Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue - Hardcover

9780199672158: Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199672156 ISBN 13: 9780199672158

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

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.

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About the Author:

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.

Review:

"This collection of essays gathers together diverse definitions of religious faith and intellectual virtue, as its contributors are both theists and atheists...the questions this volume raises themselves cause the reader who is also an educator to reflect critically on the cultivation of intellectual virtues (or lack thereof) in his or her own classroom--a humbling and fruitful form of self-examination in itself." --International Journal of Christianity & Education

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