Guy Axtell

Although there has been little written to date that speaks directly to problems of religious luck, described in other terms these problems have a long history. Contemporary contributors to the literature have referred to “soteriological luck” (Anderson 2011) “salvific luck” (Davidson 1999) and “religious luck” (Zagzebski 1994). Using “religious” as the unifying term, Part I of this monograph begins with the need a more comprehensive taxonomy. Serious philosophic interest in moral and epistemic luck took hold only after comprehensive taxonomies for those kinds of luck were introduced, but this has not yet been done for religious luck. Even if incomplete, the more comprehensive taxonomy, as introduced in Chapter One enables better diagnostic questions to be raised for researchers. Emerging questions about potentially ‘luck leaning’ attributions of good/bad religious luck, and of the possibility and desirability of “luck free theologies,” are questions which I hope to motivate as of central interest to researchers in philosophy of religion, both secular and religious. The taxonomy highlights why we should take two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — to be inextricably connected. The connection between attributing good/bad luck and violating inductive norms is easy to see upon reflection. One related distinction common in recent work on epistemic luck is that between benign evidential luck (‘benign’ because consistent with justified belief and knowledge), and malign (positive epistemic status undercutting) veritic luck. How, philosophically, this distinction should be understood is an especially acute problem when it comes to testimonial trust, and to intellectually virtuous or vicious ways of assessing testimonial claims, and sources of claims. So the chapter concludes with development of the case of Tess, as an example of testimonial environmental veritic luck. The Tess case is constructed to be formally analogous to the environmental veritic luck operating in fake barn cases (where visual perception rather than reception of testimony is the source of the agent’s belief). There does seem to be an intrinsic connection between epistemic assessment of the agent’s beliefs and the inductive context in which their own and their religious community’s inquiry takes place. This will allow for some potentially powerful thought experiments in successive chapters, about luck, risk, and questions of epistemic in/justice as they pertain to religious faith ventures.

Walls can be physical; they can also be psychological, social, political, economic, and ontological. Theological walls are ontological and typically also moral, though when we break down the “religion/non-religion” distinction and consider other dimensions of religious life beyond doctrinal ones, they are also psychological, social, and increasingly political. Among Enlightenment era philosophers eager to provide a genealogy of religious and political divisiveness was Rousseau, who held that “Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable.” Yet despite this perceptive critique, contemporary religious apologetics for salvific and/or doctrinal exclusivism still abound. Indeed, self-described “post-liberal” apologetics is often insular, and promotive of the view that polarized and polemical religious apologetics should be taken as a normal state of affairs. In this paper I argue against this view where ‘good fences to make good neighbors.’ The paper aims to explain how post-liberal apologetics has had a significant dampening effect on comparative and global philosophy. But while a critique of post-liberalism’s retrenchment strategies would seem largely negative, the main burden of the paper is to provide a positive response to it, one which reaffirms genuine “engagement” as a method and goal of global philosophy. One key to success in this endeavor is establishing a methodologically proper balance between concerns for similarity and uniqueness, or form and content. I try to show how establishing this balance is better-achieved when comparative philosophy is taken as multi-disciplinary study, able to utilize insights from not just from philosophic and theological traditions but also from psychology and the emerging field of cognitive science of religions.

This volume considers forms of information manipulation and restriction in contemporary society. It explores whether and when manipulation of the conditions of inquiry without the consent of those manipulated is morally or epistemically justified. The contributors provide a wealth of examples of manipulation, and debate whether epistemic paternalism is distinct from other forms of paternalism debated in political theory. Special attention is given to medical practice, for science communication, and for research in science, technology, and society. Some of the contributors argue that unconsenting interference with people’s ability of inquire is consistent with, and others that it is inconsistent with, efforts to democratize knowledge and decision-making. These differences invite theoretical reflection regarding which goods are fundamental, whether there is a clear or only a moving boundary between informing and instructing, and whether manipulation of people’s epistemic conditions amounts to a type of intellectual injustice. The collection pays special attention to contemporary paternalistic practices in big data and scientific research, as the way in which the flow of information or knowledge might be curtailed by the manipulations of a small body of experts or algorithms.

