Avraham Sommer

Alasdair MacIntyre and Phillip Cary have argued for what Cary calls ‘right-wing postmodernism,’ according to which adherence to a tradition is not necessarily irrational. In Cary’s terminology, modernism maintains that adherence to a tradition is irrational and concludes from this that we should move away from traditions toward universal rationality; left-wing postmodernism realizes that adherence to a tradition is inevitable and concludes that irrationality is inevitable; and right-wing postmodernism rejects the view that adherence to a tradition is irrational and can thus accept the inevitability of tradition without sacrificing claims to rationality. MacIntyre and Cary further hold that the standards of rationality and intelligibility vary between traditions—different traditions are incommensurable and untranslatable. Lara Buchak has shown that it is possible to explain how adherence to the assumptions of a tradition can be rational without adopting this claim of incommensurability and untranslatability. This paper argues that Buchak’s view offers a benefit to some religious traditions that MacIntyre and Cary’s position does not: it explains why it can be rational to seek converts, as some religious traditions require their adherents to do.

In a brief passage in the first two editions of his Inquiry, Hutcheson gives an argument that has been little noticed in the literature against the view that what motivates us to act morally is the prospect of taking pleasure in our evaluation of ourselves as moral. I reconstruct Hutcheson’s argument and show how it differs from a similar argument from Butler and Hume. I also show that Hutcheson’s argument is inconsistent with another important view of his. In the third and fourth editions of the Inquiry, Hutcheson omits the argument. I speculate that the reason for this was that he became aware that his argument was inconsistent with that other view of his.

This paper evaluates two theories of divine revelation due to the Jewish analytic theologians Samuel Lebens and Jerome Gellman. Specifically, it investigates how well those two theories explain a claim about divine revelation implied in some Jewish sources: the claim that divine revelation comes in degrees. After showing how some sources imply that divinely revealed texts vary in the degree to which they are divinely revealed, the paper argues that Gellman’s moderate-providence-based theory of revelation explains this claim better than Lebens's divine-appropriation-based theory does.