Editors’ Introduction: At the Intersection of Moral and Religious Philosophy

James Carter and Daniel Whistler

[A] The Structure of the Volume

The present volume contains twelve essays intent on furthering the conversation

between moral and religious philosophy. They employ either moral philosophy to

strengthen or critique philosophy of religion or philosophy of religion to aid or

criticise moral philosophy. All twelve essays are exercises in engaged reflection on

the moral capabilities and religious attitudes needed to traverse the ambiguities of

existence. They describe, analyse and evaluate that which empowers us and that

which makes us vulnerable—our moral powers and fragile beliefs—in order to arrive

at a philosophical understanding of living in the world.

The last few years have witnessed a marked increase of interest among some

philosophers of religion in developments within moral philosophy, while an

increasing number of moral philosophers have conversely appealed to religious

resources in order to deepen their conceptual vocabulary. Moral Powers, Fragile

Beliefs continues this exchange. It furthers the process of mutual enrichment between

moral and religious philosophy that has already begun. Drawing on the insights and

innovations of feminist philosophy, literature, art, phenomenology, psychoanalysis,

the history of philosophy and, crucially, everyday lived experience, the essays

collected herein explore and discover new domains and tools for thinking through the

collaboration of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. The aim is a

rejuvenated conception of philosophy as engaged—that is, a philosophy concerned

with traversing the complexities of living in the world.

This recent exchange between the two fields has come as something of a shock within

Anglo-American philosophy: not only for the general reason that increasing

specialisation (rather than cross-discipline fertilisation) is the norm, but also because

over the past century (if not longer) philosophy of religion and moral philosophy in

particular have remained in a state of splendid isolation to each other. Moral

philosophy feared the pieties of religious traditions to which it was once yoked, while

philosophy of religion feared the theological temptations of religious moralism. Both

fears were and remain justified; however, such isolation has also bred discontent. In

short, there has emerged a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction over the growing

‘disregard of reality’1 that (until the 1980s at least) characterised both fields.

The present volume is split into four parts, each interrogating the intersection of moral

and religious philosophy with the aim of contributing to and developing a mutually

formative conversation between the two. The first ‘cluster’, ‘Self/Other Relations’,

considers what religion has to offer an ethical account of relations between moral

subjects. What material, the contributors to this cluster ask, can religion and the

analysis of religion provide for moral thought? The second cluster, ‘The Fragility of

Life’, turns to what moral philosophy can offer the philosophy of religion. In

particular, the contributors assess the value of discourse surrounding moral capability,

disability and the emotions for developing new avenues of enquiry in the philosophy

of religion. The third cluster, ‘Philosophy via Art’, raises the possibility of

1 A phrase explored at length in Brian Clack’s essay.

appropriating resources from literature and art to further this conversation. The essays

plunder the rich vocabulary and conceptual armoury of the arts for the sake of

engaged philosophical enquiry into moral and religious topics. Finally, the fourth

cluster, ‘The Vitality of Belief’, offers a critical glance at philosophy of religion as it

is currently practiced, arguing that additional concepts and modes of thought from

moral philosophy are required in order to ameliorate it.

In this Introduction, we wish to give a brief description of the current state of relations

between moral and religious philosophy, as well as indicating what we think are the

main objectives of a conversation between them. The questions that we begin to

answer (or at least sketch a framework for answering) are: why do moral and religious

philosophy need to be brought together? What does philosophy gain from this

juxtaposition? What are the historical precedents for this conversation? Our

provisional answers to these questions will therefore provide the context in which the

subsequent contributions should be placed.

[A] Deepening Moral Philosophy through Philosophy of Religion

Since the mid-1980s (and specifically the publication of Bernard Williams’ Ethics and

the Limits of Philosophy (1985)), Anglophone moral philosophy has undergone ‘a

third wave’. Surpassing the abstractions and formalism of mid-twentieth century

ethics, but also the communitarian ideologies of the MacIntyreans, moral philosophy

has taken on a new form. This ‘new form’ found (pre-eminently) in the work of

Williams, Raimond Gaita and Martha Nussbaum is an exemplary instance of engaged

philosophical enquiry: it marks moral philosophy’s descent from its ivory tower, and

