Postmodern Epistemologies and the Rationality of Religious Belief

(transl. by Rafał Wierzchosławski)

Abstract

How can the religious believer respond to the challenge posed by Richard Rorty's postmodern critique of traditional epistemology? In a recent exchange of essays with Kai Nielsen, Hendrik Hart has elaborated an account of the nature and meaning of religious belief that, he believes, is post-modern (specifically, Rortyan) in inspiration and anti-foundationalist in character.

In this paper, I reconstruct and discuss what I take to Hart's central claims. While Harts does remind us of some important aspects of the nature of religious belief − aspects often overlooked by many critics − I suggest that there are several problems in the account he provides and that it is not clear that he ultimately avoids adopting a variant of the foundationalism he explicitly rejects.