Religion (was Re: women?feminism?)

[Sam Pawlett]

James Farmelant wrote:
> 
> One should hardly be surprised by this development.  After all
> the other side of the coin of radical skepticism is religious
> faith.  This has been true throughout intellectual history, why
> should the pomos be an exception?  Pascal stood out historically
> as exemplifying this link between radical skepticism and religious
> faith.  He insisted that none of the principles of human knowledge
> whether of theology, or of natural science or of logic itself were
> rationally provable.

  All were based on leaps of faith in his opinion,
> hence there was no reason why we should resist making a leap
> of faith in God.  This attitude was very different from that embraced
> by most of the Enlightenment philosophes.  Thus Voltaire
> satirized the Pascalian approach to religion.

 Don't forget the whole point of Kant's project "to criticize reason to
make room for faith." Kant is usually named as a top Enlightenment
philosopher (perhaps unjustly?)

 I would also add that many PoMos have been influenced by the
hermeneutic tradition in German philosophy which started out with 
Schleimacher and Bultmann as a method for biblical interpretation.


> 
> It is hardly surprising that some of the leading pomos after having
> jettisoned Enlightenment philosophical views should now be
> getting around to jettisoning modernist views concerning religion.

Sam Pawlett