Christopher J. Insole

Seeing off the Local Threat to Irreducible Knowledge by Testimony

I commit myself to the ‘common-sense restraint’ that testimony is in fact an important source of knowledge. This has the consequence of making the dispute between reductionists and anti-reductionists a question of the possibility of reducing the epistemic status of testimony to that of other epistemic resources such as perception, memory and inference. I accept arguments (from Coady and Stevenson) against the possibility of global reductionism, but little importance can be attached to their victory if the local reductionist threat (from Fricker) is not met. The strength of the local reductionist case rests on the plausibility of a distinction between developmental and mature epistemic phases, and on a reductionist stipulation of default settings. I claim that the distinction is either irrelevant or detrimental to the local case, and that default settings are more perspicuously thought of as due to the irreducible reliability of testimony.

The Irreducible Importance of Religious Hope in Kant's Conception of the Highest Good

Kant is clear that the concept of the ‘highest good’ involves both a demand, that we follow the moral law, as well as a promise, that happiness will be the outcome of being moral. The latter element of the highest good has troubled commentators, who tend to find it metaphysically extravagant, involving, as it does, belief in God and an afterlife. Furthermore, it seems to threaten the moral purity that Kant demands: that we obey the moral law for its own sake, not out of interest in the consequences. Those commentators brave enough to tackle the issue look to the concept of the highest good either to add content to the moral law (Silber), or to provide rational motivation, in a way that does not violate moral purity (Beiser and Wood). I argue that such interpretations, although they may be plausible reconstructions, are unable to account for certain conceptual and textual problems. By placing Kants thought against the background of medieval theology, I argue that the hope for the summum bonum is irreducibly important for Kant, even where its function is not that of providing the content or motivational force of the moral law. Kant is not only concerned with the shape of our duties and motivations, but the shape of the universe within which these emerge.

Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God

This paper is a warning-shot across more sloppy contemporary invocations of an apophatic God. Such apophatic approaches are thought to avoid anthropomorphic projections onto God of parochial and problematic notions of the human subject. Developing an analysis of two views of the human subject given by Charles Taylor, I suggest that modern constructions of the apophatic God look very much like a projection of an intellectually-compromised and culturally-pervasive notion of the subject. I call this subject the “romantic monad”, suggesting Ally McBeal as an example.

Burke, Enlightenment and Romanticism

In a letter sent to his Quaker school-friend, Richard Shackleton, at the start of his third year as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Burke identified a mania for syllogistic reasoning with the dark days of Scholastic philosophy, contrasting its procedures with those of ‘these enlightened times’. He had encountered neo-Aristotelian logic through the textbooks of Franciscus Burgersdicius and Martinus Smiglecius during his first year at university; at the same time, he was exposed to the Logica of Jean Le Clerc. By the mid-1740s he was associating the former with the kind of pre-enlightened ‘ignorance’ that modern philosophy had helped to overcome (C, I: 89). A decade later, in the Account of the European Settlements in America, which Burke composed with his close friend, William Burke, the passage from ignorance to enlightenment is set within a conventional, Protestant historiographical framework. Technological and scientific progress, along with humanism and the Reformation, are presented as having created the conditions for material and intellectual improvement. These developments, moreover, are shown to have occurred in tandem with the consolidation of modern monarchies, the revival of politeness, and the establishment of a ‘rational’ – meaning prudently oriented – politics. Altogether, learning prospered, manners improved, and policy became enlightened. In a fragmentary ‘Essay towards an History of the Laws of England’, which Burke undertook around the same time, the slow, faltering march towards a government of laws is taken to have been ‘softened and mellowed by peace and Religion; improved and exalted by commerce, by social intercourse, and that great opener of the mind, ingenuous science’ (WS, I: 322). What these diverse observations illustrate is that enlightenment for Burke encompassed the progress of society through the expansion of commerce under the protection of law, the improvement of morals under the government of Providence, and the liberalisation of religion under the influence of science.

