Theology After Neo-Pragmatism

Forlagets omtale:
This book develops the thesis that Evangelical theology not only cannot afford to avoid engaging with the philosophy of neo-pragmatism, but it can also benefit from the proposals of some of its leading exponents, especially Donald Davidson.

Three different themes run throughout the book: meaning epistemic justification, and ontology.

• How can theologians be confident of the meanings ascribed to religious beliefs in the wake of the dissolution of the very concept of meaning and of the analytic-synthetic distinction?
• Is there any rational fraction between our beliefs, religious or mundane, and some extra-linguistic reality?
• Is God something more than simply a symbolic construct associated with a certain manner of speaking?

The surprising thought of Donald Davidson offers resources for Evangelical theology seeking hopeful answers to these troubling questions. Davidson's rejection of the so-called 'third dogma' of empiricism, namely the dualism of scheme of content, should be welcomed by those defending theological 'rationality' and refuting relativism and incommensurability. Furthermore, his truth-conditional semantics can serve as a check against revisionist accounts of religious beliefs that flaunt the first-person point of view of the religious believer herself.

These Davidsonian contributions to an Evangelical theology are, however, balanced by inherent inadequacies which require a theological supplement, which is also a creative proposal calling for: the continued significance of experience in theology beyond the myth of the Given; an understanding of the role of Scripture as both epistemic as well as dispositional; and finally an understanding of the nature of truth as located in the mind of God.

Theology After Neo-Pragmatism is both an introduction to an influential philosophical trend, and a critical and constructive theological proposal which is at once scriptural and historicist, pragmatic and realist.
-Publisher.

Adonis Vidu