Liberal Faith: Essays in Honor of Philip Quinn

Introduction

1 Introduction Paul J. Weithman Philip Quinn was the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame from 1985 until his death in November 2004. The present volume collects some of the papers presented at a memorial conference for Professor Quinn held at Notre Dame in December 2005. The papers in the collection are by some friends of Phil’s whose work he regarded highly. The contributors also thought quite highly of Phil—as evidenced by the quality of papers they produced for the memorial conference. The conference papers brought together here have been supplemented by papers written by Robert Audi and myself, who were departmental colleagues of Phil’s at the time of his death, and by Richard Foley. Foley, who is now dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, was the chair of the Philosophy Department at Notre Dame who lured Phil away from Brown. Commemorative volumes are not just supposed to recall those whom they commemorate. Those who contribute to a volume like this WeithProof.indb Sec1:1 WeithProof.indb Sec1:1 6/30/08 11:53:11 AM 6/30/08 11:53:11 AM 2 Paul J. Weithman are supposed to honor Phil by putting their talents to work advancing discussion of a representative sample of the questions he cared about. Those who know Phil’s work know that no one set of papers would be adequate to this task. Phil had so wide a range of philosophical interests , and his knowledge of philosophy was so broad, that it would be virtually impossible to identify any one set of questions and issues as representative of those that engaged his attention. In the years after he left Brown for Notre Dame, Phil was most prominently associated with the philosophy of religion. In the last years of his career, he developed an interest in some questions within political philosophy—especially questions about human rights and about the place of religious argument in political life—the latter of which became the subject of his American Philosophical Association presidential address. Phil also retained a lively interest in the core areas of analytic philosophy, including epistemology, as Richard Foley notes in his acknowledgments. Questions in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, political philosophy, and epistemology are all taken up in the papers of this volume. Phil’s own positions on many of the religious and practical questions that interested him grew out of what I have referred to in the title of this volume as a “liberal faith.” Liberal faith is more a sensibility than a set of creedal commitments. It takes its cue from liberal political thought, which began as a family of theories about how to cope, ethically and politically, with the religious pluralism of post-Reformation Europe. Adherents of liberal faith continue to recognize enduring pluralism as one of the salient features of the world in which they live and move and have their being. They instinctively favor certain characteristic responses to it. Thus Phil accepted the inevitability of religious and cultural pluralism in the modern world. He was acutely aware of the challenges it poses and the possibilities it opens in education, in religion , and in politics. In response to pluralism and disagreement, he invariably favored the liberal values of tolerance, autonomy, and free discussion. The catholicity of Phil’s intellectual interests, which included history , literature, and the visual arts as well as philosophy, reflected an abiding faith in liberal education. He believed that such an education, supplemented by cross-cultural studies, could liberate students from prejudice and parochialism. But he remained steadfastly committed to the kind of disciplined intellectual inquiry that philosophy exempliWeithProof .indb Sec1:2 WeithProof.indb Sec1:2 6/30/08 11:53:11 AM 6/30/08 11:53:11 AM Introduction 3 fies. He eschewed the academic fads that dismissed traditional philosophical methods or that questioned the value of rigorous argumentation . Phil’s religion was also that of a liberal. The rituals of his childhood faith had a vestigial hold on him that became apparent to his friends at the end of his life. Throughout his career, he seemed to hold liberal positions in ecclesiology and in matters of observance and dogma. Interestingly, the one Christian doctrine on which Phil did a good deal of serious work was the Atonement, which is not dogmatically defined.1 Though...