subsequent engagement with concrete and complex modes of ethical living in the

world.2 Williams’ concept of ‘reflection’ (defined as a ‘general attempt to make the

best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we

find ourselves.’ (2006a, p. 182)), is key here. A reflective thinking is not concerned

with constructing systems of morality, meta-ethical reasoning or linguistic analysis;

instead, it is (at least potentially) a social, historical, political and embodied mode of

encountering reality thoughtfully. It discards the clear-cut structures of logic for the

ambiguity of existence, and in consequence engages in alternative modes of

expression and reflection—including art, drama, psychoanalysis and, above all,

religion. In many ways, then, this reflective, ‘third wave’ moral philosophy represents

a challenge to the increasingly abstract, disembodied and disembedded state of what

Williams has called ‘the professional self-image of philosophy’ (2006b, p. 202).3 To

2 Unfortunately, this is not to say that this ‘third wave’ has by any means emerged as

the status quo in contemporary moral philosophy. Instead, current debates in

Anglophone moral philosophy appear to be drawn, on the one hand, to particular

issues in moral psychology that converge with action theory and philosophy of mind;

and, on the other hand, to an increased engagement with rational choice theory and

other models of analysis drawn from the social sciences.

3 We have no wish to reject ‘analytic’ thought in its entirety. There are many

caricatures of this tradition of philosophy (that, for example, it is concerned only with

linguistic analysis) that need to be disputed. Our attitude is rather that of

Cottingham’s: ‘Anglophone philosophy is a far richer and more exciting discipline

today than it was 40 years ago, when it was largely preoccupied with conceptual

analysis. The ship is afloat and sails a wide sea. Yet for all that, there remains a sense

that the philosophical voyage has somehow become tamer, more predictable, than it

paraphrase Raimond Gaita, reflective philosophy is a philosophy in touch with reality,

one that leads us towards reality (2000, pp. 164, 173). It is fascinated by ‘the

contingencies that have nourished particular cultures, particular forms of living and

particular natural languages.’ (ibid, p. 285)

Similar philosophical preoccupations can be found outside of Anglophone philosophy

as well. The late work of Paul Ricoeur, especially, manifests almost identical

concerns with the specificities and ambiguities of ethical meditations on reality.4

Indeed, one could argue that the psychoanalytic and phenomenological traditions in

which French thought in particular is entrenched are precisely focused upon the

‘delicate empiricism’ (Goethe, 1998, §509) required to traverse concrete situations. It

should be remembered that as long ago as 1947 Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Ethics

of Ambiguity.5

used to be—more like joining a carefully planned cruise than venturing forth on the

uncharted ocean.’ (2005, p. vii) He continues later ‘The approach to be taken in this

book is in no sense intended to be disparaging of the analytic tradition: goals such as

conceptual clarity and precise argumentation seem to me important elements of any

philosophising… [But standard analytic] techniques, even in the hands of the virtuoso

practitioner, often seem somehow to miss the mark, or at least to need supplementing,

when we are dealing with the phenomena of religious allegiance and its

significance… Our philosophical discourse about religion may be in need of a certain

supplementation or broadening.’ (ibid, pp. 2-3)

4 See especially Ricoeur, 2007.

5 At stake in pointing to the similarities between (say) Ricoeur’s work and Gaita’s is a

philosophy indifferent to any sharp compartmentalisation into ‘analytic’ or

[B] Moral Philosophy and the Language of Religion

Reflective and engaged moral philosophy rejects traditional ethics’ concern for

abstractions. In many ways, ‘third wave’ moral philosophy is heir to ordinary

language philosophy and the later Wittgenstein—but crucially rather than reducing

language to a pre-established lowest common denominator (‘the language of a life

rendered ordinary by the subtraction of the imagination’ (Williams, 2006b, p. 208)),

this is a form of philosophy which revels in the rhetorical twists and turns of ‘natural

languages’. It is a form of philosophy intensely invested in the imaginative creations

of language and the light they shed on how we live our lives. Gaita, for example, is

concerned not with the language of the academy, but with ‘particular natural

language[s], historically rich and dense, shaped by and shaping the life of a people.’

(2000, pp. xxix-xxx) Foremost amongst the ‘natural languages’ with which ‘third

wave’ moral philosophy has come to engage are religion and literature.

