Historiography without God: A reply to Gregory

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 520-532

  Førland, Tor Egil ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149107141     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00473.x     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Brad Gregory, "No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion," History and Theory 47 (December 2008), 495-519 (this issue). Page references are in parentheses.
2. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
3. Tor Egil Førland, "Acts of God? Miracles and Scientific Explanation," History and Theory 47 (December 2008), 483-494 (this issue).
4. I follow Gregory's terminology here, using "empiricism" in a general sense as opposed to speculative endeavors. I do not intend it to denote the opposition between "realists," who claim that theoretical entities exist, and "empiricists," who abstain from claiming real existence for inobservables, as described, for example, in Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).
5. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 9-12;
6. Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12-18.
7. Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215, revised edition (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1987), 3-4.
8. Wislawa Szymborska, "Miracle Fair," in idem, View with a Grain of Sand; Selected Poems, transi. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (San Diego, CA and New York: Harcourt, 1995), 165-166.
9. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 4.
10. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ogden bilingual edition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), chap. 7, http://www.kfs.org/∼jonathan/witt/ t7de.html (accessed October 13, 2008).
11. See R. J. Kilcullan, "Scotus on Univocal Concepts of God," http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/z3601.html (accessed October 13, 2008).
12. Gregory seems to be unaware of Robert J. Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), deemed by Terence Penelhum in his review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews as "indispensable for anyone who wants to take the measure of [Hume's] argument." NDPR, Jan. 4, 2004, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1044 (accessed October 24, 2008).
13. See also Michael Jacovides' review of Fogelin's Defense and the books by David Johnson (1999) and John Earman (2000) that form much of the basis for Gregory's verdict on the demerits of Hume's essay (508, note 34), Philosophical Review 117 (January 2008), 142447.
14. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, transi. J. E. Anderson [1924] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 231.
15. Brad S. Gregory, "Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life," review essay, History and Theory 38 (February 1999), 100-110, quotation from 107-108, italics in original.
16. See also Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 8-15.
17. Gregory, "Is Small Beautiful?," 107.
18. For example, the deaths in Jonestown in 1978, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Jonestown (accessed October 16, 2008).
19. I take the concept of an ideal explanatory text from Peter Railton; for an introduction and a discussion of its application in historiography, see Tor Egil Førland, "The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism," History and Theory 43 (October 2004), 321-340.
20. I present Gilbert's concept of a plural subject in Tor Egil Førland, "Mentality as a Social Emergent: Can the Zeitgeist Have Explanatory Power?," History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 44-56, esp. 49-50.
21. Peter Lipton, "Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution," in Realism and Religion; Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, ed. Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 31-46.
22. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
23. idem, The Road since Structure;
24. Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. chaps. 2, 4 and 11.
25. Lipton, Science and Religion, 41.
26. Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, esp. 80-83 and 88.