Internal Realism and the Problem of Religious Diversity

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities.

Internalist Foundationalism and the Problem of the Epistemic Regress*

I provide a construal of the epistemic regress problem and I take issue with the contention that a foundationalist solution is incompatible with an internalist account of warrant. I sketch a foundationalist solution to the regress problem that respects a plausible version of internalism. I end with the suggestion that the strategy that I have presented is not available only to the traditional versions of foundationalism that ascribe foundational status to experiential beliefs. It can also be used to generate a version of internalist foundationalism based on reliabilist principles.     

宗教理解和宗教多元论问题

我们几乎都能肯定,诸宗教之问或多或少都有"排他"倾向,认为真理掌握在自己的手里,其他宗教信仰或多或少是错误的.一般宗教都在宣传自己的优越性,为自己的存在合理性寻找依据,即使是那些自认为是"非宗教的宗教"也是如此.     

Mapping Contemporary Europe's Moral and Religious Pluralist Landscape: An Analysis Based on the Most Recent European Values Study Data

We explore the less prominent and often neglected issues of religious and moral pluralism in contemporary European society. Using the survey data from the most recent European Values Study (EVS), the patterns of religious and moral pluralism are investigated. Analyses of the previous EVS data demonstrated that Europe is not homogeneous. European countries differ not only in levels of economic development, but also in cultural heritages, languages, religious and ideological traditions, and educational and political systems. Variety in the degrees to which European societies are religiously and morally pluralistic was expected. Several hypotheses were developed to explain this variety. Our analyses do not support most of the generally accepted hypotheses.     

The Problem of Theodicy and Religious Response to Cancer

The authors studied the religious response to cancer in a group of hematology/ oncology-clinic patients. Method: Patients (N = 45) were surveyed with a self-report questionnaire. Five items were designed to reflect the five major categories of theodicy or modes of reconciling suffering with a morally good God. Results: Of the 45 patients, in response to their illness, 67% (N = 30) increased amount of prayer, 51% (N = 23) gained faith, and 16% (N = 7) increased the frequency of church attendance. The majority of patients across all levels of religious belief endorse a theodicy that claims God has a reason for their suffering, but this reason cannot be explained or understood. Conclusions: Religious cancer patients intensify their religious belief and practice in response to their illness. Despite the elusiveness of an explanation for their suffering in religious terms, patients remain confident in their faith.     

An All Too Radical Solution to the Problem of Evil: a Reply to Harrison

Gerald Harrison has recently argued the evidential problem of evil can be resolved if we assume the moral facts are identical to God’s commands or favorings. On a theistic metaethics, the moral facts are identical to what God commands or favors. Our moral intuitions reflect what God commands or favors for us to do, but not what God favors for Herself to do. Thus, on Harrison’s view, while we can know the moral facts as they pertain to humans, we cannot know the moral facts as they pertain to God. Therefore, Harrison argues, the evidential problem of evil inappropriately assumes God to be intuitively moral, when we have no reason to suppose a perfectly good being would match the expectations provided by our moral intuitions. Harrison calls his view a new form of skeptical theism. In response, I show Harrison’s attempt to dissolve the problem of evil exacerbates well-known skeptical consequences of skeptical theism. Harrison’s new skeptical theism leaves us with problems motivating a substantive religious life, the inability to provide a variety of theological explanations, and, despite Harrison’s comments to the contrary, worsens problems having to do with the possibility of divine deception.     

Religious Commitment and the Benefits of Cognitive Diversity: a Reply to Trakakis

Metaphilosophical discussions about the philosophy of religion are increasingly common. In a recent article in Sophia, N.N. Trakakis (56:605–630, 2017) advances the view that Christian Philosophy is closer to ideology than philosophy. This is because philosophy conducted in the Socratic tradition tends to emphasize values antithetical to religious faith such as independence of thought, rationality, empiricism, and doubt. A philosopher must be able to follow the arguments wherever they lead, something that the religious believer cannot do. I argue that there are two main problems with this view. First, Takakis faces an unpalatable dilemma. It is possible his view recommends a rejection of itself, making it self-referentially incoherent. If it does not recommend such a rejection, then Trakakis’s preferred method is not necessary for genuine philosophical inquiry. Second, Trakakis makes numerous knowledge claims about the psychological motivation of religious philosophers but never offers evidence for these claims. Third, Trakakis never considers that the existence of cognitive diversity is truth conducive. Even if devout religious believers cannot conduct genuine philosophical inquiry, unless Trakakis thinks we should ignore all works by religious believers, then it is irrelevant whether they are genuine philosophy.     

On the Functionalization of Pluralist Approaches to Truth

Traditional inflationary approaches that specify the nature of truth are attractive in certain ways; yet, while many of these theories successfully explain why propositions in certain domains of discourse are true, they fail to adequately specify the nature of truth because they run up against counterexamples when attempting to generalize across all domains. One popular consequence is skepticism about the efficaciousness of inflationary approaches altogether. Yet, by recognizing that the failure to explain the truth of disparate propositions often stems from inflationary approaches allegiance to alethic monism, pluralist approaches are able to avoid this explanatory inadequacy and the resulting skepticism, though at the cost of inviting other conceptual difficulties. A novel approach, alethic functionalism, attempts to circumvent the problems faced by pluralist approaches while preserving their main insights. Unfortunately, it too generates additional problems – namely, with its suspect appropriation of the multiple realizability paradigm and its platitude-based strategy – that need to be dissolved before it can constitute an adequate inflationary approach to the nature of truth.     

Consciousness and Hegel's Solution to the Problem of the Criterion

Traditional epistemological interpretations have portrayed Hegel as offering a coherentist solution to the problem of the criterion in the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this paper, I criticize the coherentist interpretation and present an alternative reading that emphasizes the central role of conscious experience in Hegel's argument. In the first part of the paper, I show how the passages commonly used to support the coherentist interpretation ultimately fail to do so and argue that coherence by itself cannot be the lynchpin for an adequate solution to the problem of the criterion. In the second part, I then develop a novel interpretation of Hegel's argument by drawing attention to the fact that Hegel formulates both the problem of the criterion and his solution to it in terms of consciousness.     

Religious Experience,Development, and Diversity

Pastoral Psychology - Religious experience is a complex construct susceptible to various forms of influence. As religious experience is a very broad construct, this paper focuses primarily on one...     

Another Solution to the Problem of Theoretical Terms

In this paper, a solution to the problem of theoretical terms is developed that is based on Carnap’s doctrine of indirect interpretation of theoretical terms. This doctrine will be given a semantic, model-theoretic explanation that is not given by Carnap himself as he remains content with a syntactic explanation. From that semantic explanation, rules for the truth-value assignment to postulates, i.e. sentences that determine the meaning of theoretical terms, are derived. The logical status of postulates will be clarified thereby in such a way that the problem of theoretical terms disappears.

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A Modest Solution to the Problem of Rule-following

A modest solution to the problem(s) of rule-following is defended against Kripkensteinian scepticism about meaning. Even though parts of it generalise to other concepts, the theory as a whole applies to response-dependent concepts only. It is argued that the finiteness problem is not nearly as pressing for such concepts as it may be for some other kinds of concepts. Furthermore, the modest theory uses a notion of justification as sensitivity to countervailing conditions in order to solve the justification problem. Finally, in order to solve the normativity problem, it relies on substantial specifications of normal conditions such as those that have been proposed by Crispin Wright and Mark Johnston, rather than on Philip Pettit's functionalist specification. This theory is modest in that it does not meet the demands of Kripke's sceptic in full. Arguments are provided as to why this is not needed.