Naipaul (BB xii)1 expresses a certain surprise that "the travel form ... should have taken me back there, to looking for the story," to doing what the nineteenth century novel aspired to do: "to give news about a changing society, to describe mental states." As one whose "level of perception" of the people he meets, whose "vision of human destiny," has been characterized2 as befitting the Nobel prize he eventually won in 2001, Naipaul might be expected to reveal the thinking of those he met and show it as an intelligible response to their situations. At least, he might if one assumes that a modicum of good sense is given to the generality of humankind.
In the context of a philosophy conference, one insight we should prize would be insight into the cognitive motivations of religious belief. For many observers, the prevalence and continuing dominance of doctrinal religious belief3 is a standing problem: serious enquiry into the world around us has no need of any theistic assumptions (Laplace only made explicit the practice of physicists since before Newton); elementary instruction in critical thinking would undermine most of popular superstition and the credibility of supposed religious authorities; Marx and others have revealed the varieties of misapprehension and exploitation camouflaged by organized religions. If schooling made even a fraction of this widely available,4 it is difficult to see how religious belief could have survived.
But survived it has, indeed internationally it would seem to be flourishing. I have decided to concentrate on two of Naipaul's works that deal with Islam, and more especially with recent movements within Islam that call for stricter observance of its particular tenets. One reason for selecting this focus is that for Naipaul they obviously present the sort of problem just sketched: fundamentalist Islam is not the sort of thing he could see himself endorsing. One interest in Naipaul's stories in these books is for what, if anything, he has found that might reveal how, despite this obstacle, these people can be construed as acting rationally, as adopting an attractive option, as responding to rational motivations for adopting such views, and not merely to their concomitant advantages.
My strategy will be to examine a few of Naipaul's case studies, looking for something that bears on their rational attractiveness. Having seen what he has found to say in this regard, or perhaps how little he has said and his own mystification, I will turn briefly to ask whether I have mischaracterized the problem. Here I will address two main concerns: first, whether contemporary epistemology underwrites the initial assumption that doctrinal religious belief is in desperate need of rational support, and second, whether it is appropriate to focus so exclusively on the question of the truth or falsity of religious beliefs, rather than on what I have called their concomitant advantages.
Among the Believers opens and closes with Behzad. He enters after the car belonging to Naipaul's first guide breaks down, and accompanies Naipaul throughout the Iranian section of the book. He is also one of the last to be mentioned in the scant pages Naipaul gives to his return through Iran about six months later. For our purposes he may seem anomalous, an Iranian communist who knew no more than Naipaul about how to pass as a Muslim. He may be anomalous in any context - Gellner jokingly says that a non-Shia Persian is a contradiction in terms (1987, 139), though Naipaul may in fact be endorsing Gellner's basic point when he concludes the book by remarking that "Behzad ... was made by Islam more than he knew" (AB 399) and early on decides not to take on Behzad's appreciation of "tears for the sake of tears" (AB 13), typical of the sadness of Persian literature and art. But for now he is striking as an illustration of the obvious, but perhaps easily overlooked point that doctrinal religious belief has to be inculcated; you have to be oriented, or orient yourself, in its direction; it is not something you will discover through interactions with the non-human world.
One can imagine an isolated human discovering that fire causes pain, that ripe bananas are nourishing, that mangoes fall from trees. Any intelligent creature can learn as much, indeed non-intelligent ones are selected to respond appropriately to such facts. A reflective intelligent creature might formulate hypotheses that capture such things, and thus be set on the road (admittedly a long and tortuous one) towards the sort of institutional science we now depend upon. But the characteristic tenets of doctrinal religion do not seem to belong with such things; they will only be acquired from an institutional setting, like the rules of games or the other norms that shape the behaviour of social animals. If this is a fact about the aetiology of doctrinal religious belief, it invites a fundamentally sceptical account of its ontology.
It might be objected that "natural theology" can be provoked by observation and attempts to explain the non-human world. My point, however, is the profound gap between the results of any such argumentation and the various religious systems to be found in particular places. As a youth I was convinced by a rendition of the teleological argument on a TV programme5 and so (!) went along to the local Anglican vicarage to enquire further. I have been flagging religious belief as doctrinal to insinuate the enormity of the leap here from the existential generalisation that constitutes the conclusion of arguments in natural theology to the identification of (nowadays usually one) culturally specific deity as the instantiation of that generalisation. Whatever the worth of any such argument in natural theology, it seems clear that much more is needed than Aquinas' appendage to each of his five ways: "and this we call God", understood as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose will is partially known from the collection of writings brought together as the Bible, etc., etc. It is cross-cultural myopia not to recognise this great gap.