Gaita’s work is exemplary in its engagement with religious discourse. His example of

the nun (ibid, pp. 17-27) whom he encountered in a psychiatric ward, whose

unconditionally loving behaviour towards the patients serves to reveal their full

‘continental’; indeed, the rhetoric of ‘post-analytic’ we employ later in the

Introduction is precisely meant to blur such borders. Ideally, philosophy should

consist in a multiplicity of perspectives and practices—the logical, the speculative, the

engaged, the contemplative etc—and one of the virtues, we believe, of this volume is

its inclusion of many such perspectives and practices, not so as to synthesise them

once more into a monolithic whole, but so as to allow the conversation between moral

and religious philosophy to take on new, unexpected twists and turns.

humanity, has become a classic of its kind. We see here both Gaita’s focus on

concrete examples as revelatory of new conceptual patterns and also his fearlessness

to confront the question of what religion adds to moral philosophy.6 Gaita concludes

that while it does not seem likely that it is the nun’s metaphysical beliefs in a

transcendent deity which determine her moral outlook7, there is much to be said for

the significance of the religious vocabulary in which her moral reasoning

(presumably) takes place. He writes,

Only someone who is religious can speak seriously of the sacred, but such talk

informs the thoughts of most of us whether or not we are religious, for it shapes

our thoughts about the way in which human beings limit our will as does nothing

else in nature. If we are not religious, we will often search for one of the

inadequate expressions which are available to us to say what we hope will be a

secular equivalent of it… In my judgment these are ways of trying to say what we

feel we need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need

6 Conversely, Gaita’s work has no less been invoked as an example of what moral

philosophy adds to philosophy of religion. See Wynn, 2009.

7 ‘If the nun were questioned she might have told a religious or theological or

metaphysical story about the people to whom she responded with a love of such

purity. But one need not believe it… to be certain about the revelatory character of her

behaviour… The purity of her loving proves something, but not any particular

religious faith or doctrine.’ (ibid, pp. 20-1) The problem as Gaita sees it is that

metaphysical stories can be true or false, but the quality of her behaviour is

indisputable—‘the notion of a mistake has no clear application here’ (Wynn, 2005, p.

39).

to say it… Not one of [the secular equivalents] has the simple power of the

religious way of speaking.

Gaita goes on to consider why this is the case,

Where does this power come from? Not, I am quite sure, from esoteric theological

or philosophical elaborations…. [Rather] because of the place the impartial love

of saints has occupied in our culture, there has developed a language of love

whose grammar has transformed our understanding of what it is for a human

being to be a unique kind of limit to our will. (ibid, pp. 23-4)8

The language of religion provides something that human reason when divorced and

isolated from its religious traditions fails to. It is not because these traditions are

religious that they are important; it is merely a contingent fact of Western history that

the vocabularies of religious traditions already possess a depth, richness and density

to which other traditions can only aspire. Wynn articulates this conclusion perfectly,

While there may be no abstract conceptual requirement that saintly love be

conditioned by the language of divine love, it may well be that, as a matter of

contingent, historical fact, such love needs the language of religion, since that

language offers our richest, most sustained exploration of the thought. (2005, p.

43)

8 See further Gaita, 2000, pp. xxi-xxvi.

The upshot is that moral philosophy needs to appeal (sometimes) to religious thought

(and even religious philosophy) in order to maximise its potential and crystallise its

reasoning to the fullest possible extent. Hence, at a key point in the argument of A

Common Humanity, Gaita will appeal to Augustine’s Confessions (2000, pp. 215-7).

Ethics needs the resources of religion to complete itself. It is for this reason that ‘third

wave’ moral philosophy has entered into dialogue with philosophy of religion—as a

means of enriching and deepening its vocabulary. Moral philosophy has plundered

religion for resources.

This practice of plundering is discussed in the first cluster of the volume, ‘Self/Other

Relations’. In ‘Morality, Metaphysics and Religion’, Gaita returns to his example of

the nun to analyse more fully the significance of the religious context of her conduct.

