For a long time we humans have fairly successfully (but not invariably) avoided error within our systems of thought, but the systems themselves have often proved to be wrong. That is, our systems have made it possible (within the limits of the systems) to be consistent, but they have not preserved us from error. Our experience suggests that they cannot preserve us from error. Should we regret this? Probably not, since it is always the errors of our systems that have released us (so far) from the tyranny of our systems…. That we are in error means that our plans or systems tend to suffer from the interference of bad surprises – and, let us not forget, also of good surprises.
Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Getting Started
I've criticized the idea of a worldview in the past. My criticism is two-fold. 1) Thinking in terms of worldviews does not help one do good philosophy, and 2) assimilating Christian faith to a worldview called a "Christian worldview" distorts the nature of Christian faith.
To get started on this blog, I want to reverse the direction. I want to argue against my own position, in ways that are faithful to worldview thinkers, that the plausibility of Christian faith is a philosophical matter -- that philosophy is the discipline most capable of making that judgement and that the judgment is properly carried out on philosophical grounds. That is, I will begin by arguing that Christian faith contains within itself philosophical committments. My goal will be to map, in an Hegelian fashion, the worldview of worldviews -- the shape of consciousness required to think in terms of worldviews.
Because I am sympathetic to Hegel, and because worldview thinking is a kind of falling away from certain positions of Hegel, from a philosophical point of view, this will require a kind of settling of accounts between Hegel and post-Hegelians who are really followers of Jacobi. Here I think I will need to read Donald Davidson more closely, but my real debt will be to Levinas. I will need a critical appropriation of Levinas' claim that there is unmediated experience, or beliefs produced by the world rather than by a conceptual scheme.
This will need to join up with a Christian criticism of the sort of religion we are left with once worldview apologists are through "defending" Christianity in the culture wars.
To get started on this blog, I want to reverse the direction. I want to argue against my own position, in ways that are faithful to worldview thinkers, that the plausibility of Christian faith is a philosophical matter -- that philosophy is the discipline most capable of making that judgement and that the judgment is properly carried out on philosophical grounds. That is, I will begin by arguing that Christian faith contains within itself philosophical committments. My goal will be to map, in an Hegelian fashion, the worldview of worldviews -- the shape of consciousness required to think in terms of worldviews.
Because I am sympathetic to Hegel, and because worldview thinking is a kind of falling away from certain positions of Hegel, from a philosophical point of view, this will require a kind of settling of accounts between Hegel and post-Hegelians who are really followers of Jacobi. Here I think I will need to read Donald Davidson more closely, but my real debt will be to Levinas. I will need a critical appropriation of Levinas' claim that there is unmediated experience, or beliefs produced by the world rather than by a conceptual scheme.
This will need to join up with a Christian criticism of the sort of religion we are left with once worldview apologists are through "defending" Christianity in the culture wars.
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