The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion

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and MacIntyre 1955). Reformed epistemologists, on the other hand, such as Nicholas
Wolterstorff, hold that one's personal perspective and commitments shape one's
philosophy. Different philosophies, each in its intellectual ghetto, live in a
noninterference pact with their neighbors, all claiming an epistemic right to their basic
presuppositions. For Wittgensteinians, this is a sad surrender of philosophy's age-old
contemplative tasks in the academy (see Phillips 1993b, 2000d).
In the wider context of contemporary analytic philosophy, especially in the United States,
it seems to me that atheism has given way to indifference, one expressed in suspicion of
the very practice of philosophy of religion.^2 Wittgenstein's philosophical methods are
certainly not central in contemporary philosophical practice. His methods have to do with
giving a proper conceptual attention to the world in all its variety. To appreciate these
methods, we need to go beyond the “perspectival particularism” of Reformed
epistemology and the Enlightenment conception of philosophy as the rational assessor of
all our beliefs and practices. These are not the exclusive choices facing us. To see why,
we need to ask the following question: What is the difference between the reality
philosophy investigates and that notion of a divine reality in which believers say that they
live and move and have their being?
end p.448


Descartes' Legacy


Descartes' epistemological legacy opens up a gap between consciousness and reality.
This can be illustrated by a familiar incident that occurred while he was writing his
Second Meditation. Descartes looked out of his window and saw people crossing the
square. Had there been someone else with him in the room to ask what he was seeing,
Descartes would have replied, quite naturally, “People crossing the square.” But there
was no one in the room as he posed a philosophical question to himself. “Yet do I see
more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men”
(1990, 21).
Descartes wants to know how that judgment can be justified. If we take his worry to be
epistemological, it seems to call for a practical resolution: off with those hats and coats!
We can imagine exclaiming, as a result, in a particular case, “My God! It's an
automaton.” Perhaps we are on a film set where advanced robots are being used. As
figures cross the square, we say, “Aren't they good! With those hats and coats, you can't
tell which ones are the human beings.”
These practical responses do not do justice to Descartes' concern, since they take for
granted the very category “human being” that Descartes is questioning. He wants a
judgment about that. Although Descartes' legacy is epistemological, his own deepest
concerns are logical. In the case of epistemological concerns, the emphasis is on whether
we have the right to say that we know, let us say, that a particular figure is a human
being. The sense of what we may or may not know is not questioned. In a logical
concern, it is the very possibility of that sense that is being questioned. It is this latter
concern that makes Descartes a great philosopher.

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