Gaita claims that standard philosophical concepts alone do not adequately represent

the full register of moral philosophy. Rather, there are other forms of expression and

attention which perform a philosophically significant ‘revelatory’ function but do not

exist within the conventional vocabulary of philosophers. In particular, the language

of what Gaita calls ‘saintly love’ (as embodied by the nun) yields the idea that persons

such as the patients in the psychiatric ward can be seen as fully human (in a way that

would not be possible, for example, with the ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’-oriented language

of Kantian ethics). Moreover, Gaita urges that this language can be employed

independent of any particular metaphysical framework from which it might originate.

As such, moral philosophy has at its disposal a rich array of resources in the various

forms of expression available in religious traditions.

In ‘Love for Particular Others and Moral Inclusion’, Anca Gheaus returns us to

Gaita’s example. She does so in order to raise questions about the nature of impartial

love typical of most religious and secular ethical frameworks. She claims that the love

which can put us on the path to moral inclusion need not be a universal—for example,

Christian—love, nor does it need to be an impersonal love for humanity. In Gaita’s

example, says Gheaus, the nun's love is best understood as impartial—but would not

partial love have achieved the same result? Would this love have to be (and could it

really be) unconditional? Or is the existence of such love a myth, a necessary

idealisation? Drawing on feminist ethics’ concerns with care, Gheaus constructs a

powerful alternative to dominant religious and secular assumptions about impartiality.

[B] Philosophy, Religion, and the Literary Imagination

Another rich ‘natural language’ on which moral philosophy has drawn is the

vocabulary and imagery of literature (and the arts in general). Many moral

philosophers (most famously, Nussbaum) have utilised the resources of poetry, fiction

and music to attain a greater ‘density’ in their description of moral concepts.9 This

enterprise is considered in the third cluster of the present volume. Christopher

Hamilton, for example, pursues this project—but with the added twist of bringing his

background in philosophy of religion to bear on such discussions. Moral philosophy,

he argues, is almost completely inattentive to notions of an individual’s sensibility,

temperament, moods and vitality. He thus appeals to the sensitive languages of

literature in order to understand the inner life, drawing on examples to illustrate the

9 See in particular Nussbaum, 1990. The term ‘density’ is drawn from Christopher

Hamilton’s contribution to this volume.

means by which we might begin to express that which is inexpressible in conceptual

terms.

Martin Warner and Joseph Carlisle, meanwhile, consider whether such a plunder of

literary sources is valuable within philosophy of religion itself. Art becomes a

material for new practices of thought. Both Warner and Carlisle attempt to provide

some much needed ‘density’ to concepts in philosophy of religion. Warner examines

what ‘density’ can be brought to bear on the concept of love. Beginning with the work

of Austin Farrer and Basil Mitchell and setting out on a route that passes by

Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Eliot, Warner builds up a cumulative picture of the

legacy of Christian understandings of love, especially the problematic distinctions

between eros, philia and agape. Carlisle, on the other hand, considers what the ‘beat’

novels of Jack Kerouac have to offer philosophy’s mediation between the divine and

the way we inhabit the world. He shows how Kerouac’s vision of the divine as

existing immanently in ‘holy doubt’ can be read as a creative thorn in the side of

moral and religious philosophy, inciting them to further insight.

[A] Opening out Philosophy of Religion through Moral Philosophy

Given the advances ‘third wave’ moral philosophy has made in the last two decades,

it is of little surprise that philosophers of religion experiencing disenchantment at the

way the discipline is currently practiced have turned to these exciting developments

for inspiration and stimulation. Philosophers of religion such as John Cottingham,

Mark Wynn, Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack have absorbed many of the

practices and insights of Nussbaum, Gaita and Williams into their work. There are

two ideals at stake in this ‘opening out’ of philosophy of religion—the imperative for

a new content and the imperative for a new style.

[B] Content

When it comes to questions of moral philosophy within philosophy of religion, two

topics have traditionally dominated to the exclusion of everything else: theodicy on

the one hand and the Euthyphro dilemma (and its offshoot, divine command theory)

on the other. While these two topics are of course valuable pursuits for the

philosopher of religion, they should not be pursued to the exclusion of others. Issues

of spirituality and human value (Cottingham), emotions and the sense of place

(Wynn), sexuality, death, immanence and transcendence (Anderson and Clack) are

now being brought to the forefront of philosophical engagements with religion as

well.

