Dissertation Précis
"When to Trust Authoritative Testimony: Generation and Transmission of Knowledge in Saadya Gaon, al-Ghazali, and Thomas Aquinas"
Committee Members:
People have become suspicious of authority, including epistemic authorities, i.e. knowledge experts, even on matters individuals are unqualified to adjudicate (e.g. climate change, vaccines, or the shape or age of the earth). This is problematic since most of our knowledge comes from trusting a speaker—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or pedestrians inquiring of strangers—such that the knowledge transmitted is never personally verified. Despite the recent development of social epistemology, this is not a new problem.
Ancient and Medieval philosophers largely took it for granted that most human knowledge comes from listening to a reliable speaker and is never personally verified—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or even pedestrians inquiring of strangers. Thus, unlike contemporary Social Epistemology, few testimonial theories were explicitly laid out despite evidence of them interspersed throughout a thinker’s writings. To date, the working theory of testimony underpinning the works of medieval philosophers has not been codified (with few exceptions). Thus, there is a large gap in the recorded epistemologies of most medieval scholars. This is particularly relevant for the Abrahamic faiths since they originate with testimony from God himself. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how the generation and transmission of religious knowledge appears in an exemplary thinker from each faith: Saadya (Saadiah) Gaon of Judaism (882-942AD), al-Ghazali of Islam (1058-1111AD), and Thomas Aquinas of Christianity (1225-1274AD). While not contemporaries, these exemplars are theological philosophers who are like-minded in their desire to maintain an orthodox faith while possessing philosophical approaches to truth. Thus, they maintained sophisticated epistemological theories of transmission within their own religious contexts. The current status quaestionis concerning theories of testimony in medieval systems of thought consists of a handful of studies pertaining to Aquinas on testimony conducted within only the past few years and a complete lack of comparable studies of this type in the current literature for Saadya and al-Ghazali. The research on Saadya and al-Ghazali will thus be innovative and insightful while the section on Aquinas will serve to build on and contribute to this burgeoning conversation in Thomistic and medieval studies. I further argue for a "transhistorical" concept of testimony that does not presume an evidentialist framework to account for pre-modern theories of testimony which predominantly rely on virtue theoretic frameworks.
Committee Members:
- Andrea Robiglio, Co-Chair, KULeuven
- Richard C. Taylor, Co-Chair, Marquette University
- Michael J. Wreen, Marquette University
- Sarah Pessin, University of Denver
- Owen Goldin, Marquette University
People have become suspicious of authority, including epistemic authorities, i.e. knowledge experts, even on matters individuals are unqualified to adjudicate (e.g. climate change, vaccines, or the shape or age of the earth). This is problematic since most of our knowledge comes from trusting a speaker—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or pedestrians inquiring of strangers—such that the knowledge transmitted is never personally verified. Despite the recent development of social epistemology, this is not a new problem.
Ancient and Medieval philosophers largely took it for granted that most human knowledge comes from listening to a reliable speaker and is never personally verified—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or even pedestrians inquiring of strangers. Thus, unlike contemporary Social Epistemology, few testimonial theories were explicitly laid out despite evidence of them interspersed throughout a thinker’s writings. To date, the working theory of testimony underpinning the works of medieval philosophers has not been codified (with few exceptions). Thus, there is a large gap in the recorded epistemologies of most medieval scholars. This is particularly relevant for the Abrahamic faiths since they originate with testimony from God himself. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how the generation and transmission of religious knowledge appears in an exemplary thinker from each faith: Saadya (Saadiah) Gaon of Judaism (882-942AD), al-Ghazali of Islam (1058-1111AD), and Thomas Aquinas of Christianity (1225-1274AD). While not contemporaries, these exemplars are theological philosophers who are like-minded in their desire to maintain an orthodox faith while possessing philosophical approaches to truth. Thus, they maintained sophisticated epistemological theories of transmission within their own religious contexts. The current status quaestionis concerning theories of testimony in medieval systems of thought consists of a handful of studies pertaining to Aquinas on testimony conducted within only the past few years and a complete lack of comparable studies of this type in the current literature for Saadya and al-Ghazali. The research on Saadya and al-Ghazali will thus be innovative and insightful while the section on Aquinas will serve to build on and contribute to this burgeoning conversation in Thomistic and medieval studies. I further argue for a "transhistorical" concept of testimony that does not presume an evidentialist framework to account for pre-modern theories of testimony which predominantly rely on virtue theoretic frameworks.
