Kirill Karpov

My primary concern in this article is the connection between virtue epistemology and evidentialism. This possible connection is analyzed upon, firstly, the example of the intellectual virtue of wisdom, and, secondly, the historical case – Thomas Aquinas’ approach to virtue of wisdom as an intellectual disposition (habitus). I argue that it is possible to offer such an interpretation of ‘intellectual virtue’ that aligns with the peripatetic tradition broadly understood (to which the epistemology of virtues ascends), and on the basis of which an evidentialist theory of justification is offered. In the first part of the paper, I briefly present the main interpretations of virtue epistemology and evidentialism in the light of externalism/internalism debate. In the second part I discuss Aquinas’ understanding of intellectual virtue as a disposition (habitus). The main concern here are virtues of theoretical habitus – wisdom and (scientific) knowledge. I show that habitus in this case is understood in two ways: as an ability, inherent to human beings, and as objective knowledge. Thus, there are two understandings of wisdom – as a virtue and knowledge (scientia). Finally, in the concluding parts of the paper, I outline possible ways of solving presented in the first part challenges to evidentialism and internalism.

In this paper I consider two books of Vladimir Shokhin, a distinguished philosopher in Russia, on philosophy of religion and philosophical theology as one project aimed at drawing the demarcation between these two disciplines. In what follows I will present Shokhin’s project and show briefly how it fits in with the current discussion on the topic, then, draw some consequences from his position, and make some critical notes, and at the end I will briefly present some my views on the problem of drawing clear lines of demarcation between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology on the basis of the following questions: what is the topic of the disciplines, what are their methods, what are their guiding lines, and who may exercise them?

The article presents the main trends in the analytical epistemology of religious belief. Their interrelations and mutual influences are shown. The author argues that epistemology of religious belief has risen as one of the possible answers to the Gettier- problems. Therefore different trends in religious epistemology are bounded not only with each other, but also with trends in general epistemology. As a result of the analysis of all major trends in epistemology of religious belief (reformed epistemology, social epistemology, virtue epistemology, problem of the epistemic authority) the author concludes that the core of each trend is an attempt of defining the phenomenon of religion itself. Hence it is possible to consider epistemology of religious belief as the next step in the history of such attempts. Since finding appropriate definition of the phenomenon of religion is a special task of philosophy of religion (both in analytic and continental traditions), the author argues that epistemology of religious belief is the essential part of philosophy of religion as a scholar discipline.

In Russia, philosophy of religion, likewise religious studies, only managed to claim their name, let alone their right for self-realisation, as late as the early 1990s. The article represents an attempt to elicit the maximum possible number of primary methodological accounts, conceptual divergences and discussions pertaining to both the domain of understanding and that of studying the phenomenon of religion and the variety of religious expression, as well as methods of establishing the actual interdisciplinary relations between religious studies and the philosophy of religion, with their disciplinary scope defined, on the one hand, and contiguous scientific disciplines and worldview discourses on the other