In terms of content therefore, philosophy of religion has undergone (and still needs to

undergo)10

something of an ‘opening out’—releasing it from the dead-hand of the

topic, so as to philosophically explore the complexity of religion from an engaged

perspective. The rhetoric of ‘topic’ which informs philosophical education and

practice in the English-speaking world has, we contend, stifled much of its potential

creativity. Philosophers of religion—in order to qualify as ‘legitimate’ or even

10

Indeed, in many respects Anglophone philosophy of religion lags behind moral

philosophy which has been far more open to engagement with other disciplines and

new issues. Philosophy of religion remains dominated to a far greater degree by

variations on a small handful of questions largely concerned with the attributes of the

God of Christian theism.

‘respected’—are forced to produce endless variations on the same theme. These

‘topics’ suffocate, and only by opening new windows and doors to allow philosophy

of religion to communicate with other fields and modes of thinking can one hope to

revive it. Sustained engagement with themes in moral philosophy thus represents an

opportunity for transposing philosophy of religion into new domains.

It is for this reason we have labelled each of the parts of this volume, ‘clusters’. Such

a designation is meant to suggest a looser affiliation of concerns than the more formal

‘topic’; it is meant to promote individual and even idiosyncratic exploration of the

intersection between moral and religious philosophy without thereby delineating in

advance prescribed areas of interest. Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs is a volume intent

on new voyages and new discoveries.

[B] Style

A similar story can be told about style. The majority of philosophy of religion has

remained in thrall to the logical argumentation and tools of linguistic analysis which

were forged during the birth-pangs of analytic philosophy. The question asked by

many recent philosophers of religion is: are these tools and styles sufficient?11

In

asking such a question, they have begun to interrogate the practices we have inherited,

drawing in this regard on the critiques already well established within ‘third wave’

moral philosophy. Williams’ attack on the abstractness of linguistic analysis in ethics,

for example, surely has weight in philosophy of religion as well: just as ‘goodness’

and ‘justice’ in the abstract say nothing about the concrete complexities of ethical

11

See in particular Cottingham, 2005 and Harris and Insole, 2005.

living in the world12

, so too dissecting abstract terms such as ‘omnipotence’,

‘revelation’ and ‘natural law’ reveals little about religious phenomena as they are

lived. An engaged and reflective response is required by philosophers, instead.

At stake in respect to style, therefore, is the possibility of other ways of thinking

philosophically, other ways of conceptualising religion than those we have

inherited—yet, always, the same demands on any form of philosophy remain: rigour,

clarity and cogency. As Stephen Mulhall has recently written:

The point here is not to deny that more familiar forms of critical reflection, of the

kind associated with philosophy in general and analytical philosophy in particular,

and which tend to focus on questions of inferential validity in the context of

assertion and argument, are real and important elements in the human rational

armoury. It is simply to point out that there are other forms of critical reflection as

well–ones with which we are perhaps more familiar in extraphilosophical

contexts, but which are no less concerned to deepen our understanding and enrich

our thought by embodying certain kinds of affective response to things, and

inviting us to share those responses, as well as to critically evaluate them. (2009,

p. 9)

The question therefore arises: are there other forms of rigour, other forms of clarity

and other forms of cogency than those embedded within traditional analytic

12

As Williams markedly puts it: ‘Of much philosophy purportedly about ethical or

political subjects (and other kinds as well) one may reasonably ask: what if someone

speaking to me actually sounded like that?’ (2006b, p. 206).

philosophy? What else, in short, is philosophy of religion able to do?13

‘Getting it

right has to be in place [in order to philosophise], and the same thing goes,

indisputably, for clarity and precision. But there is more than one kind of all these

things.’ (Williams, 2006b, p. 203) One always needs to ask: which clarity, which

precision, is appropriate for philosophy of religion?

Here the appeal of ‘third wave’ moral philosophy becomes obvious. The realisation

among moral philosophers in the last thirty years that phronesis is not deduction (that

moral reasoning is irreconcilable with logical reasoning) has led to experiments with

new modes of thinking and writing that are intended to pinpoint the procedure of

moral thought and convey it as adequately as possible. As a result, a whole host of

meditative, confessional and even literary styles have emerged—all with the same aim

of enacting what is at issue in moral reflection without thereby renouncing rigour,

clarity or cogency.

