PHIL 743

Philosophy of Religion 2


Please note: this is archived course information from 2019 for PHIL 743.

Description

The focus of this course is on the epistemology of religious belief and the nature of faith. Can religious belief be justifiable even if it turns out that the truth of its factual claims is not adequately supported by our total available evidence in accordance with our established practices for settling factual questions? Where factual evidence falls short, might an ethical evaluation of religious beliefs, or of the consequences of holding them, provide justification for (certain forms of) religious commitment?

We will consider the current state of the debate between evidentialists and fideists over the justifiability of religious belief, and recent work on faith, including an emerging tendency to defend ‘non-doxastic’ accounts of faith (that is, accounts which hold that there could be, for example, authentic Christian faith without any actual belief that central Christian doctrines are true). A good place to start is with the papers collected in Laura Frances Callahan and Timothy O’Connor, eds, Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue, Oxford University Press, 2014.

View the course syllabus

Availability 2019

Not taught in 2019

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Professor John Bishop

Recommended Reading

Suggestions for preliminary reading will be available from the Course Director.

Points

PHIL 743: 15 points