Practices of Belief: Volume 2, Selected Essays

This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.

Nicholas Wolterstorff (Author), Terence Cuneo (Edited by)

9780521514620, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 February 2010

446 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.5 cm, 0.84 kg

'Nicholas Wolterstorff is well known as one of the founders of Reformed Epistemology, along with William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. I suspect, however, that his papers on epistemology and on philosophy of religion have not been as widely read as they should have been. I hope these volumes will rectify that. Analysis Reviews

Practices of Belief, the second volume of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers, brings together his essays on epistemology from 1983 to 2008. It includes not only the essays which first presented 'Reformed epistemology' to the philosophical world, but also Wolterstorff's latest work on the topic of entitled (or responsible) belief and its intersection with religious belief. The volume presents five new essays and a retrospective essay that chronicles the changes in the course of philosophy over the last fifty years. Of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of religion, and theologians, Practices of Belief should engage a wide audience of those interested in the topic of whether religious belief can be responsibly formed and maintained in the contemporary world.

Editor's introduction
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The world ready-made
2. Does the role of concepts make experiential access to ready-made reality impossible?
3. Ought to believe - two concepts
4. Entitlement to believe and practices of inquiry
5. Historicizing the belief-forming self
6. Epistemology of religion
7. The migration of the theistic arguments: from natural theology to evidentialist apologetics
8. Can belief in God be rational if it has no foundations?
9. Once again, evidentialism - this time social
10. The assurance of faith
11. On being entitled to beliefs about God
12. Reformed epistemology
13. Are religious believers committed to the existence of God?
14. Reid on common sense
15. What sort of epistemological realist was Thomas Reid?
Postscript: a life in philosophy
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of religion [HRAB]