Owen Anderson

The central assumption behind James’s project, which is noted in many of the essays, is that religious knowledge is not possible. This assumption shapes the approach James takes, and limits the possible conclusions he can reach. It was an assumption shared by William Clifford, who is the chief target of James’s The Will to Believe. However, James goes in a different direction than Clifford. James agrees that religious knowledge is not possible, and yet asserts that religious experiences are useful. His hypothesis is that while religious experience does not provide knowledge, it can be the cause of beneficial effects in a person’s life. His focus on results or effects is an important part of his pragmatism, and seems to grow out of his assumption that religious knowledge is not possible. It is the combination of making religious experience an object of scientific inquiry and a pragmatic assessment of religious experience that makes James unique during his time.

The Natural Moral Law argues that the good can be known and that therefore the moral law, which serves as a basis for human choice, can be understood. Proceeding historically through ancient, modern and postmodern thinkers, Owen Anderson studies beliefs about the good and how it is known, and how such beliefs shape claims about the moral law. The focal challenge is whether the skepticism of postmodern thinkers can be answered in a way that preserves knowledge claims about the good. Considering the failures of modern thinkers to correctly articulate reason and the good and how postmodern thinkers are responding to these failures, Anderson argues that there are identifiable patterns of thinking about what is good, some of which lead to false dichotomies. The book concludes with a consideration of how a moral law might look if the good is correctly identified.

Ayn Rand, through her character Fransisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged, taught that the Apostle Paul is wrong when he says money is a root of all kinds of evil. Instead, she argues that money is perhaps the greatest invention of humanity and is the foundation of civilization. In this article, Dr. Anderson challenges Rand’s understanding of good and evil first by comparing d’Anconia to Thrasymachus and then by considering good and evil in the Biblical Worldview. These connections make it possible to see how economics and religion are closely connected through basic assumptions about reality and our highest good. Without knowing our highest good we cannot make sense of either religion or economics.

In ‘The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology’ I argue that there are four important presuppositions behind John Hick’s form of religious pluralism that successfully support it against what I call fideistic exclusivism. These are i) the ought/can principle, ii) the universality of religious experience, iii) the universality of redemptive change, and iv) a view of how God (the Eternal) would do things. I then argue that if these are more fully developed they support a different kind of exclusivism, what I call rational exclusivism, and become defeaters for pluralism. In order to explain rational exclusivism and its dependence on these presuppositions I consider philosophers J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Alvin Plantinga, who offer arguments for their forms of exclusivism but I maintain that they continue to rely on fideism at important points. I then give an example of how knowledge of the Eternal can be achieved.

Current debate in metaethics includes the question of objectivity. What does it mean for a moral prescription to be objective? It is easy to see how matters of fact are objective, and it is also easy to see how matters of taste are subjective. But what about matters of morality? Given the diversity in moral beliefs and practices it appears these cannot be matters of fact. Are they thus matters of taste? If so, we are left with the unlivable conclusion that all moral prescriptions are beyond rational scrutiny. David Hume expressed these problems in a way that continues to be influential today: ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowled'd lesser good to my greater’ (Hume, 2003: 2.III.ii). Resolving problems about moral objectivity is further complicated by the philosophical presuppositions of analytic philosophy that have dominated the 20th century, initiated in the work of G.E. Moore, and promulgated in theories such as logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Contemporary thinkers from both the cognitivist and the non‐cognitivist camps have tried to demonstrate that moral claims are objective in the sense of being subject independent. By considering contemporary appeals to the ideally rational self to establish objectivity, and objections to rationality as a ground for objectivity, it will be argued that objectivity can be grounded in the good which in turn is grounded in human nature. This approach can be found in the Socratic denial of knowingly doing evil, and out of this a foundation for moral objectivity can be developed that does not require an appeal to the individual's mental state and which preserves individual responsibility for knowing the good.

In Minimal Theologies Hent de Vries offers a revision of his German language edition of Theologie im pianissimo published in 1989. There has been an impressive amount of scholarly work on Adorno and Levinas since 1989, “but this literature pays no attention to a systematic confrontation between their respective philosophical projects, if it mentions their names in conjunction at all”. What his work contributes is an analysis of the works of Adorno and Levinas as being focused on a common project. That project is the exploration of “native modalities of the performative contradiction of argumentative discourse as it seeks to come to terms with its other”. Further, he contrasts these with the later Habermas and early Derrida. This is a meticulous work that provides important insights into these thinkers and religious philosophy. It is directed at a scholarly audience and could be of use in a graduate seminar focusing either on these thinkers or on contemporary issues surrounding the relationship between faith and reason.