In this study, Paul Murray argues for the cogency, attractiveness and fittingness of a theological rationality he styles variously ‘pragmatist-idealist’ or ‘post-foundationalist.’ The study is provoked by the contemporary challenge put to accounts of human reasoning — theological reasoning included — by recognition of the intractably pluralistic, situated and interested character of our knowing and thinking. Its aim is not primarily to offer a revisionist view of reason that comports with the contemporary mood and which theologians could subsequently adopt; rather Murray works to sketch an account of reason which accords with ‘the tradition's core belief in the Trinitarian reality of God’ (p.193).
The wide-ranging case which Murray advances takes Richard Rorty, Nicholas Rescher and Donald McKinnon as foil, friend and exemplar respectively. Murray ultimately recommends Rescher's mature epistemology as broadly amenable to or resonant with the internal requirements of Christian theology. The presentation of the case is clear, as is Murray's prose generally, though non-specialists will undoubtedly struggle at times to track the technical details of the argument in the central chapters on Rorty and Rescher — not to mention the distillation of aspects of the latter's account of truth into symbolic logic (pp.121–22, 199ff.). And while Murray evidently wants in particular to address running Roman Catholic debates concerning the surety of faith, the capacities of reason, and the nature of doctrine, any reader concerned with questions of theological method, contemporary epistemology, and the status of ‘reason’ as a theological theme will learn much from this insightful and closely argued work.
Murray specifies his ‘desiderata’ at the outset—namely, an account of human rationality ‘alert to the situated, partial character of all human knowing and doing, but that both perceives the need for a constant exposure to the refreshing challenge of other perspectives, and retains the realist aspiration,’ and ‘theological appropriation’ in a manner ‘true to the conversations and practices of Christian faith’ (pp.16–17).
In Chapter Two, Murray moots Rorty's neo-pragmatism as a candidate for such an account of rationality, but ultimately finds it wanting. Murray finds much to commend in Rorty's diagnosis of the ills of ‘foundationalist objectivism’— the illusion of supra-linguistic objectivity, and the inevitable scepticism and elitism which are its corollaries — though what is most appreciated in Rorty on this score is often shown to have been explicated more fully and with greater care (and less rhetorical exuberance) by others like Quine, Davidson and Sellars. What fails to convince however is Rorty's own proposed cures for such epistemic ills. In an extended internal critique, Murray demonstrates how, rather than dissipating such problems, Rorty's demotion of the notion of ‘truth’ to a compliment paid to beliefs we can no longer be bothered to justify, or to a ‘localised honorific designation for what is considered useful’ (p.130) actually aggravates them. Apart from the aspiration to know ‘the reality of things' and not just to achieve ‘agreement in conversation’ (p.74) Murray worries that we are left bereft of any compelling reason to engage with other ‘local’ perspectives different from our own: far from keeping a broad pluralistic conversation going, Rorty's philosophy seems finally to encourage us all to retreat to our respective country clubs for another round of tennis with our own ‘set’— or, as Murray writes, his position ‘makes it impossible to resist the recurrent tendency for human conversation to come to premature self-interested closure’ (p.79). The problems of modernity's ‘view from nowhere’ are best met by cultivating a ‘view from everywhere’ (p.89), i.e., by aiming to ‘to know something of the polyvalent richness-in-relation (both actual and potential) of extra-linguistic reality’ while acknowledging that ‘something of this richness is diversely articulated in language albeit in a fashion as permanently eludes exhaustive articulation within any one language alone’ (pp.85–86).
The third chapter is an essay recommending the epistemic theories of Nicholas Rescher as well fitted to this end. Murray finds Rescher's account of human reasoning which is ‘genuinely postfoundationalist in structure, realist in intent, fallibilist in commitment, expansive in orientation and appropriately integrated in its interweaving of cognitive, evaluative and practical concerns' (p.93) to be both philosophically compelling and theologically attractive. The chapter goes on to elucidate these aspects of Rescher's epistemology in some detail, dwelling in particular upon how his mature work conceives of human reasoning like a dynamic ‘learning machine,’ incorporating more fully both pragmatic and evaluative analysis into his earlier, more narrowly cognitive account of human reasoning. Key in all of this is how Rescher's realist ideal underwrites both a perspectival pluralism and fallibilism without collapsing into scepticism.
The subsequent chapter argues that notwithstanding Rescher's own hesitations in extending his epistemic reflections into the theological sphere, Christian theology has its own good reasons to adopt a view of human reasoning which accords with his pragmatic-idealism. The Christian commitment to remaining open to ‘allowing the insights of other aspects of human understanding to refresh the perspective of Christian faith’ is underwritten in Murray's account by recognition of the validity of a kind of natural theology, i.e., of an ‘indirect partial knowing (and reasoning about such knowing) of the reality of God as reflected, refracted, figured and disfigured in created reality’ (p.134). Appreciation of Christian faith as a constellation of living practices always in via, and of the mystery of God as faith's proper object (p.142), conspire to enjoin upon both faith and theology an epistemic humility and ‘the need for a healthy fallibilist self-regard’ (p.143). In working this all out, Murray invokes the doctrine of the Trinity here in a way which is quite formal and somewhat belies the claim of the chapter to trace a ‘richly Trinitarian appropriation of Rescher's thought’ (p.133).
The book's final chapter briefly commends Donald MacKinnon as an example of a theologian whose theologically motivated account of human reasoning instantiates the virtues of the very position for which Murray has been plumping in conversation with Rescher. For MacKinnon's ‘theological style’— too loose to be taken as a method —‘combines a steadfast realism as regards the object of faith with a rigorously self-critical fallibilism as regards the quality of all attempts to live and think the ways of God in Christ’ (p.186). By demonstrating how MacKinnon's work comports with Rescher's view of human reasoning, Murray hopes to show that the latter can be very helpful as a ‘self-conscious articulation of the authentic dynamics of Christian theology’ (p.189). The fact that MacKinnon himself arrived at his view of human reasoning largely by way of Kant and Aristotle rather than the pragmatic/analytic philosophy which engages Murray's attention is a notable reminder that a theologically salutary posture on the question of human reasoning can be arrived at in a number of philosophically contingent ways.
