Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief

Abstract

"Based on the proceedings of the fourteenth annual conference on the philosophy of religion at the Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, Calif., in Feb. 1993"--Preface. The papers in this collection present a diversity of views on the epistemology of religious belief. There is a diversity of views about the intelligibility of particular religious beliefs: for example, about the reality of God's existence and of miracles. There is further disagreement concerning the reasonableness of religious belief itself. Some contributors argue that locating grounds for believing in God is still a fruitful undertaking. Both issues raise the problem of the philosopher's position vis-a-vis religious belief. Are philosophers in a privileged position to determine either the reasonableness or the intelligibility of religious belief? Or is philosophy, properly understood, a descriptive task? The papers in this collection present a diversity of views on this issue, too. Drawing on the works of Kierkegaard, a few of the contributors argue that philosophical description cannot be neatly divorced from religious persuasion. Whatever their views on these issues, however, the contributors accept that philosophical discussion cannot proceed very far without attention to what religious believers say about their beliefs and the practices in which they take part. At the mercy of method / D.Z. Phillips -- Taking the curse off language-games : a realist account of doxastic practices / William P. Alston -- The squirrel does not infer by induction : Wittgenstein and the natural history of religion / John Churchill -- Anselm and Phillips on religious realism / Stephen T. Davis -- Religion and 'really believing' : belief and the real / M. Jamie Ferreira -- Tradition, authority and the hiddenness of God / Gareth Moore -- Can anything be beyond human understanding? / Kai Nielsen -- Violations of nature and conditions of sense / Anthony Palmer -- Asking too many questions / Peter Winch -- Religion and Wittgenstein's legacy : beyond fideism and language games / Richard H. Bell -- Putting two and two together : Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the point of view for their work as authors / James Conant -- Plantinga and the rationality of religious belief / Gary Gutting -- Can a purely grammatical inquiry be religiously persuasive? / John H. Whittaker -- Voices in discussion / D.Z. Phillips.