Faith and the practical self

Gomes' The Practical Self is a rich and ambitious exploration of the connection between self-consciousness and objectivity. The argument of the book is this. As self-conscious creatures, we are required to have faith in ourselves as agents of our thinking. Our faith in ourselves as agents of our thinking is sustained by our participation in a practice—our practice of holding each other accountable for our attitudes. To participate in such a practice, we have to be connected to other persons, and therefore to an objective world. So, as self-conscious creatures, we are connected to an objective world. In this paper, I will be concerned with the first premise of this argument. For Gomes, an agent is required to have faith in a proposition p just in case (i) the proposition p is theoretically undecidable but (ii) the agent is practically required to assent to it. I will question Gomes’ claim that the proposition that we are agents of our thinking is theoretically undecidable. And I will express scepticism—from a different direction—about his claim that we are practically required to assent to the existence of a self that serves as an agent of thinking

Faith · Theology · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Medicine · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics

• Agentive Modals

  Matthew Mandelkern, Ginger Schultheis et al.•The Philosophical Review•2017

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