These considerations are not impugned by appeals to religious experience or revelation, since the diversity of belief remains to be explained. Whether or not all men by nature desire to know, they do all know that bread nourishes and fire burns; if their awareness of divinity derived from anything like an analogous encounter, the amazing diversity of resultant doctrine would seem peculiar. Much easier to suppose the culturally specific forms come first, and the experiences and reports take their colouring from them, colouring then which cannot claim any support from what it colours.
Behzad, then, does not offer us what I seek, but he draws attention to one of the standing conditions of the adoption of religious belief, and in particular of conversion - the topic Naipaul claims to discover as the theme of both his books on Islamic countries (cf. BB xii). But Naipaul's verdict, that this man's communism is hardly distinguishable in its essentials from the Islamic beliefs he rejects,6 presents us with one of his pervasive diagnoses of the latter: its simplistic simplicity.
Such emotion, such bravery; and, unavoidably in Iran, his cause was as simple as his enemy's, and in the end really no more than a version of his enemy's. Both sides depended on revealed truth and a special reading of historical events; both required absolute faith. And both were fed by the same passion: justice, union, vengeance. (AB 78)
But this too denies us what I seek, for it is an indictment rather than an apologia. People want simple answers, black and white; they don't want a world of shades of grey, or a rainbow coalition. It is pseudo-Russell's "most people would rather die than think". It is a recurrent theme in Naipaul's account of Islamic piety: the impossible fairy-tale golden age of the true jamé towhidi, the society of believers.7 This wish for simplicity may well be common, indeed it can be seen in philosophical isms as much as elsewhere, but it is not the kind of answer I am looking for.
Naipaul begins AB with preparations for a visit from Tehran to the holy and academic city of Qom; chapter 3 reports the actual visit there and interviews with a noted teacher, ayatollah Shirazi, and Khomeini's hanging judge, ayatollah Khalkhalli. My interest, however, is more with what Naipaul discovers of the boundlessness of esoteric learning. He is talking with the director of the college and some students:
There were 14,000 theological students in Qom, they told me.... The shortest period of study was six years.
'Six years!'
The director smiled at my exclamation. 'Six is nothing. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years some people can study for.'
What did they study in all that time? This wasn't a place of research and new learning. They were men of faith. What was there in the subject that called for so much study? Well, there was Arabic itself; there was grammar in all its branches; there was logic and rhetoric; there was jurisprudence, Islamic jurisprudence being one course of study, and the principles of jurisprudence being another; there was Islamic philosophy; there were the Islamic sciences - biographies, genealogies, 'correlations', traditions about the Prophet and his close companions.
I had expected something more casual, more personal: the teacher a holy man, the student a disciple. I hadn't expected this organization of learning or this hint of antique classical methods. I began to understand that the years of study were necessary. Faith still absolutely bounded the world here. And, as in medieval Europe, there was no end to theological scholarship (AB 48).
He goes on to report a scholar's "twenty-five-volume commentary on a well-known work about the Shia idea of the Imam" and later comments:
The director showed photographs of a meeting of Muslim university heads that had taken place in Qom two years before. And again, though it oughtn't to have been surprising, it was: this evidence of the existence of the sub-world, or the parallel world, of medieval learning in its Islamic guise, still intact in the late twentieth century (AB50).
I would suggest that it is not the boundlessness alone that appeals - no one is infatuated with the possibility of counting the natural numbers for ever - but the idea that everything one wants and needs to know is there; there is an answer that needs only diligence and rhetorical skill to divine. In BB, Naipaul reports one instance:
People could also stand out because of their ability, in this thicket of scholarship, to make fresh or interesting judgments. Khomeini, for example, did that with his statement that the game of chess was not against the law, provided there was no betting on the outcome. That was a judgment that people in Qom still talked about (BB 213).
Many world-views offer such a completed infinity, though, if one can trust St Paul on the Athenians (Acts 17:23), they, with their altar to the unknown god, did not share one.