The contributors to the second and fourth clusters, ‘The Fragility of Life’ and ‘The

Vitality of Belief’, concentrate precisely on the ‘opening out’ of philosophy of

religion through bringing tools from ‘third wave’ moral philosophy (and its

intellectual allies, like psychoanalysis) to bear on this field of thought as it is currently

practiced. The second cluster questions the capacity of philosophy of religion alone to

analyse religion in its concrete manifestations. There is a depth to human experience

that philosophy of religion in its current guise is ill-equipped to address. In ‘The

Passionate Life: On Grief and Human Experience’, James Carter draws on resources

in moral philosophy and literature to offer a phenomenological engagement with grief

13

See Cottingham, 2005, p. 233.

and human vulnerability, proposing a new form in which the philosophy of religion

might fruitfully come to terms with our moral powers and fragile beliefs. Similarly,

Michele Petersen’s reading of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of contemplative silence

opens a hitherto unexplored avenue for philosophers of religion to confront the

aporetic depths of human experience.

By comparison, the fourth cluster takes the form of a more critical project,

questioning what philosophy of religion lacks, and how it might be revitalised. By

engaging with the phenomenology of space, psychoanalysis, and verificationism

respectively, Wynn, Beverley Clack and Brian Clack each pose critical questions to

analytic philosophy of religion, while also offering a rich range of suggestions as to

how the discipline might broaden its outlook while still developing its capacity for

self-regulation. Mark Wynn considers the idea of space as a springboard from which

enquiry in philosophy of religion might begin. The neglect of this idea within so much

philosophy (despite the obvious importance of sacred spaces, spaces for devotion and

spaces for confession within almost all religious traditions) starkly reveals its lack of

phenomenological engagement with religious practices qua lived. Beverley Clack and

Brian Clack both use their essays to suggest the potential significance of concepts

drawn from Freudian psychoanalysis to rectify deficiencies in the current practice of

philosophy of religion. These appeals to a neglected tradition of thought (the

psychoanalytic) add one more dimension to the engaged philosophy which is in the

process of being articulated in this volume. Beverley Clack argues that a notion of

play—developed from Freud and Winnicott’s work, as well as that of feminist

philosophers—should hold a central place in our philosophical analysis of religious

experience. Brian Clack argues that much recent philosophy of religion is in need of

critique due to its patent ‘disregard of reality’; in this context, the Freudian idea of

wish-fulfilment provides a useful tool. Only through these interrogative procedures

can philosophy of religion become an engaged practice once again.

A philosophy of religion newly opened up in these ways would be a genuinely post-

analytic philosophy of religion—testing the analytic tradition so as to discover what is

of use for engaged reflection on religion and what is not. It would fulfil the criteria set

by Williams in his late essay, ‘What will Philosophy Become?’ (2006b), for a

reformed philosophical enterprise, casting off unnecessary scientism to instead engage

with imagination and the arts, society and history.

[A] The History of Moral Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion

It is this notion of a philosophy of religion which takes history (and especially its own

history) seriously that we would finally like to discuss.

Until the late eighteenth century, there was little distinction between moral and

religious philosophy—‘religious’ in the early modern period did not name what or

whether one believed, but how one acted. By the mid-twentieth century, however,

philosophy had completely splintered into a plurality of specialisations, and so

philosophical enquiry into religion was separated out from philosophical enquiry into

ethics. There are advantages and disadvantages to specialisation. The benefits were

and are immense: moral philosophy was liberated from the normative demands

religious traditions made on it, and it was now able to consider ethical life freely and

disinterestedly. Philosophy of religion, moreover, no longer needed to preach about

right and wrong. Specialisation was necessary to allow both fields to come into their

own. Nothing is more symptomatic of the gulf that now separates the two fields than

the position of religious ethics: the philosophical examination of ethical concepts

drawn from religious traditions fits neatly neither into philosophy of religion nor

moral philosophy; it has in fact frequently migrated to theology to find a home.

