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Summary: A Much Needed Work for the Ethics of Belief
Review: William Wainwright's book, Reason and the Heart, desperately needs to be given more attention by epistemologists. It focuses on the question, roughly speaking, "what is the relationship of our beliefs and passional nature?" Or more precisely, "what must be true of the world and our relation to it if our religious knowledge is genuine" (152). Consider the following "Oxford-Philosophers Case": both Richard Swinburne (a Christian philosopher) and J.L. Mackie (an atheist philosopher) are both *very* intelligent individuals. Both have looked at a great deal of the evidence regarding the existence or nonexistence of God. Why is it that both of these bright men end up taking drastically different positions? Wainwright argues that one explanation of this is that one's heart is not suited to see the *force* of the arguments one way or the other. Typically, most philosophers have thought that our knowledge of God is either by reason alone, or knowing God is a "heart" knowledge (something contrasted to reason). Wainwright offers a third alternative - which I for one am in full agreement with. In explicating this third alternative - that "reason is capable of knowing God one the basis of evidence - but only when when's cognitive faculties are rightly disposed," - Wainwright considers the work of the Puritan philosophical theologian, Jonathan Edwards, Cardinal John Henry Newman (particularly from The Grammar of Assent), and William James. However, Wainwright's interpretation of James is unique in that most take a different interpretation. Lastly, Wainwright considers three objections to this view (a passional theory of knowledge); they are subjectivism, the problem of (vicious) circularity, and cognitive-relativism. The third appears to be the most problematic; however, the are ways of dealing with the matter depending on one's underlying metaphysics. Theists and nontheists alike should be concerned about passional-reason. If one does not have any account of why disputes appear on basic issues (i.e. determinism or indeterminism), then one's acceptance of a position may appear arbitrary to oneself and to others. One small problem is that it seems, to me at least, that Wainwright's arguments for his view are deeply theistic. It would be interesting to see someone like William Rowe write an indepth discussion about this (perhaps he has?). In any case, this is a fantastic book because it emphasizes the need for an account of when and what role passions *should* play in our reasoning. How such an account would go is only hinted at; but this book does a nice job pointing out that we need one.
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