While I can acknowledge the attraction of systems of thought that offer this kind of elaboration, it is, as Naipaul says, "really only a way of learning the rules" (BB 213). It assumes that there is an answer, and a straightforward substantial answer, to every question, not that one may have to admit that a question is ill-posed, or that there is no answer of the desiderated sort to be had, or that what is called for is a decision rather than a discovery.8
The standard mode of teaching and learning in schools, where teachers ask questions whose answers they know in advance, hardly encourages a realisation of these other possible responses to a question. It does not inculcate a Confucian modesty:
Ke Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master said, "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?"
Ke Loo added, "I venture to ask about death." He was answered, "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?" (quoted from Legge's translations in Max Muller, 1867)
We have seen oversimplification and here we have over-elaboration, but both share the key notion, one might almost say Quinean notion, that everything is one seamless web, that genealogies and cosmology and mathematics and law and everything else are all on one level, responsive to the same mode of enquiry: back to the scriptures.
Imaduddin appears prominently in both the books. In AB he was still under government suspicion, not long out of prison and not yet allowed to resume teaching electrical engineering at the Bandung Institute. By the time of BB he has become "the man of the moment". My interest in him arises from his "mental training" sessions at Bandung, where he was borrowing techniques from western training schemes for improving problem solving. They raise issues close to those I have just been discussing. Naipaul observes the end of a long session of such training.
Then it was time for the serious part. And like good trainees, who had had their fun and were now willing to find virtue in that fun, the trainees settled down and told the instructor what they had learned from the exercise. They had learned important things: the value of inquiry, rational analysis.
It seemed to me that the deductions might work against them, because the message they were going to take to the world was extraordinary: a divinely inspired Prophet, arbitrary rules, a pilgrimage to a certain stone, a month of fasting. But we were well within Islam now, and its articles were beyond question. Inquiry and analysis were for internal matters: the hadiths, the traditions and reports about the Prophet. Some hadiths were more reliable than others; people who went by unreliable hadiths could easily find themselves committed to un-Islamic ways (AB 342).
Here we may see another part of the answer to the puzzle that massive efforts to educate people, to get them to start thinking and thinking critically, do virtually nothing to dislodge ancient and absurd assumptions. It is not now that people refuse to think, but rather that such thinking is conducted within a framework that is not itself examined. I have long argued that this framing of intellectual activity is indeed pervasive but not inevitable, not a precondition of that intellectual activity.9 In fact, one of the contributions of philosophy to a tradition of thought is precisely to turn the tools of normal critical reflection upon some of the framework assumptions themselves. One notable case was Plato's arguments about the role of women in the Republic. His twists and turns betray the enormous difficulty of subverting socially recognised and entrenched categorisations, but they also provide an existence proof of the possibility of so doing.
To the extent that this framing happens, we can expect that movements whose major emphasis is on returning to the pure doctrine, rejecting syncretic mediation in favour of direct appeal to the authoritative texts10 will in fact appeal to educated and reflective persons. It is simply telling them to take seriously what they already claim to accept; those accepted views present them with a choice between a male chauvinist paradise or a horrific hell, a choice that they can determine by submission to the teaching of the Prophet;11 so taking it seriously would seem eminently sensible. Of course, "statistical" Muslims, just like statistical Christians, find it impossible to give greater weight to the eschatological context than to their everyday lives, though it is probable that the demands of Islam are far less extreme than those of the Sermon on the Mount. For my present purposes, what Imaduddin reveals is that it is only if we can fault the framing of reflective thought that we can continue to find the persistence of doctrinal religion an affront to rationality.
Feri is a fictitious person, not merely a fictitious name Naipaul may have used to conceal or protect his sources. In AB he reports on his growing interest in the Iranian revolution that led to the trip behind the book. Part of his background information came from a novel, Foreigner, by Nahid Rachlin, published in 1978, whose narrator is Feri. The story provides Naipaul with some insight into why people reject western society and its technological innovations, withdraw and seek to re-enter the wholeness and security of a tradition-bound way of life.
Feri is an Iranian woman of 32, living in Boston. She has studied in the US, is married to an American university teacher and works as a biologist in a research institute. Returning to Iran for a holiday Feri realises that her sometime home has signs of Westernisation but is still the cramped and squalid traditional society she left behind. Falling sick, she is reassured that her doctor was himself trained in the US. Why did he return? Naipaul reports that "he could have stayed there but - for reasons he could not give, except that Iranians become unsettled - he preferred to come back; and then for a month, he says, he soothed himself by visiting mosques and shrines" (AB 18).
