Anonymous Skeptics
Swinburne, Hick, and Alston
by Lance Ashdown
At its deepest, philosophical skepticism questions the sense of language. Skepticism manifests itself in different forms, three of the most powerful being logical, external-world, and religious skepticism. How has philosophy of religion addressed these challenges? The attempt to answer this question leads Lance Ashdown to a consideration of three prominent contemporary philosophers of religion: Richard Swinburne, John Hick, and William Alston. The author shows that these philosophers are indeed open to the criticisms of the three types of skepticism mentioned above. According to Ashdown, they are rightly to be considered as ‘anonymous skeptics’. Readers familiar with the work of the theologian Karl Rahner will recognize an echo of his famous doctrine that non-Christian religious believers are really ‘anonymous Christians’, i.e., Christian believers who do not recognize themselves as such. In a similar way, the philosophers of religion under consideration are skeptics who most certainly would not identify themselves as such. They are anonymous skeptics in the sense that their epistemologies create the very conditions that allow for the severe and, on their own terms, unanswerable challenges of skepticism. At the same time, none of these philosophers thinks that skeptical objections pose a devastating or unanswerable threat to their epistemologies. For example, each of them is an avowed believer in God and is fully aware of the challenge of religious skepticism, yet none believes that skepticism need cause a rational Christian to abandon his or her beliefs. Nevertheless, each of the three philosophers adheres to a philosophical theory that remains open to the devastating critique of Philo in David Hume’s essay Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion – who argues at his deepest that talk of God is meaningless.
Lance Ashdown, Born 1966; 1984-1988 undergraduate study of English at the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A.); 1989-1991 graduate studies in religion at Florida State University (M.A.); 1992-1997 doctoral studies at Claremont Graduate School (M.A. in philosophy, Ph.D. in religion); since 1997 adjunct instructor at various colleges, writer for a software company, pursuit of academic interests as an independent scholar.
- By (author) Lance Ashdown
Other Titles in this Series
Die nahe ferne Kirche
Studien zu einer protestantischen Ekklesiologie in kulturhermeneutischer Perspektive
Volume 50
Schuld und Narration
Zur anthropologischen Bedingtheit und narrativen Aufarbeitung von Schuld in Auseinandersetzung mit Soren Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt und Paul Ricoeur
Volume 124
Redeeming Relationship, Relationships that Redeem
Free Sociability and the Completion of Humanity in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher
Volume 99
The Ghost of Totalitarianism
Deconstructing the Pneumatological Nature of Christian Political Theology
Volume 132
Works of Love in a World of Violence
Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice
Volume 89
Humanity
An Endangered Idea?: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2019
Volume 125
Interpreting Religion
The Significance of Friedrich Schleiermacher's 'Reden über die Religion' for Religious Studies and Theology
Volume 57
The Meaning and Power of Negativity
Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2017
Volume 110
Der Eine oder der Andere
Gott in der klassischen deutschen Philosophie und im Denken der Gegenwart
Volume 44
Das Versprechen
Studien zur Verbindlichkeit menschlichen Sagens in Soren Kierkegaards Werk Die Taten der Liebe
Volume 39
Similar Books
A Companion to Christianity and Sport in Europe and North America (19th-21st centuries)
Volume 1: Western and Eastern Europe
A Connecting Polemic in the Medieval Mediterranean
The Correspondence of Leo III and ʿUmar II
Volume 6
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
As Messianism Turns to Heresy
The Regenstein Chair Lectures On Lurianic Kabbalah and Shabbatai Tzevi at Hebrew Union College - Cincinnati
Creating the Woman in Antiquity
Proceedings of the 16th Melammu Workshop, Innsbruck, 2–3 June 2022
Volume 13
Cultic Kisses
Fruitful Encounters Between Deities and Humans. Festschrift for Angelika Berlejung on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday
De/colonizing Theologies
Glocal Histories, Contemporary Challenges, Theoretical Reflections
Volume 4
Drunk the Potion, No Whit Charmed
The Doctrine of Pure and Perfect Souls from Iamblichus to Damascius
Éthique, politique, religions
Superstition (XVIIe - XXIe siècles). Sémantique, histoires et cultures