Responsible Belief

Responsible Belief
Author: Rik Peels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190608110

This book develops and defends a theory of responsible belief. The author argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence them. It is because we have intellectual obligations to influence our beliefs that we are responsible for them.

Responsible Belief

Responsible Belief
Author: Rik Peels
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016
Genre: Belief and doubt
ISBN: 9780190608132

This work develops and defends a theory of responsible belief. The author argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence them. It is because we have intellectual obligations to influence our beliefs that we are responsible for them.

Responsible Belief

Responsible Belief
Author: Robert M. Frazier
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015-10-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498225004

Responsible Belief tackles the problem of fixing the tenacity of believers in forming, holding, and modifying beliefs. In conversation with the history of philosophy and religion, the author attempts to expose and refute some aspects of the dominant epistemological framework for engaging belief fixation and improvement. In contrast to this framework, Dr. Frazier provides a model of a responsible believing agent rooted in an ethic of the intellectual virtue tradition. In dialogue with Aristotle, he proposes three principal virtues, which he calls the generative, the transmissive, and the metamorphic. The author's alternative framework includes an examination of the role that intellectual passions play in the melioration of belief. Responsible Belief considers whether Doestoevsky's claim that "Beauty will save the world" has a place in discussions of belief formation and revision and offers an account of its vitality in addressing the concerns raised in the book.

Believing Against the Evidence

Believing Against the Evidence
Author: Miriam Schleifer McCormick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2014-10-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136682686

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible (and possible) to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief.

Knowledge and Belief

Knowledge and Belief
Author: Frederick F. Schmitt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2006-11-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134967799

Knowledge, from Plato onwards, has been considered in relation to justified belief. Current debate has centred around the nature of the justification and whether justified belief can be considered an internal or extenal matter. Epistemological internalists argue that the subject must be able to reflect upon a belief to complete the process of justification. The externalists, on the other hand, claim that it is only necessary to consider whether the belief is reliably formed, and argue that the ability to know by reflection is not required for a justified belief. In the historical section of this book the three most important epistemologists, Plato, Descartes and Hume, as well as the ancient epistemologies of the stoics, Academics and Pyrhonians, are considered. In reconsidering the history of epistemology the author is led to argue against hte view that internalism is historically dominant. His critique of internalism is then developed into a sustained argument against many of its forms, and he goes onto defend an externalist, reliabilist epistemology.

Blameworthy Belief

Blameworthy Belief
Author: Nikolaj Nottelmann
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2007-07-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1402059612

Believing the wrong thing can have drastic consequences. The question of when a person is not only ill-guided, but genuinely at fault for holding a particular belief goes to the root of our understanding of such notions as criminal negligence and moral responsibility. This book explores the conditions under which someone may be deemed blameworthy for holding a particular belief, drawing on contemporary epistemology, ethics and legal scholarship.

Ad Infinitum

Ad Infinitum
Author: John Turri
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-06-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019101804X

Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification, according to which there are no foundational reasons for belief. The view has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but after languishing for centuries it has recently begun a resurgence. Ad Infinitum presents new work on the topic by leading epistemologists. They shed new light on infinitism's distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and address questions, new and old, about its account of justification, reasoning, epistemic responsibility, disagreement, and trust, among other important issues. The volume clarifies the relationship between infinitism and other epistemological views, such as skepticism, coherentism, foundationalism and contextualism, and it offers novel perspectives on the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of regresses and reasons.

Reason & the Contours of Faith

Reason & the Contours of Faith
Author: Richard Rice
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013-05-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1625640846

Can reason and religion get together? Should believers think? Can thinking people believe? Does religion have to make sense? Does careful thinking help or hinder religious experience? People have wrestled with such questions for hundreds of years, and they are just as perplexing today as ever. Reason & the Contours of Faith explores the wide-ranging issues these questions raise, from biblical interpretation and proofs for God's existence to the nature of religious conversion. Its central purpose is to find an alternative to both fideism, the idea that reason has nothing to do with faith, and rationalism, the conviction that reason has everything to do with it. Part One, "Reason and the Contents of Faith," argues that reason contributes in important but limited ways to our understanding of religion. Part Two, "Reason and the Experience of Faith," shows that reason can support religious commitment, but never produces it.