Feri herself begins to reflect on her time spent abroad. She has been "a stranger, solitary in spite of husband and friends, always at a loss sexually and socially; she cannot say why she has done anything, why she has lived the American life." The doctor tells Feri that the pain in her stomach is due to an old ulcer, brought with her from the foreign land. "'What you have is a Western disease.'"
Feri's husband arrives to take her home - she needs her husband's consent to leave Iran - but she now sees him as a stranger: "a man of work and the intellect, private rather than solitary, self-sufficient, a man made by another civilization, his marriage to an Iranian his single unconventional act. It is impossible for Feri to go back with someone so remote to the American emptiness. She will lose her research job. But she doesn't mind" (AB 18). She then resolves to do as the doctor did: she will visit mosques and shrines, and to do that she will put on the chador. She feels she has never really been happy. Tranquillity comes with her renunciation.
Naipaul's own summing-up is that
it is as if Feri and the doctor, turning away from the life of intellect and endeavour, have come together in an Iranian death pact. In the emotions of their Shia religion, so particular to them, they will rediscover their self-esteem and wholeness, and be inviolate. They will no longer simply have to follow after others, not knowing where the rails are taking them. They will no longer have to be last, or even second. And life will go on. Other people in spiritually barren lands will continue to produce the equipment the doctor is proud of possessing and the medical journals he is proud of reading.
That expectation - of others continuing to create, of the alien necessary civilisation going on - is implicit in the act of renunciation and is its greatest flaw (AB 19).
We have there perhaps the first12 of Naipaul's repeated condemnations of Islamic societies - and the developing world more generally - for a kind of parasitism and double-think. Import the medicines and the M16s, but go on with the same old superstitions and feudal exploitation. Learn the equations and the formulae, but reject critical thinking in civil society.
The issues here are large and complex, as indeed is Naipaul's considered view,13 and I do not wish to go into them now. But one issue Feri's story does raise is the relative priority to be given to the various factors that make for human satisfaction (or Aristotelian eudaimonia). Unfortunately Feri's story - at least in Naipaul's brief summary - hardly articulates the emptiness of a research biologist's life in Boston, the unsettling of expatriate Iranians, or the fulfilment supposed to flow from being back home. There is, of course, the simple contrast home and away, but that cannot be the end of it. Ravi Dev's comment, on Naipaul's message for the ex-colonial, is apposite:
Through a critical examination of one's past ... we begin the process of discovery of one's self and uncover the psychic damage of historical upheaval but we should feel no nostalgia for the miserable security of the old ways. Naipaul commends Koestler's aphorism: 'Men can add to their knowledge, but they cannot subtract' (2002, 8).
Or at least, they cannot while remaining in full possession of their senses and their memories. Repression is, however, an option, and many have seen Naipaul as condemning the intellectual self-mutilation bound up with conversion in the modern world for those who have become, however peripherally, inheritors of modernity.14 But it need not be a matter of repression, simply of the exiguous options actually available. To take a trivial example, one might wish the efficiency of one island and the friendliness of another, but if those are the only two islands and you have to choose, you have to choose - a logically possible friendly and efficient island is not actually to be had. So the satisfactions of ancient rituals might only be available by foregoing the frenetic competition for wealth and power of consumerist society; the knowledge of the latter may be irrelevant to the discourse of the former; and you may not be able to have the best of both worlds. Why then suppose an unblinking recognition of the truth should prevail over more organic satisfactions?
Suryadi's daughter (AB 283-284) may be a case in point: she had been a bright girl but had become a born-again Muslim, impervious to irony, submissive to her intellectually inferior husband. Not long before Naipaul's interview she had given her father hope that she still had her intelligence:
And that little sign, the first for some time, that his daughter still had a mind, was still capable of judging, was a great comfort to Suryadi. She had seen what was clear to Suryadi: that the boy was a poor student, didn't have the background, couldn't cope with university life (AB 284).
But she had chosen to marry him. She did not have the option of that boy plus the lively modern life she had enjoyed. Can we be sure she made a mistake?
