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229 pages

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Philosopher James R. Peters defends the reasonableness of the Christian faith in The Logic of the Heart. He paves a middle road between the Enlightenment's worship of reason and postmodernism's emphasis on freedom and self-rule. He delves into the thought of theologian St. Augustine and philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal and engages the skeptic David Hume, who argued against the possibility of miracles. Throughout this process, Peters provides an alternative to postmodern thought as well as the widespread New Atheism. This work is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing studies in philosophy of religion and historical theology. Since Peters writes in nontechnical language, readers interested in the relationship between faith and reason will also benefit from The Logic of the Heart.

Sujets

Philosophy of religion

Christian theology

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 mars 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441205711
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1008€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2009 by James R. Peters

Published by Baker Academic a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-0571-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NEB are from The New English Bible . Copyright © 1961, 1970, 1989 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

“September 1, 1939” (which appears on pp. 218, 230, 241–42, and 264), copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from COLLECTED POEMS by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
[Text not included because of rights restrictions.]
C ONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Augustine, Pascal, and Hume on the “Embeddedness” of Reason

1 Augustine, Pascal, and Hume for the Postmodern World?
Skeptics of Modernity: Embedded Rationality versus Rational Autonomy
Embedded Reason in Augustine, Pascal, and Plantinga
Augustine, Pascal, and Hume as Socratic Apologists: Human Wisdom as Passionate Self-Knowledge
Hume, Pascal, and the Humility of Reason

2 Hume’s Skepticism and the Wisdom of the Heart
Hume’s Epistemological Refutation of Theism
Three Answers from the Enquiry
Hume’s Attack on and Misunderstanding of Miracles
Hume’s Psychological Refutation of Theism
Hume versus Augustine (and Pascal): Opposing Rationalities in Conflict
Conclusion

3 Pascal, Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Heart
Pascal and the Rationality of Faith
Pascal’s Dialectical Defense of Faith
Pascal’s Teleological Apologetics
Pascal: Faith Is Rational but Beyond Reason
Pascal’s Wager: Unmasking Skeptical Neutrality
Pascal versus Fideism: Faith Is Not Contrary to Reason
Pascal and Hume, Pascal and Aristotle: Conclusions

4 A Dialectical Defense of Pascal’s Paradox Argument: Pascal versus Radical Postmodernism
The Radical Postmodern Challenge to Pascal’s Paradox Argument
Radical Postmodernism’s Fourfold Hermeneutics of Unmasking
Postmodernism as “Hypermodernism ”

