Anthony Fisher on Productive Conversation across Significant Disagreement

About This Event

Anthony Fisher (Gonzaga, Philosophy) explores how atheist philosopher David Lewis' interaction with Christian philosophers models productive dialogue across disagreement in a talk for the Gonzaga Socratic Club, “David Lewis in Conversation with Christian Philosophy.”

David Lewis was one of the most influential philosophers in the analytic tradition. When it came to religion, he was a ‘contented atheist’. Despite being an atheist, he took philosophy of religion seriously and maintained an extensive correspondence with Christian philosophers, especially with those who put analytic theism on the map (Robert Adams, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen). His conversations with Christian philosophers not only impacted the development of analytic theism, but led to an epistemological methodology for discussing topics that one does not believe in their heart to be true. In this talk, I explain this methodology and argue that it is useful for engaging constructively in intellectual debates, where certain propositions are based on faith. The upshot is that disagreement is no barrier to intellectual discussion of religion, so long as the attitude of dogmatism is held in a reflective, measured way with empathetic understanding.

Anthony Fisher has been a faculty member of the Philosophy Department at Gonzaga University since Fall of 2022. He has moved around quite a bit, working at several universities in the US, Canada, and the UK. Before coming to Gonzaga, he was most recently at UW in Seattle. Prior to that he was at the University of Manchester (the second time), Queen's University, Canada, University of Manchester (the first time), and Dalhousie University. Originally from Australia, he received his PhD in Philosophy from Syracuse University in 2012. Growing up in Outback Queensland, he never anticipated that abstract thinking about big questions from the armchair would lead him to travel around the world. His research interests are in Metaphysics, History of Philosophy, and Ethics. Combining the first two areas of interest, he has told a novel narrative about the fall and revival of metaphysics in the analytic tradition, incorporating connections among a variety of thinkers from Samuel Alexander and Grace de Laguna to Donald C. Williams, David Lewis, and David Armstrong. His interests in Ethics stem from his teaching at Gonzaga. In this area he is currently researching AI Ethics.