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Advice to Philosophers who are Christians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

D.Z. Phillips
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Cardinal Mercier Lecture 1988

According to Alvin Plantings, ‘we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers.’ He gives advice on the character such striving should have. I think his advice is bad advice, bad for philosophy and bad for Christianity. Here I shall concentrate, in the main, on the philosophical aspects of this bad advice. The aspects I have in mind are of two kinds: first, Plantinga’s appeal to considerations external to philosophy which distort the spirit of philosophical enquiry; second, Plantinga’s conception of philosophical enquiry itself.

Plantinga claims, ‘Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move ... There is also powerful evidence for this contention in philosophy’ (p. 253). How is this supposed to be established? By comparison, it seems, with the state of philosophy in the fifties vis á vis Christianity: ‘the public temper of main-line establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian: even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers’ (p. 253). These three characterisations of the fifties are very different from each other.

The first sign that Christianity in philosophy was not on the move in the fifties is supposed to be the fact that few Christians were in the philosophical establishment.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 69 , Issue 820 , October 1988 , pp. 416 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 This paper was one of the Cardinal Mercier Lectures delivered at the University of Leuven 1988. A wider consideration of Plantinga's epistemology of religion was given in the 1987 Aquinas Lecture ‘Shaking the Foundationalists’, delivered at Blackfriars, Oxford. Material used in that lecture appears in Faith After Foundationalism, Routledge 1988Google Scholar.

2 Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 3, July 1984, p. 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All quotations from Plantinga are from this paper.

3 O'Connor, Flannery, Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, New York: Vintage Books 1980, p.456Google Scholar.

4 Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order, New York: Seabury Press 1975, p.7Google Scholar.

5 Wippel, John F., ‘The Possibility of a Christian Philosophy: A Thomistic Perspective’, Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 3, July 1984, p. 280CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 I am not denying the possibility that in some instances the philosophical differences may themselves reflect religious differences between the philosophers concerned. Religious belief itself is, after all, a ragged phenomenon.

7 See Nicholas Wolerstorff, ‘Can Belief in God be Rational?’, in Faith and Rationality, edited by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolerstorff, University of Notre Dame Press 1983. I do not claim to have argued fully for my counter‐conclusions here. I am only indicating the direction such argument might take. For a fuller account see D.Z. Phillips, Faith After Foundationalism.

8 This does not commit me to the view that no religious belief can be confused.

9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Zettel, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M., Oxford, Basil Blackwell 1967, 455Google Scholar.