This volume is not an exercise in religious ethics. The contributors herein are

concerned neither with the ethical significance of religion nor the religious

significance of ethics. The intersection is between philosophy of religion and moral

philosophy. However, even with this proviso, it is still worth asking: while much has

been gained by this process of specialisation, what has been lost? That is, both

philosophy of religion and moral philosophy need to attend far more seriously to the

resources concealed and neglected in their joint traditions. There is of course no

question of a return to the past; rather, what is at issue is the appropriation of the past

for the present. What insights and practices can be rescued from the history of

philosophy and put back to use in a post-analytic age?

Obviously, much work has been done already in moral philosophy to reinvestigate

this tradition. Nussbaum’s appropriation of Aristotle in support of a modern, broadly

liberal political philosophy (1986, 2006) is perhaps the most famous example, while

Susan Neiman’s engagement with a host of figures in the history of philosophy to

reconsider the problem of evil (2002) and, more recently, the moral fabric of

contemporary Western society (2008) is also exemplary. One illustration of this

process within philosophy of religion, on the other hand, is Cottingham’s re-

engagement with the work of Blaise Pascal. Pascal is exemplary in, on the one hand,

his refusal to dissociate moral and religious philosophy and, on the other, his

experimental attempts at discovering new content and new styles by which to

mutually enrich both moral and religious philosophy. Pascal notoriously writes, ‘The

heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ (2003, §423) That is, there are

forms of thinking distinct from those historically employed in the geometrical and

logical traditions. ‘Heart’ here does not designate an irrational (or worse, antirational)

principle of religious intuition, but a form of thoughtful judgment—judgment that

subtly discriminates between the various ‘sentiments’ stimulated by our worldly

existence, rather than analysing disembodied concepts.14

It is an ‘alternative

conception of rationality’ (Warner, 1989, p. 31). The esprit juste comprises both an

esprit de géométrie and also an esprit de finesse—a finesse that delicately traverses

the materials of our lives. Moreover, despite that fact that Pascal’s Pensées are an

accidental product of a premature death, their style—aphorisms with a sprinkling of

dialogue and other non-conventional philosophical forms—is itself an aid in

cultivating this finesse.15

Obviously, the traditions shared by moral and religious philosophy go beyond one or

two thinkers picked from the last 2500 years. One of the most urgent requirements for

a post-analytic philosophy is to recover the depth and resources of all these traditions,

so as to reinvigorate and renew contemporary investigation into moral and religious

thought.16

In this regard it is worth naming one recent work which provides a template

14

See further Warner, 1989, pp. 158-60, 183 and Cottingham 2005, chapter 1.

15 See Warner, 1989, p. 187.

16 In Warner’s words (1989, p. 3), what is needed are studies that ‘seek to help re-

enfranchise a range of voices, procedures and positions which have long been

for such an approach: A.W. Moore’s Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes

and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (2003). The subtitle here

tells it all: Moore works to reciprocally enrich moral and religious philosophy through

an historical enquiry into Kant’s thought. The two fields begin to complement each

other by means of an unlikely, but productive historical grounding. It is in Moore’s

footsteps that Anderson and Whistler tread in this volume. They both employ the

history of philosophy to deepen the conversation between moral and religious

philosophy. Pamela Sue Anderson achieves this by appeal (via Ricoeur) to Spinoza’s

Ethics, as she develops a conception of (ethical) confidence which requires belief in

oneself as part of nature, in which each individual can come to understand both the

power to act and the power to suffer. Anderson’s engagement with the history of

philosophy thus results in a vision that succeeds in rendering moral and religious

philosophy ultimately inseparable. Daniel Whistler’s chapter interrogates the neglect

of the concept of piety in both moral and religious philosophy, and identifies the

reason for this lack in the eighteenth-century emergence of disinterested fields of

philosophical enquiry. Piety—as a form of interest—was excluded from these newly

formed disciplines.

Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs is therefore a book about possibilities: the possibilities

for a moral philosophy that takes religious discourse seriously and the possibilities for

marginalized by the dominance of the geometric method of philosophical argument.

[Such] case-studies point beyond themselves to a conception of philosophy as an

activity of interrogation (including self-interrogation) for which the paradigms

associated with analysis and system-building are inadequate.’

a philosophy of religion that learns from moral philosophy. It is a book that not only

talks about, but also practices the mutual enrichment of two fields of enquiry.

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