By contrast, Cristopner Crosbie maintains that this play does not negotiate epistemology, but rather engages Aristotelian ontology and the metaphysics of haecceity or 'thisness." He holds that while the play entertains a fundamentally nominalist picture, the community of Ephesus ultimately agrees to put faith in a stable realist metaphysics, although "the play does this by showing how an otherwise compromised nominalist epistemology, when distributed across a network of likeminded people, can facilitate the fideistic leap to this realistic metaphysic, even while masking the
fideism intrinsic to such an approach"; "The Comedy of Errors, Haecceity, and the Metaphysics of Individuation," in Renaissance Papers, ed.
The flipside to
fideism is a type of religious sentimentalism.
Was the only defense of the faith pure
fideism (by faith alone)?
All in all, he was the most generous of human beings and a boon companion to those who struggled alongside him to defend political decency and nobility, religion shorn of sentimentality and
fideism, and the contemplation of the highest possibilities of the human soul.
(1) See Thomas Casey's article "The return of the soul," Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 102(2013): 31 and Robert Gall's article "
Fideism or faith in doubt?
Philosophers refers to this as "
fideism," the idea that faith is independent of knowledge and reason and operates on trust.
Mure's presentation of Catholicism is an entirely mental construct, born of hearsay, his own reading and his readers' prejudice, and his strategy as an artist is to combat reified superstition with abstract
fideism. Whatever one may think of the religious attitudes undergirding Mure's work, the poem is a masterpiece of dialectic.
Are we talking about pure
fideism? How to characterize, at least summarily, the cosmology, theology, theodicy, eschatology, liturgy, ethics, politics, historiography, etc.
(20) Abduh (1849-1905) and al-Maraghi (1881-1945) were both proponents of modernization, both championed a new type of ijtihad (independent legal reasoning), and both considered taqlid (legal
fideism) to be the main cause of the downfall of Muslims.
The theme of the address was the compatibility of faith with reason, a position challenged by an extreme voluntarism and
fideism in faith (Islam being cited as an instance of this) and by the skepticism and relativism implicit or explicit in most systems of modern thought.
Even considering the Catholic
fideism of thinkers like Montaigne (and possibly like Cervantes), the crucifix here stands for skepticism itself, for the instability of the rule of faith, and for the view that no propositions are absolute beyond proof and no proofs are absolute beyond doubt.
In sixteen pages, Pihlstrom skates quickly over many "conceptual and metaphilosophical issues concerning the status of theism and the meta-level contrast between evidentialism and
fideism" (196), to conclude that the only hedge Jamesians have against pluralism being discarding as one of many different plausible philosophies is the responsibility of reflexive criticism and inquiry into the justifiability of particular perspectives.