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.