Analytic Catholic Epistemologies of Faith: A Survey of Developments

Abstract

If you were to take a time machine and travel back to the 1980s, Catholic epistemology would look drastically different than it does today, at least in analytic circles. One of those drastic changes relates to whether Catholic epistemology is consistent with Reformed epistemology. Another issue relates to whether St. Thomas Aquinas was a classical evidentialist. In this paper, I survey recent developments in Catholic epistemology. I do this by first looking at Gregory Stacey's recent work arguing the Catholic Church's teaching on faith is best situated in a Reformed epistemological framework. I then engage decades old objections to Reformed epistemology from a Catholic perspective. I respond to these objections partly by surveying recent work by Catholic epistemologists. The paper then takes a turn to look at the recent scholarship on Aquinas' epistemology. I show that there is now an emerging consensus that Aquinas belongs not to a hard evidentialist camp as it was previously thought, but rather an externalist friendly tradition.

Christian epistemology. How faith can shape and promote rationality

“…Note that, in contemporary religious epistemology, this view may be seen as “externalist,” as emerges from Eleonore Stump's investigations, especially Stump (1992). For more on the epistemology of faith as developed by contemporary analytic Catholic thinkers, see McNabb (2023).…”

“…1‐16 , tr. by Thomas a Kempis Reilly (St. Louis: Herder, 1965), from which it seems to emerge that Aquinas was an evidentialist (see McNabb, 2023, p. 2). These views have been questioned by more recent interpretations.…”