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Int J Philos Relig (2012) 72:139144
DOI 10.1007/s11153-012-9362-5
BOOK REVIEW
Received: 20 June 2012 / Accepted: 26 June 2012 / Published online: 22 July 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
In Rationality and Religious Commitment, Audi argues that religious commitment can be rational. Audi is concerned with religious commitment in a robust sense, which includes not just ones beliefs, but also the behavioral, moral, dispositional, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the religious life. He argues that a non-dogmatic religious commitment suffused with appropriate humility, particularly in the interpersonal and political sphere, can be rational. But such a commitment need not be a watered-down or circumscribed commitment: on the contrary, the deeper the commitment reaches into all the dimensions of her life, the more integrated and rich is the life of the rational religious person.
It is natural to start with the exact notion of rationality at issue. Audi distinguishes four separate normative ideals that can apply to beliefs: beliefs can be rational; beliefs can be reasonable; beliefs can be justied; and beliefs can amount to knowledge. Audi stresses that these rst three notions apply to conduct as well as belief, e.g., practical as well as theoretical rationality. His view of rationality is a well-groundedness view: the rationality of particular beliefs and conduct depends on their having good grounding in experience, direct or indirect, where indirect experience includes (among other things) logical and inferential reasoning. Whether an individual is overall (globally) rational will depend in part on whether her individual beliefs, desires, and actions are rational. Audi is also at times concerned with the stronger normative notion of reasonableness, which he takes to mean (in the global sense) governed by reason or (in the sense of individual beliefs and desires) exhibiting support by reasons, not merely consonant with reason as rationality requires.
L. Buchak (B)
Department of Philosophy, University of California, 314 Moses Hall #2390, Berkeley, CA 94720-2390, USAe-mail: [email protected]
Robert Audi: Rationality and religious commitment
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, xvi and 311 pp., $45.00 (hb)
Lara Buchak
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Audi also devotes considerable space to what religious commitment consists in. Audi distinguishes between seven different locutions involving faith in English, and isolates four which are not reducible to...