In Greek mythology the Muses –patron goddesses of fine arts, history, humanities, and sciences– are tellingly portrayed as the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess Memory, who is of the race of Titans, older still than Zeus and other Olympian deities. The relationship between memory and such fields as epic poetry, history, music and dance is easily recognizable to moderns. But bards/poets like Homer and Hesiod, who began oral storytelling by “invoking the Muses” with their audience, knew well that remembering, forgetting, and imagining are each to be esteemed as, in Hesiod’s words, “gifts of the goddesses.” The economy of memory is an important concern for moral psychology, philosophy of emotions, and philosophy of imagination. This chapter examines ways that amusements, both classically and today, can function to educate moral emotions in and though their multi-faceted engagements with the economy of memory.

This chapter focuses on the responses that proponents of virtue epistemology (VE) make to radical skepticism and particularly to two related forms of it, Pyrrhonian skepticism and the “underdetermination-based” argument, both of which have been receiving widening attention in recent debate. Section 1 of the chapter briefly articulates these two skeptical arguments and their interrelationship, while section 2 explains the close connection between a virtue-theoretic and a neo-Moorean response to them. In sections 3 and 4 I advance arguments for improving the prospects of virtue-theoretic responses, sketching a particular version of VE that by recasting somewhat how we understand the “externalist turn in epistemology” also suggests ways of improving the adequacy of philosophical diagnoses and responses to skepticism.

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]

This book is a major contribution to a growing literature in character-based or responsibilist epistemology. One point I criticize is the author's claim that intellectual virtues must be “indexed to world views” (318) which is line-drawing maneuver that would remove religious beliefs deemed basic in a given tradition from rational criticism. Still, the overall effect of the authors’ regulative epistemology is nevertheless to put religious believers and secularists, and again Christian and non-Christian faith traditions, on a far better path towards mutual understanding and respect.

The faults of logical empiricist accounts of metascientific discourse are examined through a study of the modifications Carnap makes to his version of the program over four decades. As empiricists acquiesced on the distinction between theory and observation, Carnap attempted to retain and insulate an equally suspect sharp distinction between the theoretic and the pragmatic. Carnap's later philosophy was understood as a modification of the program in the direction of pragmatism. But neither the key notion of "external questions" nor an instrumentalist understanding of "pragmatic utility" are genuinely compatible with pragmatism. This underlines the need to clarify what is unique to pragmatic views of cognitive evaluation and normative discourse as they affect scientific reasoning. I conclude by suggesting how pragmatic conceptions of metascientific discourse can work to correct misconceptions about norm generation and governance that are shared in logicist and historicist accounts.

Philosophical anthropologist Mircea Eliade once said that "the union of opposites" is a basic category of archaic ontology and comparative world religions. In this paper I develop the theory of contrariety or opposition as a prime focus for East/West comparative philosophy. The paper considers especially Nishida Kitaro's later works and the complex phrase "zettai mujuntekijikodbitsu," variously translated by Schinzinger as "absolute contradictory self-identity," "the self-identity of absolute contradictories," or more simply as "oneness" or "unity" of opposites.

The Emotions chapter (XXV) in James' Principles of Psychology traverses the entire range of experienced emotions from the “coarser” and more instinctual to the “subtler” emotions intimately involved in cognitive, moral, and aesthetic aspects of life. But Principles limits himself to an account of emotional consciousness and so there are few direct discussions in the text of Principles about what later came to be called moral psychology, and fewer about anything resembling philosophical ethics. Still, James’ short section on the subtler emotions, when read in connection with his later philosophical writings, still provides insight on James’ views about how human emotion colors our moral psychology and agency. The paper tries to articulate how James' somatic account of emotion adds significantly to contemporary discussions at the borders of moral psychology and philosophy: discussions over the foreground/background distinction, emotional temperament, emotional learning, moral imagination, and selfhood and narrativity. The final section focuses on the neo-Jamesian character of "new sentimentalist" moral psychologists. Among the substantial connections I discuss between James and 1) between Jonathan Haidt’s “social intuitionism” and 2) Jesse Prinz’s "emotionism" are the critiques that they each share of the pretensions of hard universalist ethical theories.

