Francis Fallon and Gavin Hyman (eds.). Agnosticism: Explorations in Philosophy and Religious Thought (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press 2020). Pp. x + 218. £78.00 (Hbk). ISBN: 9780198859123.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: In their introduction to Agnosticism, Francis Fallon and Gavin Hyman note that, in spite of how widespread and philosophically significant agnosticism about God is, its nature and ramifications have been discussed by philosophers much less frequently than those of theism and atheism.This assessment is supported by the fact that the work they introduce is the first book-length general discussion of agnosticism in English from a predominantly analytic perspective since Robin Le Poidevin's 2010 Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction.This in itself provides a reason to take a close look at the account(s) of agnosticism presented in the book.The contents of the book reflect the fact that during the decade separating it from Le Poidevin's work the interest in agnosticism has grown in both general and religious epistemology.The general epistemological debate on what is involved in the suspension of judgement, along with the continued attention to topics such as non-doxastic faith and alternative concepts of God in the epistemology of religion, have made agnosticism a broader and more complex notion.This, in turn, drew the attention of philosophers who work on agnosticism away from the issues surrounding evidence towards practical questions.The latter are the main theme of the set of essays edited by Fallon and Hyman, making the book a marking point -both a commentary on and an illustration of the problems increasingly recognised as important.One challenge in providing a unified account of agnosticism about God is that it has historically been discussed within wildly different conceptual frameworks.Originally rooted in nineteenth-century epistemology, where it described a position inspired by the views of Hume and Kant, the term 'agnosticism' acquired a new meaning within analytic philosophy, where it is usually defined as suspending judgement on whether something is true.At the same time, the term occasionally makes appearance in continental thought, where it signifies a general existential perspective rather than an attitude towards a proposition.All these senses of agnosticism are present in the book, interpreted and combined in various ways -a situation made necessary by the ambitious goal of extending the discussion onto the authors either independent of the analytic tradition, like Hegel, or, like Wittgenstein, placed on the border of it.Though the authors of particular chapters approach the topic very differently, they all share an interest in what James C. Livingston in his overview of the thought of Victorian
Source: Religious Studies
Author: Sylwia Wilczewska
Institution: Polish Academy of Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404116195