Practices of Belief: Volume 2, Selected Essays

Practices of Belief, the second volume of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers, brings together his essays on epistemology from 1983 to 2008. It includes not only the essays which first presented 'Reformed epistemology' to the philosophical world, but also Wolterstorff's latest work on the topic of entitled (or responsible) belief and its intersection with religious belief. The volume presents five new essays and a retrospective essay that chronicles the changes in the course of philosophy over the last fifty years. Of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of religion, and theologians, Practices of Belief should engage a wide audience of those interested in the topic of whether religious belief can be responsibly formed and maintained in the contemporary world.

Editor's introduction; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The world ready-made; 2. Does the role of concepts make experiential access to ready-made reality impossible?; 3. Ought to believe - two concepts; 4. Entitlement to believe and practices of inquiry; 5. Historicizing the belief-forming self; 6. Epistemology of religion; 7. The migration of the theistic arguments: from natural theology to evidentialist apologetics; 8. Can belief in God be rational if it has no foundations?; 9. Once again, evidentialism - this time social; 10. The assurance of faith; 11. On being entitled to beliefs about God; 12. Reformed epistemology; 13. Are religious believers committed to the existence of God?; 14. Reid on common sense; 15. What sort of epistemological realist was Thomas Reid?; Postscript: a life in philosophy; Bibliography; Index.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University, and Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia. His many publications include Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (1995), John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (1996) and Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (2001, 2004).
Terence Cuneo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He is author of The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (2007) and editor of six books including The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid co-edited with René van Woudenberg (2004).