How Agatheistic Account of Doxastic Pluralism Avoids the Shortcomings of Hickian Pluralism

Аннотация

The paper outlines an original solution to the problem of ‘doxastic pluralism’ understood as irreducible pluralism of beliefs (doxa) in the areas where knowledge (episteme) is in principle unavailable. The problem is explored on the example of religious doxastic pluralism, with implications for all types of ‘agathological beliefs’ (beliefs about the good: to agathon in Greek), which – as value-laden beliefs – do not lend themselves to verification or falsification by scientific methods. The ‘agatheistic account of doxastic pluralism’ is presented as superior to John Hick’s conceptualisation of doxastic pluralism. The Hickian pluralism is wedded to the Kantian critique of metaphysics and his epistemology of transcendental idealism and while it proclaims that different religious beliefs are ‘diverse responses to the Transcedent’ or to ‘the Real’, it is arguably unable to show how various assertions about the Real can be justified and thus how doxastic commitment of belief-holders can be explained. Agatheism conceives of the object of religious commitment as the highest good and links both the metaphysical and epistemic aspects of religious doxastic practices with the activity of ‘agathological imagination’, conceiving various religious beliefs as grounded in human conceptualisations of the highest good towards which human agathological consciousness is directed of no choice of our own (that is a phenomenologically given fact).