“Objectivity” is an important theoretical concept with diverse applications in our collective practices of inquiry. It is also a concept attended in recent decades by vigorous debate, debate that includes but is not restricted to scientists and philosophers. The special authority of science as a source of knowledge of the natural and social world has been a matter of much controversy. In part because the authority of science is supposed to result from the objectivity of its methods and results, objectivity has been described as an “essentially contested,” and even an “embattled” concept. The concept of objectivity has important but contested applications outside of scientific practices as well. Philosophers, psychologists, and theologians debate whether there is an objective basis for ethical claims and demands. Legal scholars debate what it would mean for laws to be objectively derivable from basic assumptions about justice and equality. One aim of this book is to guide readers through the often volatile debates over the nature and value of objectivity. Another aim is to contribute to that debate through articulating the domain-variance of norms of objectivity, and their different functions for inquirers. A better understanding of the underdetermination problem, and of the many ways that "epistemic" and "social" values rub shoulders in the course of inquiry, aids the development of my pragmatic pluralist account of objectivity.

A Review of S. Napiers, book Virtue Epistemology. While concerned with the nature of knowledge, Napier also wants to claim that a key implication of responsibilist VE is “a shift away from analyzing epistemic concepts (knowledge, etc.) in terms of other epistemic concepts (e.g. justification) to analyzing epistemic concepts with reference to kinds of human activity…much of analytic epistemology centers on epistemic concepts, whereas the responsibilist focuses on epistemic activity” (144).Of the main points he claims responsibilism provides us with—(i) rentention of the idea that a person who knows is personally justified in the sense of is rational, justified, or intellectually good, (ii) a sound account of the value of knowledge, and (iii) a Gettier-proof theory of knowledge —I pose some questions about the first and third.

The use of the term "applied ethics" to denote a particular field of moral inquiry (distinct from but related to both normative ethics and meta-ethics) is a relatively new phenomenon. The individuation of applied ethics as a special division of moral investigation gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, largely as a response to early twentieth- century moral philosophy's overwhelming concentration on moral semantics and its apparent inattention to practical moral problems that arose in the wake of significant social and technological transformations. The field of applied ethics is now a well established, professional domain sustained by institutional research centers, professional academic appointments, and devoted journals. As the field of applied ethics grew and developed, its contributors predominantly advocated consequentialist and deontological approaches to the problems they address; but lately a significant number of moral philosophers have begun to bring the resources of virtue ethics to bear upon the ever-evolving subject matters of applied ethics.

This essay extends my side of a discussion begun earlier with Duncan Pritchard, the recent author of Epistemic Luck. Pritchard’s work contributes significantly to improving the “diagnostic appeal” of a neo-Moorean philosophical response to radical scepticism. While agreeing with Pritchard in many respects, the paper questions the need for his concession to the sceptic that the neo-Moorean is capable at best of recovering “‘brute’ externalist knowledge”. The paper discusses and directly responds to a dilemma that Pritchard poses for virtue epistemologies (VE). It also takes issue with Pritchard’s “merely safety-based” alternative. Ultimately, however, the criticisms made here of Pritchard’s dilemma and its underlying contrast of “anti-luck” and “virtue” epistemologies are intended to help realize his own aspirations for a better diagnosis of radical scepticism to inform a still better neo-Moorean response.

This chapter examines the modifications William James made to his account of the ethics of belief from his early ‘subjective method’ to his later heightened concerns with personal doxastic responsibility and with an empirically-driven comparative research program he termed a ‘science of religions’. There are clearly tensions in James’ writings on the ethics of belief both across his career and even within Varieties itself, tensions which some critics think spoil his defense of what he calls religious ‘faith ventures’ or ‘overbeliefs’. But our study of James in the first half of the chapter reveals a significant degree of unnoticed unity: The two distinct defenses of faith ventures he develops post-1900 are actually both versions of the Dialogue Model of the relationship between individual religiosity and scientific reasoning. One shared theme in the diverging approaches to doxastic responsibility suggested by the two versions is what some interpreters have called ‘the character issue’ in James’ writings. The second half of the chapter develops these connections and argues that a neo-Jamesian approach tying the ethics of belief with Rawlsian reasonable pluralism and with contemporary character epistemology results in a stronger yet more clearly delimited defense of responsible faith ventures.

