Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T16:40:38.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

KNOWLEDGE AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

Get access

Abstract

Introductions to epistemology routinely define knowledge as a kind of belief which meets certain criteria. In the first two sections of this article, I discuss this account and its application to religious epistemology by the influential movement known as Reformed Epistemology. In the last section, I argue that the controversial consequences drawn from this account by Reformed Epistemology offer one of the best illustrations of the untenability of a conception of knowledge as a kind of belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative account of cognition which also provides a different framework for religious epistemology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 For a fuller discussion of these issues see Antognazza, Maria Rosa, ‘Belief, Religious Belief, and Faith’, in a special issue on ‘Kinds of Belief’ of the Rivista di Filosofia 110(2) (2019): 283306Google Scholar, on which the following remarks are based.

2 Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’, Noûs 15(1) (1981): 4151CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 43.

3 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, ‘Religious Epistemology’, in Wainwright, William J. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; hereafter RE), 245–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 269.

4 Plantinga, Alvin, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Plantinga, Alvin, Warrant and Proper Function (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Plantinga, Alvin, Warranted Christian Belief (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; hereafter WCB)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 This proposal will be developed in Maria Rosa Antognazza, Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).