Bibliography
Index
Notes
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work on this book began at a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the philosophy of David Hume, held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1990. I am grateful to both the faculty and participants of that seminar for six weeks of a most engaging and lively exchange of ideas and arguments. Two professors there, Donald Livingston and Terence Penelhum, deserve special mention. From Donald Livingston—under whom as both an undergraduate and graduate student at Northern Illinois University I had the privilege of studying Hume’s philosophy—I continued to learn to read Hume as a subtle and complex historical thinker whose skeptical vision is inextricably bound up with a humanistic Ciceronian concern for civil politics, humane social order, and the concord of the life of the passions. In Terence Penelhum I found a living and exemplary model of how a Christian philosopher ought to engage a great adversary like the “dreaded Scot, David Hume”—with unfailing seriousness tempered by humble charity and deep respect. Professor Penelhum’s God and Skepticism is a towering classic from which I have greatly benefited.
My aim in The Logic of the Heart is to provide a clear and nontechnical philosophical defense of the rationality of Christian faith. I hope that my book will meet the interests of a wide range of readers, from academic philosophers and theologians to ordinary laypeople confronted with the challenges of postmodern accounts of religious pluralism and metaphysical skepticism. The Logic of the Heart is deeply indebted to the critiques of Enlightenment rationality found in such works as Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (1990); Stanley Hauerwas’s A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (1981) and A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (2000); Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief (2000); and the critiques of postmodernism in these works, as well as in David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003). The uniqueness of The Logic of the Heart lies in its focus on Pascal’s and Augustine’s non-Enlightenment vision of human rationality, and in the comparative analysis of Pascal and Hume that elucidates the fundamental differences in their perspectives on theism and defends Pascal’s account of reason and faith. Calling on this Augustinian and Pascalian account of the embeddedness of human rationality, The Logic of the Heart contends that human reasoning on ultimate issues of human life is inextricably bound up with those affections and feelings that reveal to us our proper place in creation. Reason can function properly only when reason is informed by the intuitions of the heart, as nurtured by historically constituted traditions of belief and practice.
In defending the inseparability of reason and affection, The Logic of the Heart bears some resemblance to two fine works of twentieth-century philosophy, C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1944) and William Wainwright’s Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (1995). Neither of these classic works, however, specifically defends the reasonableness of Christian faith for the postmodern world in the contexts of reason, affection, and embeddedness, loci shared among Augustine, Pascal, and Hume, on the one hand, and the postmoderns, on the other, but the sharing of which leads to widely divergent conclusions. The Logic of the Heart defends Augustinian and Pascalian “embedded reason” as a viable middle ground between the Enlightenment’s affirmation of universal rational autonomy and radical postmodernism’s affirmation of the poetics of self-creation.
A recurring theme in The Logic of the Heart is the importance of the Socratic tradition in understanding all three of the major philosophers whose arguments about faith and reason differently make up the substance of my work. For my appreciation and understanding of the Socratic vision of the philosophical quest I am especially indebted to three of the finest teachers I have ever known—Michael Gelven at Northern Illinois University and Kenneth Seeskin and the late Reginald Allen at Northwestern University. My debt to these three men is incalculable; in both word and deed, they have shown me what it means to love wisdom. Despite their noble efforts, I acknowledge that my own rendition of the Socratic vision of life comes up short, both in its eloquence and substance. I hereby exonerate them from any responsibility for my inadequate and halting efforts to convey in words the passion of spirit and clarity of insight they so generously shared with me.
I also wish to give special thanks to my colleagues at the University of the South—William Garland, James Peterman, Christopher Conn, and Andrew Moser—with whom I have enjoyed hours and years of philosophical conversation and from whom I have learned so much about deep and important philosophical matters. I would like also to thank my students at the University of the South, not only for their fruitful insights and questions that have deeply shaped my own thinking, but also for their patience in permitting me to continue to be a mere apprentice for twenty-three years in that honorable craft known as the teaching of philosophy. I owe an especially warm thanks to three of my most thoughtful Christian friends—Jon Bruss, Wilmer Mills, and Dale Richardson—who graciously read and commented on my manuscript at various stages of its completion. Luther Leibensberger, cherished elder brother in the faith, has long provided yet another source of thoughtful insight on the life of faith. I would like to express as well my sincerest gratitude to David Haskell for his generous and perceptive comments on my text. David has taught me by word and example what it means to think with the heart. To these patient friends and cherished fellow pilgrims I owe a debt I cannot repay.
I am also deeply grateful to Bill Davis and Reg McLelland and their students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, all of whom offered invaluable comments on earlier drafts of my chapters on Hume’s case against miracles and Augustine’s conception of charitable reason. During the last fifteen years, I have further benefited from the helpful comments on earlier versions of my text graciously provided by many friends and colleagues. I would like especially to thank Stanley Hauerwas, Tad Lehe, Scott Sinclair, the late Monroe Spears, and the late Cecil Woods. Tom Kennedy, outstanding former editor of the Cresset , offered invaluable counsel on an earlier draft of my chapter on Augustine. I am deeply grateful to Tom for his gracious editorial assistance and years of friendship. At a crucial stage in my life when I was a zealously skeptical college student, Dick Thompson convinced me through his generous and thoughtful spirit to rethink my