scholarly journals Indirect epistemic reasons and religious belief

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIRK LOUGHEED ◽  
ROBERT MARK SIMPSON

AbstractIf believing P will result in epistemically good outcomes, does this generate an epistemic reason to believe P, or just a pragmatic reason? Conceiving of such reasons as epistemic reasons seems to lead to absurdity, e.g. by allowing that someone can rationally hold beliefs that conflict with her assessment of her evidence's probative force. We explain how this and other intuitively unwelcome results can be avoided. We also suggest a positive case for conceiving of such reasons as epistemic reasons, namely, that they exhibit a form of interpersonal normative parity that's typical of epistemic reasons but not pragmatic reasons. We then link this discussion to religious belief, suggesting that there are sometimes indirect epistemic reasons for religious belief, and that certain characterizations of religious belief are instructive in thinking about how to take account of indirect epistemic reasons.

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-260
Author(s):  
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

This chapter begins by distinguishing two kinds of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Here the kinds of reasons that are irreducibly first personal are called “deliberative reasons,” and the kinds of reasons that are third personal are called “theoretical reasons.” The use of the terms “deliberative” and “theoretical” is not essential to the distinction being made, but these terms draw attention to the different functions of the two kinds of reasons in psychology. Epistemic self-trust is an irreducibly first personal epistemic reason, and it is the most basic reason of either kind. Attacks on religious belief are sometimes third personal, but sometimes they are first personal attacks on self-trust or trust in religious communities. Attacks on self-trust require a different kind of response than attacks on third person reasons.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski

In this paper I argue that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons. One kind is irreducibly first personal – what I call deliberative reasons. The other kind is third personal – what I call theoretical reasons. I argue that attending to this distinction illuminates a host of problems in epistemology in general and in religious epistemology in particular. These problems include (a) the way religious experience operates as a reason for religious belief, (b) how we ought to understand religious testimony, (c) how religious authority can be justified, (d) the problem of religious disagreement, and (e) the reasonableness of religious conversion.


1965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor B. Cline ◽  
James M. Richards
Keyword(s):  

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Ravi Vasudevan

This article focuses on the specific Indian cinematic form of the Hindu devotional film genre to explore the relationship between cinema and religion. Using three important early films from the devotional oeuvre—Gopal Krishna, Sant Dnyaneshwar, and Sant Tukaram—as the primary referent, it tries to understand certain characteristic patterns in the narrative structures of these films, and the cultures of visuality and address, miraculous manifestation, and witnessing and self-transformation that they generate. These three films produced by Prabhat Studios between the years 1936 and 1940 and all directed by Vishnupant Damle and Syed Fattelal, drew upon the powerful anti-hierarchical traditions of Bhakti, devotional worship that circumvented Brahmanical forms. This article will argue that the devotional film crucially undertakes a work of transformation in the perspectives on property, and that in this engagement it particularly reviews the status of the household in its bid to generate a utopian model of unbounded community. The article will also consider the status of technologies of the miraculous that are among the central attractions of the genre, and afford a reflection on the relation between cinema technology, popular religious belief and desire, and film spectatorship.


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