Description: This book develops an inductive risk account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. The riskiness of different people's methods for forming religious beliefs is shown central both to understanding fundamentalist orientation and to concerns that philosophers and th...
Brief description: Guy Axtell is Professor of Philosophy at Radford University, working primarily in social epistemology, and philosophy of the sciences. His volume Knowledge, Belief, and Character (Rowman & Littlefield 2000) was the first edited collection in the area of virtue/vice epistemology; he has since published two monographs along with numerous articles.
Review Quotes:
"Guy Axtell's new book, as the title suggests, is an attempt to assess the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. In trying to delineate those limits Axtell thinks that it is useful to employ the notions of luck and risk in examining how reasonable a particular religious (or atheistic) stance is. A central concern of the book is with religious groups which exclude others in some way and which ascribe traits to those other groups that are very unlike the traits the group ascribes to themselves.... Problems of Religious Luck takes a fresh look at the kinds of problems raised by the contingency of people's beliefs on their location (the time they live in, the place they live in, the family they grow up in, the groups they happen to be exposed to, and so on).... His book is intelligent, thought provoking, and it does valuable work in promoting a more open-minded and empathetic approach to religious disagreement.²6" --Wittgenstein-Studien
"In this book, Guy Axtell joins this important conversation about lucky belief, with an eye toward the religious case. He focuses on the epistemic justification of religious belief: the "de jure question" (p. 6). Axtell's main target is religious exclusivism -- a doctrinal or soteriological uniqueness that sets a particular religion apart from other religions. . . . Overall, the contingency of belief is a fascinating issue that deserves serious consideration. I'm hopeful that Axtell's book draws more attention to the intriguing problems raised by religious luck." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "A thought-provoking, historically-informed, and highly distinctive take on the important questions raised by religious luck, this is a welcome addition to the literature." --Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh