Brendan Sweetman

The emergence of modernity in Western thinking entails a new, radically different worldview from the past, one dominated by secular understandings of history and tradition, and of new forms of what Cochran calls “collective consciousness.” Modernity also requires a rethinking of the role of human knowledge in the world. Cochran’s aim is to explore the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of these developments by looking at the ideas of a variety of thinkers, and by focusing in particular on the rise of the print medium, the book, as the dominant medium for recording, preserving, and disseminating thought. By modernity, Cochran means the world’s “relative disengagement from a theologically grounded view of human history”. His approach is fundamentally postmodernist, although he mentions few postmodernists in his exposition; he is inspired mainly by critical theory, especially Gramsci. He wants to challenge the traditional view of the progress of knowledge, which he believes was strongly influenced in terms of its theoretical understanding by Leibniz and Kant. This is the view that history is linear: that we are always adding to the sum total of knowledge, which inevitably opens a distinction between the present and the past; that we learn from the past, and project toward a better future. This view is fundamentally against the relativistic tendencies of the modern age, and it contributed to the emergence of several concepts that became central to our understanding of culture: the totality of human knowledge, adding to knowledge, the university as center of knowledge, the scholarly expert, the emergence of the subject, the expert informing the public, and so on.

This book illustrates the profound implications of Gabriel Marcel's unique existentialist approach to epistemology not only for traditional themes in his work concerning ethics and the transcendent, but also for epistemological issues, concerning the objectivity of knowledge, the problem of skepticism, and the nature of non-conceptual knowledge, among others. There are also chapters of dialogue with philosophers, Jacques Maritain and Martin Buber. In focusing on these themes, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the literature on Marcel.Brendan Sweetman, a native of Dublin, Ireland, is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO, USA. His books include Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (InterVarsity, 2006) and Religion: Key Concepts in Philosophy (Continuum Books, 2007). He has coauthored or coedited several other books, including Truth and Religious Belief (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), and Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 1992). Professor Sweetman has published more than fifty articles and reviews in a variety of collections and journals, including International Philosophical Quarterly, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophia Christi, and Review of Metaphysics. He writes regularly in the areas of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, political philosophy and ethics.

This paper considers two related claims in the work of D. Z. Phillips: that commitment to God precludes a distinction between the commitment and the grounds for the commitment, and that belief and understanding are the same in religion. Both these claims motivate Phillips’s rejection of natural theology. I examine these claims by analyzing the notion of commitment, discussing what is involved in making a commitment to a worldview, why commitment is necessary at all in religion, levels of commitment, and commitment and justification. I show that Phillips fails to distinguish between adopting a hypothesis, where justification would be germane, and committing to the hypothesis after one has adopted it, where justification is not so pressing. This failure fatally undermines his rejection of natural theology.