Critics and defenders of William James both acknowledge serious tensions in his thought, tensions perhaps nowhere more vexing to readers than in regard to his claim about an individual’s intellectual right to their “faith ventures.” Focusing especially on “Pragmatism and Religion,” the final lecture in Pragmatism, this chapter will explore certain problems James’ pragmatic pluralism. Some of these problems are theoretical, but others concern the real-world upshot of adopting James permissive ethics of belief. Although Jamesian permissivism is qualified in certain ways in this paper, I largely defend James in showing how permissivism has philosophical advantages over the non-permissivist position associated with evidentialism. These advantages include not having to treat disagreement as a sign of error or irrationality, and mutual support relations between permissivism and what John Rawls calls the "reasonable pluralism" at the heart of political liberalism.

Originally titled “Institutional, Group, and Individual Virtue,” this was my paper for an Invited Symposium on "Intersections between Social, Feminist, and Virtue Epistemologies," APA Pacific Division Meeting, April 2011, San Diego. Abstract: This paper examines recent research on individual, social, and institutional virtues and vices; the aim is to explore and make proposals concerning their inter-relationships, as well as to highlight central questions for future research with the study of each. More specifically, the paper will focus on how these studies can be approached in a systematic way such that it contributes to greater convergence between virtue theory, feminist epistemology, and social epistemology. To this end the paper develops a model of responsibility qua diachronic (longitudinal) assessment of the inquiry-directed agential habits (motivations, activities, and strategies), while explaining the place of this model within a broader, 15-point proposed “Responsibilist” research program.

If description of mental processes and evaluation of agents and their beliefs are rightly to be considered as complementary concerns on any plausible construal of the epistemological project, then this relationship cries out for explanation. For the complementarity of these concerns is hardly straightforward: One cannot epistemically evaluate a belief without knowing how it was formed, a causal or a scientific question; on the other hand, epistemic norms are and must be used to evaluate our scientific beliefs and theories, and apparently then require a basis at least partly independent of scientific matters of fact.

Thirty years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sharp disagreement persists concerning the implications of Kuhn’s "historicist" challenge to empiricism. I discuss the historicist movement over the past thirty years, and the extent to which the discourse between two branches of the historical school has been influenced by tacit assumptions shared with Rudolf Carnap’s empiricism. I begin with an examination of Carnap’s logicism --his logic of science-- and his 1960 correspondence with Kuhn. I focus on problems in the analysis applied to the unit of metascientific study or appraisal, arguing for a reassessment of historicist treatment of the internal/external distinction and historiographic meta-methodology. The critique of objectivism and relativism that eventuates from this re-assessment is a double-edged blade, undercutting both objectivist and relativist treatments of cognitive evaluation and scientific change. I use it to cut across an otherwise diverse group of historicist-influenced writers, including Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, H. M. Collins, Stephen Stich. I. Introduction..

The criteria of “forced, live, and momentous options,” as William James utilized them in his pragmatic defense of religious belief, cannot, I argue, both support religious pluralism and acknowledge lessons about failure of epistemic responsibility in Heaven’s Gate-followers. But I attempt to re-vitalize the pragmatic argument, showing it capable of walking this narrow line. I proceed (1) by developing the distinction and relationship between a commitment to a particular religious system or community, and a commitment to the generic “religious hypothesis” itself; and (2) by explicating and expanding upon the “experimental” status—and associated pragmatic criteria for success or failure—that James already recognized for commitments to particular religious communities. I thus show how the “pragmatic argument” takes on heightened significance—and renewed promise—in light of problems associated with New Age and so-called “cult” religiosity.