In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy

by R. Scott Smith

Publisher:

IVP Academic

, 2014

Overview

For most of the church’s history, people have seen Christian ethics as normative and universally applicable. Recently, however, this view has been lost, thanks to naturalism and relativism. R. Scott Smith argues that Christians need to overcome Kant’s fact-value dichotomy and recover the possibility of genuine moral and theological knowledge.

Key Features

• Offers a defense of moral knowledge.
• Presents an insightful history of Western ethic.
• Challenges various forms of relativism and naturalism.

Praise for the Print Edition

Scott Smith, carefully and consciously, with philosophical rigor and clarity of word, offers a defense of moral knowledge that is tightly tethered to more ancient, and Christian, understandings of the good, the true and the beautiful. The result is a compelling case for why philosophical naturalism, including its cousin, nominalism, must be rejected by anyone who sincerely seeks after moral knowledge. Smith’s greatest accomplishment in this book, however, is the way in which he interacts, at a high level, with contemporary philosophical schools of thought and ancient traditions in a way fully accessible to the educated layman and college student.

--Francis J. Beckwith, Baylor University

While ancient and medieval philosophy agrees with Scripture that moral knowledge is possible, the fallout of both modernism and postmodernism is a debilitating moral skepticism. Against this, Smith shows these worldviews to be self-defeating, and defends an ontology of embodied souls and moral essences grounded in God, which rehabilitates the idea of moral knowledge. Anyone dismayed by our culture’s creeping nihilism will be encouraged by this important, insightful and timely study.

--Angus Menuge, president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society

Scott Smith has done an admirable job of surveying the ethical landscape both past and present. And he both challenges various forms of relativism and naturalism that are so corrosive to moral knowledge and quite effectively dismantles the commonly assumed arguments for the fact-value split. Also, he carefully constructs a case for the foundations of moral knowledge. In doing so, he offers much-needed wise guidance in an era that increasingly calls such knowledge into question.

--Paul Copan, Palm Beach Atlantic University

Product Details

• Title: In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy
• Author: R. Scott Smith
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2014
• Logos Release Date: 2018
• Pages: 363
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• ISBNs: 9780830880218, 0830880216
• Resource ID: LLS:9780830880218
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-06T20:49:43Z

About R. Scott Smith

R. Scott Smith (PhD, University of Southern California) is associate professor of ethics and Christian apologetics at Biola University. He is the author of Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language After MacIntyre and Hauerwas, Truth and the New Kind of Christian, and Naturalism and our Knowledge of Reality.