Reason, Revelation, and Devotion

Reason, Revelation, and Devotion will appeal to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in philosophy, theology, or religious studies. The author focuses on important features of reasoning, which have been comparatively neglected by philosophers of religion, so it should be appealing to philosophers of religion as well.

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Reason, Revelation, and Devotion argues that immersion in religious reading traditions and their associated spiritual practices significantly shapes our emotions, desires, intuitions, and volitional commitments; these in turn affect our construction and assessments of arguments for religious conclusions. But far from distorting the reasoning process, these emotions and volitional and cognitive dispositions can be essential for sound reasoning on religious and other value-laden subject matters. And so western philosophy must rethink its traditional antagonism toward rhetoric. The book concludes with discussions of the implications of the earlier chapters for the relation between reason and revelation, and for the role that the concept of mystery should play in philosophy in general, and in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology in particular.