Externalism, Warrant, and the Question of Relativism

According to James K.A. Smith, contemporary epistemology is overly focused on the noetic. Smith offers a counter-epistemology drawn from pentecostal spirituality that is narrative, affective, and embodied. Richard Davis and Paul Franks criticize this model and argue that it succumbs to story-relativism and arbitrariness. This article defends Smith against their critiques through three steps. First, it exposits Smith’s narrative, affective epistemology in order to identify areas that are relevant to their critiques. Second, it outlines and analyzes their critiques, reveals areas in which they fundamentally misunderstand Smith, and presents their commitment to epistemological objectivism. Finally, utilizing Alvin Plantinga’s externalist warrant model, it argues that Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology can assist Smith’s epistemology in consistent ways. If the following argument is successful, then Smith’s postmodern pentecostal epistemology can be reimagined as an externalist epistemology that overcomes the charges of relativism and arbitrariness.

KNOWLEDGE AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF

ABSTRACTIntroductions 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.

Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology

"Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology. Alvin Plantinga is a well-known defender of Reformed epistemology. The main thesis of the Reformed epistemology argues that faith in God is rational and justified without the aid of arguments or evidence. In this paper, we intend to describe Alvin Plantinga’s perspective, more precisely, the A / C model (Aquinas / Calvin) proposed by him, in which faith in God is innate and does not need arguments or evidence, and then to analyze the objections on this model, in order to determine whether faith in God can be considered basic. Keywords: epistemology, reformed, Alvin Plantinga, warrant, justification"

Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind

This chapter objects to three features of Reformed Epistemology, two of which are connected with its Calvinist inspiration and one of which was a feature of most contemporary epistemology at the time. First, like almost all contemporary American epistemology, Reformed Epistemology focuses on individual beliefs—where by a “belief” is meant a particular state of believing, not the proposition believed—and it searches for the properties of a belief that convert it into knowledge. Second, Reformed Epistemology is largely externalist. Third, an important motivation driving externalist theories is the desire to avoid skepticism; in fact, this is one of its most attractive features. Reformed epistemology is externalist and nonvoluntarist; it is individualistic rather than communally based; and it makes the element of belief that converts it into knowledge a property of the belief rather than of the believer. The approach here is Aristotelian in spirit and differs from the Reformers in all three respects.

Prolegomena

This chapter charts some of the ways in which the prolegomena have traditionally been drafted and discussed in Reformed theology. First, we will examine the two Reformers who arguably most deeply influenced most of the later trajectories of Reformed theology: Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin. Next, we will turn to the movement of post-Reformation Reformed Orthodoxy, mapping some of its complex and intricate intellectual trajectories. We will then turn to Schleiermacher as the great nineteenth-century Reformed theologian who reinvented the prolegomena after Kant had given short shrift to their classical form. Subsequently, we will show how the tradition of Reformed prolegomena from Calvin to Schleiermacher received a surprising update in philosophical quarters by the end of the twentieth century, in circles of what has come to be called ‘Reformed epistemology’. Finally, in a brief prospect we will suggest some of the tasks and functions which any future (Reformed) prolegomena may fulfil after the demise of classical foundationalism.