Accidentally Factive Mental States

Knowledge is standardly taken to be belief that is both true and justified (and perhaps meets other conditions as well). Timothy Williamson rejects the standard epistemology for its inability to solve the Gettier problem. the moral of this failure, he argues, is that knowledge does not factor into a combination that includes a mental state (belief) and an external condition (truth), but is itself a type of mental state. Knowledge is, according to his preferred account, the most general factive mental state. I argue, however, that Gettier cases pose a serious problem for Williamson's epistemology: in these cases, the subject may have a factive mental state that fails to be cognitive. Hence, knowledge cannot be the most general factive mental state.     

Self-Knowledge and Rationality

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent's intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view.     

Response to Filatov and Stepina on Lutheranism in Russia

I have been reading the book Religiya i obshchestvo: ocherki religioznoi zhizni sovremennoi Rossii recently published by Letny Sad. If my understanding is correct, the publication of this book was financed by Keston Institute and it claims to be an ‘Encyclopedia of religious life in Russia today’. Most of the chapters are by the editor of the book, the Moscow sociologist Sergei Filatov. I was particularly interested in the chapter ‘Katoliki i katolitsizm v Rossii’, having a longstanding concern with Catholic-Protestant relations, and also of course the chapter ‘Rossiiskoye lyuteranstvo’. For the last 25 years I have been closely involved in church life in Latvia and, through the will of Providence, with the regeneration of the Lutheran Church in Russia. Any information about Lutheranism, including scholarly work on the subject, is of course extremely important for me, especially when it deals not just with practical aspects of the revival of a traditional confession in the Russian Federation, but also with individual personalities and their involvement in bringing this revival about. The chapter ‘Rosiiskoye lyuteranstvo’ describes the complex process of the revival of Lutheranism in Russia, but also deals with the identity of Lutheranism in the difficult and troubled conditions in Russia today. It is true that there are three, five, perhaps more types of Lutheranism involved, including the Finno-Scandinavian type (supported by some of the American Lutherans), the very liberal West German type, and the ‘new Russian’ (‘novorossiiskoye’) Lutheranism (as I call it), which is asserting its independence both from narrow nationalism and from western superliberalism, while at the same time working out a new synthesis of the Reformation heritage in the difficult conditions in our country. Here I agree with the sociologists who wrote this chapter: for Russian Lutheranism to achieve theological independence it will need more trained theologians from amongst the Russian Lutherans themselves.