Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T13:17:33.818Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

(Ad-)ventures in faith: a critique of Bishop's doxastic-venture model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2014

AMBER L. GRIFFIOEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Konstanz, PO Box 22, 78457 Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

While some philosophical models reduce religious faith to either mere belief or affect, more recent accounts have begun to look at the volitional component of faith. In this spirit, John Bishop has defended the notion of faith as a ‘doxastic venture’. In this article, I consider Bishop's view in detail and attempt to show that his account proves on the one hand too permissive and on the other too restrictive. Thus, although the doxastic-venture model offers certain advantages over other prominent views in the philosophy of religion, it still falls short of providing us with an ultimately satisfactory account of religious faith.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bishop, John (2002) ‘Belief as a doxastic venture’, Religious Studies, 38, 471487.Google Scholar
Bishop, John (2005) ‘On the possibility of doxastic venture: a reply to Buckareff’, Religious Studies, 41, 447451.Google Scholar
Bishop, John (2007) Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press).Google Scholar
Bishop, John (2010) ‘Faith’, in Zalta, E. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/faith/.Google Scholar
Clark, Kelly James & VanArragon, Raymond J. (eds) (2011) Evidence and Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
James, William (1956) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality (New York: Dover).Google Scholar
Michel, Christoph & Newen, Albert (2010) ‘Self-deception as pseudo-rational defense of belief’, Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 731744.Google Scholar
Schälike, Julius (2004) ‘Willensschwäche und Selbsttäuschung’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 52, 361379.Google Scholar
Wood, William (2013) Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall: The Secret Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar