Michael Bergmann
Please join me in congratulating Michael Bergmann, professor in the Department of Philosophy, who has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship in Religious Experience by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, where he will be a visiting scholar for the 2015-2016 academic year. His project is to complete a three-part book titled Responding to Skepticism: Radical, Moral, and Religious. Part I of the book defends a response, inspired by the 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, to radical skepticism about perceptual, memorial, and logical belief. Part II argues that moral and religious belief are similar to perceptual, memorial, and logical belief in being noninferentially based on experience of some kind and that parallel Reidian responses can be used in defending moral and religious belief against similar skeptical worries. Part III responds to different skeptical challenges arising from the existence of disagreement with our peers and from research on the evolutionary origins of our belief-forming tendencies—challenges that seem more troublesome for moral and religious belief than they are for perceptual, memorial, and logical belief.
Congratulations, Dr. Bergmann!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts