Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:51:16.977Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Fragility of Faith: Toward a Critique of Reformed Epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David Wisdo
David Wisdo
Affiliation:
Divinity School, Yale University, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction. To acknowledge affliction means saying to oneself: I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose.(Simon Weil)

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 365 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 365 note 1 Weil, Simone, ‘Human Personality’, in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. Panichas, George A. (New York: David McKay, 1977), p. 332.Google Scholar

page 365 note 2 This turn of phrase is intended as a reminder that this essay is in keeping with the spirit of Nussbaum's, MarthaThe Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

page 365 note 3 Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 16–93.Google Scholar

page 367 note 1 For a more detailed treatment of what can constitute a ‘defeater’ as well as a ‘defeater for a defeater’, see Foley, Richard, The Epistemic Theory of Rationality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 18 if.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The distinction between potential and genuine defeaters is treated on pp. 42 ff

page 368 note 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Viking Press, 1974), Pp. 245–6.Google Scholar

page 368 note 2 Taylor, Charles, ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 45–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 369 note 1 Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1993–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Pp. 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 369 note 2 Ibid. p. 12.

page 369 note 3 Kierkegaard, Soren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Swenson, David F. and Lowrie, Walter (Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 19.Google Scholar

page 369 note 4 Ibid.

page 370 note 1 Ibid.

page 372 note 1 Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)Google Scholar and God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman, 1977.

page 373 note 1 God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 23.

page 373 note 2 Ibid. p. 54.

page 373 note 3 See Mackie, J. L., The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), esp. pp. 173–6.Google Scholar and Kenny, Anthony, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), esp. p. 70.Google Scholar

page 374 note 1 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Garnett, Constance, revised and edited by Matlaw, Ralph E. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 216.Google Scholar

page 374 note 2 God, Freedom, and Evil, pp. 63–4.

page 374 note 3 A good example of how Ivan's atheism might lend itself to philosophical reflection can be found in Sutherland's, StewartAtheism and the Rejection of God (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), esp. pp. 25–40.Google Scholar