt to argue philosophically for a return to ordinary experience. The role of drama and art in the recovery of the realm of mystery is also highlighted. The (...) play illustrates these themes at the concrete level as it raises many of the challenging situations and moral dilemmas that emerged from the occupation of France by a brutal enemy during World War II. The realities of deceit, betrayal and blackmail are all in the air, as are real worries about reprisals, violence, and irreparable loss. In a moving, gripping drama, Marcel portrays the occupation as an occasion for deep soul-searching among the characters, in the midst of great suffering and loss, and, rather than passing easy judgment, he suggests a journey toward healing, one inspired by compassion, honesty, courage, and faith. (shrink)

Advances in technology have not only given rise to many important questions in bioethics but have also made the whole subject something of an ethical minefield. Bioethics now involves practices that give rise to ethical dilemmas in such diverse fields as medicine, biology, and even physics and chemistry. The success and future potential of scientific research in bioethics has contributed to the growing perception that science has a kind of hegemony over modern life, and this brings with it a temptation (...) to make scientists the gurus of modern culture, to look to them for answers to all human problems. (shrink)

This is a study of Marcel's valuable and unique contribution to contemporary epistemology, which originated out of his existentialist critique of traditional Cartesian philosophy. Marcel argues that Descartes conceives the self as a discrete entity, distinct from the body, which "looks out" upon the external world, and apprehends it by means of clear and distinct ideas, ideas which can be understood without reference to the world. This view motivated Descartes's epistemological project, and the project of the tradition that followed. The (...) existentialist critique, therefore, if successful, would be important. ;My aim is: to explicate and defend Marcel's understanding of the human subject as the basis for a critique of Cartesianism; and to establish that Marcel's view has radical implications for some central problems of traditional philosophy. ;In the first half of the study, I consider Marcel's view of the subject: the nature of human embodiment; the distinction between the realm of mystery , and the realm of problems ; and the ontological priority of the former over the latter. I explain and defend Marcel's claim that the individual subject's ideas always involve a body and a world which partly constitute their particular character. Marcel concludes from this that the "objective knowledge" of Cartesianism, including scientific knowledge, is founded on abstractions from the level of "being-in-a-situation" where we actually live, and must be understood in terms of this "situated involvement", not vice versa. ;The remainder of the study considers the implications of this conclusion for the traditional problems of: skepticism ; internal/external relations; necessary connections; identity; and the existence of God. ;Marcel's approach is unique because he avoids, unlike Heidegger , the problematic conclusion that mental content is not necessary at the ontologically basic level. He also avoids the conclusion that human understanding is merely interpretative, for he rejects the view that concepts are holistic. In short, he is one of the only philosophers to successfully attack atomism while at the same time avoiding monism. (shrink)

This paper is a critical reflection and response to the religious fideism of D. Z. Phillips, and especially to recent attempts to defend this fideism. Over the course of his career, Phillips argued for a number of interesting but quite dramatic theses about religious belief, including the claim that what is sometimes called the propositional nature of religious belief is frequently misunderstood by philosophers, and that this misunderstanding involves a distortion of what religious believers are doing when they say they (...) believe in God and engage in various religious practices. This paper explores these and other claims in the light of recent interesting attempts to defend them, especially in the work of Patrick Horn. I elaborate the distinction between the propositional and expressive dimensions of religious belief, and argue that Horn does not succeed in rescuing Phillips’s view from a number of serious philosophical objections, including the objection that theirs is a metaphorical interpretation of religion. I suggest also that Horn’s and Phillips’s fideistic versions of religious belief and religious phenomena may involve an element of self-deception, and would likely lead to people giving up their religious beliefs, or at least to their beliefs playing a decreasing role in their everyday lives. (shrink)

This collection of ten essays “by a team of leading philosophers, social scientists, intellectual historians and literary critics” aims to critically engage Jürgen Habermas’s critique of postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Five of the essays have been previously published, and Habermas’s essay, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” is also reprinted here. The book also contains a very helpful introduction by Passerin d’Entrèves, and an index.