A realist epistemology of faith

2005 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL A. MACDONALD
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Cognitive State ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Central Claim

In this paper, I analyse and interpret Thomas Aquinas's account of faith in order to show how Thomistic faith is a veridical cognitive state that directs the mind to God, and consequently constitutes a distinct form of knowledge of God. By assenting to the revealed propositions of faith (which express the truth about God), and thereby forming true beliefs about God under the authority and guidance of God's grace, the possessor of faith comes to know or apprehend truly something about God, even if she fails to ‘see’ or know fully the truth that she believes. A further task of the paper is to show how Thomistic faith qualifies (at least potentially) as knowledge from a contemporary epistemological standpoint, insofar as it consists of true belief that is appropriately justified and warranted, by virtue of being supernaturally informed and generated. By expositing and defending this central claim – focusing specifically on faith as a form of knowledge – I show how Aquinas offers an epistemologically realist account of faith.

Freedom and Responsibility

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-184
Author(s):  
Thomas H. McCall ◽  
Keith D. Stanglin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

In Chapter 4, we survey how claims to knowledge of God were defended in the nineteenth-century Methodist context; we look both at the theological methods that were employed and how apologetic impulses functioned within those prolegomena. Turning to the doctrine of God, we trace some of the momentous changes that took place as Wesleyan theology wrestled with modern challenges in relation to its classical inheritance (especially in relation to classical doctrines of perfection, simplicity, aseity, immutability, and omniscience as well as Trinitarian theology). With regard to theological anthropology, we see how the major Methodist theologians wrestled not only with long-standing disputes (for example, the mind–body relation) but also with current debates (for example, race and ethnicity). We trace the Wesleyan debates (both internally, and against traditional Reformed theology as well as revisionism and modernism) over the doctrine of original sin.

Ignorance and Its Disvalue

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-447
Author(s):  
Anne Meylan
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
True Proposition ◽  
Cognitive State ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Knowledge Account ◽  
Normative Account

Abstract It is commonly accepted – not only in the philosophical literature but also in daily life – that ignorance is a failure of some sort. As a result, a desideratum of any ontological account of ignorance is that it must be able to explain why there is something wrong with being ignorant of a true proposition. This article shows two things. First, two influential accounts of ignorance – the Knowledge Account and the True Belief Account – do not satisfy this requirement. They fail to provide a satisfying normative account of the badness of ignorance. Second, this article suggests an alternative explanation of what makes ignorance a bad cognitive state. In a nutshell, ignorance is bad because it is the manifestation of a vice, namely, of what Cassam calls “epistemic insouciance”.

On Graves' Disease with Insanity

1875 ◽  
Vol 20 (92) ◽  
pp. 573-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Graves Disease ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
The Mind

Before narrating the case which is the basis of this communication, I shall briefly advert to the leading features, and the views held regarding the nature of the remarkable neurosis with whose discovery the name of the late eminent Dublin Professor, Dr. Graves, is most frequently associated. The dependence of the psychical and somatic phenomena on one cause, common to both, will thus be more clearly demonstrated, and the claim which it seems to me the disorder of the mind has to be regarded as a distinct form of insanity will be more apparent.

Nebuchadnezzar and the animal mind (Daniel 4)

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Jared Beverly
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Animal Ethics ◽  
Animal Mind ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Special Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Alternative Reading

The case of King Nebuchadnezzar’s animal episode in Daniel 4 has typically been read in ways that pathologize animality. I argue, however, that the Hebrew Bible demonstrates at least two views of animals and knowledge: one which casts them as ignorant and stupid and one which celebrates their knowledge, especially knowledge of the divine. Rather than reading Nebuchadnezzar’s experience through the former tradition, I offer an alternative reading in which nonhuman animals are seen as having knowledge, even a special knowledge of the divine. Nebuchadnezzar’s animalization need not be read as punishment or madness, but rather it is meant to educate him. When Nebuchadnezzar is given the ‘mind of an animal’ (4.13), the goal is to reach a better knowledge of God through this animal mind. Finally, I conclude with thoughts about how this interpretation avoids the pitfalls of conflating animality with madness and its relevance for animal ethics today.

Matthew of Aquasparta (c.1238–1302)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen F. Brown
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Actual Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Mind

Matthew walked in the footsteps of Bonaventure, which were widened by his first followers, Walter of Bruges, John Pecham and William of Mare. For them, the knowledge of God’s existence is the first truth implanted in the human mind. God’s existence cannot be proved a priori (from something prior to it), since it is the first truth. It is a truth that is immediately known, not in the sense that there is actual knowledge of God implanted in the mind at birth, but because any judgment we make presupposes that the mind has contact with the Truth that is the measure of all truth. Such a first Truth must exist.

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-151
Author(s):  
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Process Reliabilism ◽  
Proper Functionalism ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mere True Belief ◽  
Better Than

This chapter is Zagzebski’s first paper that discusses “the value problem,” or the problem that an account of knowledge must identify what makes knowledge better than mere true belief. One of the problems with reliabilism is that it does not explain what makes the good of knowledge greater than the good of true belief. In Virtues of the Mind she gave this objection only to process reliabilism. In this chapter she develops the objection in more detail, and argues that the problem pushes first in the direction of three offspring of process reliabilism—faculty reliabilism, proper functionalism, and agent reliabilism, and she then argues that an account of knowledge based on virtuous motives grounded in the motive for truth can solve the value problem.