Naipaul's two books contain many stories, and no doubt more detailed examination of them might reveal further issues that bear on the rational attractiveness of the Islam Naipaul was studying. But perhaps not much, since his fundamental lack of sympathy with the incredible creed and his perception of Islam as among the worst of imperialisms mean that he usually lets people offer their inchoate, virtually inarticulate thoughts, and leaves them with scant intellectual respectability. Thus, for instance, we are presented with a medical doctor (AB 161-168), puzzled, it is true, by such things as life after death, but finally forcing himself to believe on the basis of odd coincidences and dreams that proved beneficial for him and his family. Or the school girls in Malaysia who saw the rules about what can and cannot be shown as aiming "to preserve the beauty and gentleness of women. We can preserve our beauty. It's not for showing off. It's very bad" (AB 234) - it is a sin to make men attracted to you.
One response to the failure to find a clear account of the rational motivations of belief would be to suggest that we should not be looking for such a thing. The people Naipaul describes are doing just what they should be doing; it is out of place to ask for more by way of intellectual or cognitive justification.
Philosophy has not traditionally been of much help in deciding whether such a response is reasonable, since when it turns to the justification of our knowledge the western philosophical tradition has been hard pressed to find our beliefs in the tables and chairs and embodied minds around us justifiable, let alone doctrines of heaven and hell or the immortality of the soul. But in recent years, an approach to epistemology has become influential that promises to restore the credentials of most, if not all, of the common sense and more esoteric learning we bring to philosophizing. I allude to the contextualism of such writers as Michael Williams (2001) and Gilbert Harman (2003).
While there are, as one would expect, differences among those sympathetic to such accounts, one common feature is a fundamental rule that says, roughly, that you are justified in believing the beliefs you have; challenges to them need to be motivated, they cannot just be issued for the sake of it. As sailors in Neurath's ship, you don't replace a plank without good reason. Or to put it in Rawlsian terms, moves to reflective equilibrium are only necessary when there is disequilibrium.
As far as I am aware, Williams has not explicitly said what his particular version of contextualism does or does not do for religious belief. But Harman briefly notes, as a possible objection to his version (characterised as general foundationalism,15), that it may let religion in too uncritically. I quote the passage in full from the 2001 on-line version of the text:
In a foundations approach, S's religious beliefs are justified only if S has a justification for them. According to general foundationalism, all of S's current beliefs are prima facie justified, including S's religious beliefs, and the mere fact that S cannot find a foundational justification for those beliefs does not prevent S from being justified in believing them. Some philosophers have thought this was a serious objection to general foundationalism. I myself do not agree.
General foundationalism must indeed suppose that S's religious beliefs are prima facie justified in the absence of some specific challenge to them deriving from S's other beliefs and inferential practices. It may be that S is aware that certain other people have religious beliefs that conflict with S's religious beliefs in various ways, and S may come to think that he or she is no better placed to know which of these beliefs are true than those others do, which might be enough to give S reason to become somewhat agnostic. But maybe not (2003, 2001).
Harman's diffident response, which will serve to capture most if not all of Naipaul's cases, is that an awareness of alternatives might demand cognitive attention. That it doesn't in fact do so is part of the claim about the framing of intellectual activity we looked at earlier. But can this framing be defended on a contextualist view of knowledge?
It would seem difficult to do so. Let us briefly review analogous cases. I get one answer to a sum; you get a different one. There is hardly room here for supposing nothing is wrong. I say a whale is a fish; you say it is completely different. We may not need to resolve our differences, but we can see how we might go about doing so and how that may well reveal gaps or errors in what one of us supposes initially. I eat sweet potato leaves; you don't. We can here agree to differ, however weird we might think each other, since it is not clear any substantive differences about the world are at stake. (If there are, they can be investigated, and we are closer to the whale case.) I think we can avoid hell-fire if we look after orphans and are charitable and pray facing Mecca; you think we need to be baptised and .... On the face of it, this looks like a genuine disagreement about how things go; one would want to pick the winning system, it is not obviously a matter of indifference. One can understand missionary zeal, given such assumptions, just as one can understand campaigners who want everyone afflicted with HIV to get the drug cocktails that a few rich people can afford - because they work.
But if taking seriously the content of one's religion does have these consequences, then the fact of religious difference cannot remain irrelevant. But, as Harman's brief remark suggests, once one begins to wonder what underlies one's own local belief it is not difficult to think that we are all equally at sea, all equally lacking in warrant.16
As I have suggested elsewhere in discussing Arthur Fine's related position (1997a), part of the attractiveness of contextualism comes from its own framing: its proponents are operating within belief systems the rest of us can recognise as by and large acceptable, they are not casting spells and seeking the future in the entrails of an ox. What Gellner regarded as the serious questions of epistemology - roughly why "our" procedures are to be preferred to haruspicy; why the assumptions set out at the beginning are the assumptions we ought to adopt - get left aside, since we choose our reference-group the natural, framed, way.
