Reason, Revelation, and Devotion Inference and Argument in Religion Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society Series

Reason, Revelation, and Devotion argues that immersion in religious reading traditions and their associated spiritual practices significantly shapes our emotions, desires, intuitions, and volitional commitments; these in turn affect our construction and assessments of arguments for religious conclusions. But far from distorting the reasoning process, these emotions and volitional and cognitive dispositions can be essential for sound reasoning on religious and other value-laden subject matters. And so western philosophy must rethink its traditional antagonism toward rhetoric. The book concludes with discussions of the implications of the earlier chapters for the relation between reason and revelation, and for the role that the concept of mystery should play in philosophy in general, and in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology in particular.

1. Four examples of religious reasoning; 2. The purposes of argument and person-relativity of proofs; 3. Religious reading and theological argument; 4. Passional reasoning; 5. The role of rhetoric in religious argumentation; 6. Reason, revelation, and religious argumentation; 7. Theology and mystery.

William J. Wainwright is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He has served as Editor of Faith and Philosophy and is past President of both the Society for Philosophy of Religion and the Society of Christian Philosophers. Major publications include Mysticism (1981), Philosophy of Religion (1998, 2nd edition 1999), Reason and the Heart (1995), Religion and Morality (2005), and the edited volume Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (2005), as well as over eighty articles and book chapters.