3 - Philosophy's perpetual polarities: anti-realism and realism

Summary

I have spoken of the anti-rational outlooks in mainly negative terms in the last chapter. But there is also an extremely valuable service they have provided with respect to our own main goal of preserving rational integrity in theological thinking. In demonstrating the attack on reason to be most essentially an attack on end-orientedness or intentional reference in thinking, they have refocused and given a new and sharpened relevance to what must be the main task for any endeavour that wants to speak on behalf of the integrity of reason. Put simply, a defence of rational integrity will have to show how end-oriented thinking, that is, intentional-referential reasoning, is not a ruse, not merely a fabrication or an imposition, but rather the reflection, in Kantian terms, of something like a fundamental need of reason. In other words – and here we come back to one of the pivotal assertions of chapter 1 – the primary task in making the case for the integrity of reason will be to provide compelling and if possible indefeasible ways of accounting for obligation in reason or, what amounts to the same thing, of accounting for the intrinsic, self-orienting nature of reason.

To provide such an account of rational integrity for theological purposes is the first of the two major concerns of this book; and it is to that task that we now turn in the present and the following three chapters.