The CREC Scholastic? Part III: Presuppositionalism
On the most awkward issue for me personally
[Continuing my Apologia de CREC. The first post is here, the second here.]
I can’t deny it: I have never identified with presuppositionalism. The reasons for this are mostly nerdy and technical. I am epistemologically a realist and think presuppositionalism, at least in its stronger forms, tends to break that. If you are into this kind of thing, the following quote from Frederick D. Wilhelmsen more or less explains what I think is at issue:
The Thomistic realist, so goes the complaint, is a man who merely pounds the table and asserts flatly that things exist without justifying his assertion in any way. He is a naïve realist, a man who refuses to take into account the past three hundred years of philosophical speculation, a philosopher whose philosophy amounts to little more than the spontaneous affirmations of the man in the street. The Thomistic position, according to the critical epistemologists, is really no position at all; it is nothing but "common sense,” uncriticized, unpenetrated by philosophical analysis. When Boswell asked Dr. Johnson to refute the idealism of Bishop Berkeley, Johnson kicked a stone on the street. This, say the critical thinkers, is dogmatism: unreflecting, unthinking, unenlightened. This is not philosophy: It is prejudice.
There is no doubt that Johnson's kicking the stone was not philosophy. But the Thomistic realist maintains that he can explain why Johnson kicked the stone. Johnson kicked the stone because he was certain there was a stone to kick, not because of prior convictions he entertained about the nature of the mind, but because of the stone itself.
So, I’m unapologetic about my realism and its accompanying general classicalism in metaphysics, epistemology, and thus also apologetics. Why, then, can I get along comfortably in a realm where presuppositionalism is the standard?