Dewey, Epistemic Fetishism, and Classical Theism

John Dewey’s discussion of faith deserves more attention than it has received in the dominant kind of academic philosophy in Europe, Australia, and North America in recent history. In the present context, the motivation for looking carefully at what he says about faith is that it is a sustained attempt to develop a functional account of faith, though decidedly hostile to religious expressions of such faith. The goal of this chapter is to clarify the useful conception of faith to which he points, and argue that the hostility toward religious faith is unsustainable in light of the arguments for the value of the kind of faith he identifies.