Burke and Religion

Edmund Burke was not a theologian, but a man of letters and a statesman: it was in these capacities that he was deeply interested in Christianity and its importance for society. He did not conceive religion as an activity of body or mind insulated from the rest of life and thought, but rather as a relation between God and people which, in a range of ways, characterised central aspects of their terrestrial lives as well as their eventual destiny. It will be best to turn to specifics in order to understand what Burke had in view. Early Thought Burke was educated – whether at home or Ballitore School or Trinity College, Dublin – at places where the truth of Christianity was assumed. By the time he left Trinity, he had an orientation towards religion, improvement, and politics. Ireland at that date was a place where reflective thinking had its main social setting in a small educational elite, much of it connected with the Church of Ireland. This elite contemplated a political class that owned much of the land, and consisted primarily of a gentry and peerage, headed by the king’s representative, the lord-lieutenant, but this elite saw too a tiny professional class, and a huge, illiterate, impoverished peasantry. The aim of the educational elite, which it shared with some of the political class, was improvement in the broadest sense, that is to say it connected self-improvement, via the arts and sciences and through the development of intellectual skills, with moral culture and with economic development. The Irish situation suggested a general rationale of practice to those who wished to improve themselves and others: improvement, if it was to spread outside the educational elite, must spring from the guidance and good will of the possessing classes – from the landlord who developed his property, from the priest who instructed and consoled the poor, and from the lord-lieutenant who used his power benevolently. In other words, direction was from above, and it needed to be given in an easily intelligible form.

Kant's Transcendental Idealism and Newton's Divine Sensorium

When Kant read Newton (and Clarke) the following conceptual space could have been opened up for him: space is neither a substance nor an accident, but is the way in which objects are present to the (divine) mind. Space is the divine sensorium, the means by which God is present to the creation. That objects have a spatial form occurs insofar as objects are dependent upon and known by (divine) mind. Such a conceptual space, transposed (with some modifications) to the human cognitive mind, might plausibly—both philosophically and historically speaking—have helped Kant along the road to transcendental idealism.

A Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion – or A Philosophy of Wittgensteinian Religion?

I evaluate the plausibility of how broadly ‘Wittgensteinian’ approaches to the philosophy of religion: looking in the first half of the essay at the account such approaches give of the meaning of religious utterances, and in the second half at the account given of the required justification for believing such utterances. As regards the meaning of religious utterances I distinguish weak and strong Wittgensteinian theses, supporting the former but refuting the latter. Turning to Wittgensteinian approaches to the justification of religious beliefs I argue that although some beliefs are ‘groundless’ in a way that makes them an unquestionable feature of our conceptual landscape, anything as interesting as a religious belief can not be ‘groundless’ in the relevant sense (of being invulnerable to attack). Finally I argue that only Wittgensteinian approaches can capture the meaning and justificatory requirements of religious beliefs for a minority of ‘believers’: but that this minority is important.

Kant on Christianity, Religion and Politics: Three Hopes, Three Limits:

This article makes two key claims in succession. First of all, Kant’s own religious hope is significantly and studiedly distanced from the traditions of Christianity that he would have received, in ways that have not yet been fully, or widely, appreciated. Kant makes an ideal moral community the object of our religious hopes, and not the transcendent God of the tradition. Secondly, Kant nonetheless has a notion of transcendence at play, but in a strikingly different key to traditional Christianity. Both concepts of transcendence, the Christian and the Kantian, deflate, in their own distinctive ways, our hopes for politics and history, in a way that can unsettle the certainties, and vanities, of both the traditional theologian and the secular Rawlsian. The Christian hope is not the same as Kant’s religious hope, which is distinct, in origin, depth and ambition from his more limited hope for politics.

A Metaphysical Kant: A Theological Lingua Franca?

I track a strand of intellectualist theology, running from Kant’s pre-critical into his critical work, whereby the divine will is constrained in its creative activity by the divine understanding. I suggest that Kant’s intellectualist theology continues to do important work in his mature conception of transcendental idealism, transcendental freedom and autonomy. I consider briefly how this might impact upon theological ethics, particularly in relation to the conflict between Kantian secularists and religious believers. I conclude by asking whether Kant’s intellectualist theology—with its Platonic strands—opens up possibilities for inter-faith dialogue.

Intellectualism, relational properties and the divine mind in Kant's pre-critical philosophy.

I demonstrate that the pre-Critical Kant is essentialist and intellectualist about the relational properties of substances. That is to say, God can choose whether or not to create a substance, and whether or not to connect this substance with other substances, so as to create a world: but God cannot choose what the nature of the relational properties is, once the substance is created and connected. The divine will is constrained by the essences of substances. Nonetheless, Kant considers that essences depend upon God, in that they depend upon the divine intellect. I conclude by gesturing towards some possible implications of this interpretation, when considering the role that might be played by God – both historically and conceptually – in relation to the notion of ‘laws of nature’, and when understanding Kants transcendental idealism and his Critical conception of freedom.