Philosophy of Religion Work-in-Progress Group Talk (J.L. Schellenberg, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax)

The group welcomes J. L. Schellenberg, professor of philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax.

Talk Title

Faith, Fictionalism, and the Future

Talk Abstract

Fictionalism is a relative newcomer to philosophy of religion. Its presence in the field raises a number of questions, among which are the following. Can attitudes grounded in a fictionalist semantics for religious discourse count as genuinely religious? Is the defence of fictionalism in the religious case assimilable to the current emphasis on nondoxastic faith, or instead distinct from it? Might religious fictionalism and a realist nondoxasticism in some way fruitfully be combined? (For concreteness: Should we respond with equanimity or with horror to the notion of a general realist faith combined with the attitudes of a Christian fictionalist?) My aim is to see what light is shed on such questions by the notion of human religious immaturity, which I have explored and defended in other work. Does this idea allow for a unified approach and plausible answers?