Anamorphosis and Subjectivity in the Space of Reasons

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Dominik Finkelde ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
True Belief ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Space Of Reasons ◽  
The Mind

Jacques Lacan comments repeatedly on anamorphic art as it exemplifies for him how the mind from a certain angle perceives through law-like patterns the world that would otherwise be nothing but a chaos of arbitrary multiplicities. The angle, though, has a certain effect on what is perceived; an effect that, as such, cannot be perceived within the realm of experience. The article tries to make the link between diffraction laws of perception more explicit in the subject-object dichotomy and refers for that purpose to the work of both Hegel and Lacan. A reference to Hegel is necessary, as Hegel was not only one of Lacan’s own most important sources of insights, but the author who first focused on justified true belief through a theory of a missed encounter between truth and knowledge.

Virtues and Vices of Virtue Epistemology

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Greco
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Generality Problem ◽  
Ernest Sosa ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Recent Interest ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cognitive Virtue ◽  
Central Claim

In recent years, virtue epistemology has won the attention of a wide range of philosophers. A developed form of the position has been expounded forcefully by Ernest Sosa and represents the most plausible version of reliabilism to date. Through the person of Alvin Plantinga, virtue epistemology has taken philosophy of religion by storm, evoking objections and defenses in a wide variety of journals and volumes. Historically, virtue epistemology has its roots in the work of Thomas Reid, and the explosion of Reid scholarship in the last few years is perhaps both a cause and an effect of recent interest in the position.In this paper I want to examine the virtues and vices of virtue epistemology. My conclusion will be that the position is correct, when qualified appropriately. The central claim of virtue epistemology is that, Gettier problems aside, knowledge is true belief which results from a cognitive virtue. In section one I will clarify this claim with some brief remarks about the nature of virtues in general, and cognitive virtues in particular. In section two I will consider two objections to the theory of knowledge which results. In section three of the paper I will argue that virtue epistemology can be qualified so as to avoid the objections raised in section two. Finally, I will argue that the amendments which solve the objections of section two also allow us to solve a version of the dreaded generality problem.

There is No Searching for the Self: Self-Knowledge in Book Ten of Augustine’s De Trinitate

Phronesis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-300
Author(s):  
Mateusz Stróżyński
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
De Trinitate ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

Abstract This article explores the conception of self-knowledge in book 10 of Augustine’s De Trinitate. Augustine starts from the worry in Plato’s Meno that one cannot search for something entirely unknown and engages with Plotinus, Ennead 5.3 in developing his own understanding of the mind’s self-knowledge. He concludes that this knowledge is paradoxical in nature: it is necessary and, at the same time, futile; and it is separated from the knowledge of God. Augustine reaches this point by rejecting the Aristotelian identity of the knower with the known, as well as by grounding self-knowledge in the fact of the mind’s intimate presence to itself. Ultimately, self-knowledge appears to be an ‘objectless’ knowledge, a knowledge that the mind exists rather than knowledge of what the mind is.

scholarly journals “The Golden Age of Patristics”: Hellenophonic Patristic Discourse in the 4th–6th Centuries

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Д. С. Верланов
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Church

In the early 4th century the Roman Empire suffered a number of important socio-political changes. TheEdict of Milan (313), having recognised in full the existence of the Church and its rights for worship, declaredreligions toleration, and put the end to the era of persecutions, but at the same time actualised and reinforced thestruggle of ideas between Christians and pagans. This controversy between Christians and pagans contributedimmensely to process of the becoming of Christian intellectual culture. In order to answer the most burningquestions and challenges of the time, the fathers of the Church deepened understanding and interpretation ofthe message of the Bible, created a large moral and ascetic literature, designed the dogmatic system. The mainpurpose of the present study is to specify the origins and main directions of patristic thought. In order to dothis I examine how fathers of the Church solve complex philosophical and theological issues, focusing on theepistemic aspect of the issue.According to the patristic tradition, the first step to acquire the true knowledge is to cleanse the self fromevery impurity of sin and passions. It is attained through keeping God’s commandments and maintaining asceticefforts. The sign of correct spiritual growth is a specific ability to penetrate into nature of things, which thefathers call “διάκρισις”. The fathers of the Church and Christian writers of the epoch recognise this ability asa religio-intuitive. One who receives this gift of divine grace becomes able of self-knowledge, distinguishingbetween good and evil, and understanding of the will of God. A Christian who possesses it becomes fully awareof personal spiritual condition, and as a result becomes capable to make the right choice of the way of salvation.There are two sources of the knowledge of God: natural (from the experience of being into the world) andsupernatural (divine revelation). The cognitive process therefore has two major aspects: sensual and speculative.The senses allow knowing God from his creation, as the mind or intellect enables man to contemplating ofincorporeal. The latter aspect enables one to self-knowledge or introspection and contemplation of the mind orsoul, which has been created in the image and likeness of God.The clarification of the Hellenophonic patristic discourse in 4th–6th centuries, on a large scale, allowsreconstructing another important phenomenon of this period, known as the “Golden Age” of Patristics.

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