But even if variety raises a problem, is a focus on truth/falsity the appropriate way to deal with it? Religion satisfies needs and longings that its absence leaves as necessarily frustrated or unassuageable. And besides the cognitive comforts it provides, there is a whole range of more tangible benefits to be derived from the social institutionalising of religion. If one chooses with overall eudaimonia as a goal, it is by no means obvious that one should pay overmuch attention to the truth of the beliefs that come as part of a package-deal.
This, too, is an enormous topic on which I can say very little in this paper. But I am inclined to think that one cannot find good reason to exalt truth and the search for truth above these other considerations in a way that would quickly yield a positive answer to our earlier question about Suryadi's daughter.17 If we are not forced to such a conclusion, is there yet reason to choose it?
Any such choice will be limited in scope. Naipaul's report on the credulous doctor's son, Syed, reminds us why:
Syed said he felt isolated from his friends at medical school. They just wanted to pass the examinations, to become doctors; they weren't interested in intellectual matters. The just wanted the skill; they weren't interested - as Syed was - in the civilization that went with the skill. (But Syed didn't put it like that.) (AB 163)
A common complaint, at least in university circles. Some people want views, beliefs, techniques, skills; others want to surround them with a context that explains or justifies or somehow makes sense of them. Any choice for the importance of truth will apply only to the latter.
But perhaps now it is too easy. Once bitten by the bug of wanting reasons, naturally you want reasons that provoke intellectual assent and so cannot help but be concerned for truth. You will want to hold beliefs whose causes can be acknowledged without dissent, that stand up to all kinds of scrutiny. Keeping frameworks out of the critical eye becomes a kind of self-deception; and while self-deception may in some matters be the norm, willing persistence in self-deception, when the materials are available to undeceive yourself, would seem a failing.
We are back with Koestler's aphorism, and with Naipaul's persistent concern, in fiction and non-fiction alike, with
protagonists who are caught between past, present and future.... The dilemma of the dangling man or the marginalized individual seems to be a common condition to all people in the modern age who must wrestle with what Alfred Kazin, commenting on Naipaul's work, has described as "the psychic realities of exile" (Tewarie, 2002, xxvii).
Brandon, E.P. 1979, The Key of the Door. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 11, 23-34.
Brandon, E.P. 1982, Quantifiers and the Pursuit of Truth. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 14, 50-58.
Brandon, E.P. 1997a. California Unnatural: On Fine's Natural Ontological Attitude. Philosophical Quarterly, 47, 232-235.
Brandon, E.P. 1997b, Education and Secularization: Taking Philosophy of Education Seriously. Caribbean Journal of Education, 19, 227-238.
Brandon, E.P. 2003, Sustaining a right to be in error? Paper read at the 21st World Congress of Philosophy, Istanbul, August 10-17.
Buruma, I. 1998, In the Empire of Islam. New York Review of Books, 45 (12) July 16th. Also available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/783.
Dev, R. 2002, A Reply. Caribbean Quarterly 48 (2&3) 7-11.
Engdahl, H. 2001, Presentation Speech to the Swedish Academy, at http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/presentation-speech.html, also included in Caribbean Quarterly 48 (2&3) 74-76, 2002.
Gellner, E. 1987, Culture, Identity and Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Harman, G. 2003, Skepticism and Foundations, in Steven Luper, ed., The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003), pp. 1-11. Accessible at http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Skepticism.html.
Heller, E. 1961 [1952], The Disinherited Mind. Penguin.
Muller, M. 1867, Chips From A German Workshop: Essays on the Science of Religion. Longman's Green & Co.
Naipaul, V.S. 1999 [1998], Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted People. Vintage International.
Naipaul, V.S. 2001 [1981], Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. Picador.
Tewarie, B. 2002, A House for Mr. Biswas Revisited: Ethnicity, Culture, Geography and Beyond. Caribbean Quarterly 48 (2&3) vii-xxix.
Williams, M. 2001. Problems of Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
4 See Brandon, 1997b, for a modus tollens argument to the negation of this supposition.
© E.P. Brandon, 2004. HTML last revised, 18 May 2004.
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