Doctor Farrer discusses the Libertarian-Determinist controversy in terms of mind and body, speech and conduct, nature and spirit, and responsibility and value. It should be of interest to philosophers from both schools of thought.

Doctor Farrer discusses the Libertarian-Determinist controversy in terms of mind and body, speech and conduct, nature and spirit, and responsibility and value. It should be of interest to philosophers from both schools of thought.

Thirty years of reflection on the philosophical theology of Austin Farrer lie behind the nine chapters of this book, in which Farrer's seminal work on faith and ...

Austin Farrer is a genuine conundrum. On one hand, he is commonly hailed as one of the most brilliant and original British thinkers of the previous century. On the other hand, his work is almost entirely neglected by contemporary scholars and students. However, his centenary year of 2004 saw a renewed interest in exploring and appropriating various aspects of his rich intellectual legacy. This review article surveys these centenary perspectives on Austin Farrer with a focus on (...) their philosophical significance, in particular for the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 5, Page 1024-1025, September 2022.

This article seeks to place the theodicy of the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer, as expressed in Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited , within the context of philosophical and theological approaches to the so‐called “problem of evil”. Farrer's work is initially contrasted with the theodicies of John Hick and Richard Swinburne. This comparison reveals some of the rationalist and foundationalist moral assumptions of modern philosophical theodicy of which Hick and Swinburne are representatives. By contrast, it is argued that (...) Farrer's approach is thoroughly theological and begins not with a pre‐conceived ethics, but with God's self‐revelation in Jesus Christ. Farrer is thus deemed to have much in common with pre‐Enlightenment thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas.Although Farrer's theodicy is seen to be theological , it is argued that he resists trends in recent theological approaches to theodicy that claim that God is passible . This article defends divine impassibility and argues that, although Farrer's later “metaphysical personalism” implies that God may be personal to the point that he could be said to suffer, his Augustinian notion of the nature of evil as privatio boni strongly implies impassibility. This Farrer is seen to avoid two anthropomorphic approaches to theodicy: one that judges God by the standards of a foundational secular morality, and the other that ascribes certain “personal” emotions to the divine.This article defends Farrer's theological approach to theodicy and his emphasis on ecclesiology and soteriology. However, the lack of a convincing and thorough dogmatic theology is seen to render his theodicy uncompelling. Despite this weakness, it is argued that Farrer's work points theodicy towards a theological encounter with particular narratives of evil and suffering and away from the consideration of a single “problem of evil” by means of “rational”, philosophical enquiry. (shrink)

C.S. Lewis and Austin Farrer were friends and fellow academics for more than 20 years, sharing both their Anglican faith and similar concerns about their modern world. Lewis, as Christian apologist and popular novelist, and Farrer, as philosophical theologian and college priest, sought to defend a metaphysically thick universe in contrast to the increasingly secular culture all about them. The Shared Witness of C.S. Lewis and Austin Farrer explores a number of areas that demonstrate the (...) ways in which Lewis and Farrer both intersected and influenced each other's thought. Both insisted that myth prepared the heart for a sense of divine glory and even had a place in the Christian scriptures. Farrer and Lewis prized virtue ethics as a key to human character and ethical problem solving, and they explored the relationship of nature and grace. In regard to the problem of evil, the two men shared much but also disagreed how best to account for an all-powerful loving God and a world full of suffering, and both writers were engaged with apocalyptic thinking--not only in Farrer's commentaries and Lewis's fiction but also in essays and sermons that addressed the eternal end and purpose of humanity. Finally, as Philip Irving Mitchell shows, the worldview espoused and explored by Lewis and Farrer still speaks to our contemporary world, a post-secular society in which the super-natural may again be taken seriously. (shrink)

The book opens with an informative picture of the theological-cum-philosophical climate of Oxford in the period immediately after the Second World War. The Anglican theologian Austin Farrer was a leading figure in an informal discussion group known as “The Metaphysicals,” formed out of dissatisfaction with the then prevailing positivist orthodoxy, which outlawed the grand ‘ultimate’ questions of philosophy as nonsensical. In many ways, MacSwain explains, Farrer was a kind of model for younger members of the group such (...) as Basil Mitchell, who later described him as “conspicuous among us for actually doing the sort of metaphysical theology whose possibility we wished to vindicate” .Farrer had captured attention with his formidable exploration of theological metaphysics, Finite and Infinite , a work of “rational theology,” which approached God via philosophical enquiry, understood as a “reflective cognitive activity appropriated to the knowledge of God from universal grounds” .. (shrink)

How can we, or should we, talk about God? What concepts are involved in the concept of a Supreme Being? This book is about the search to reconcile modern metaphysics with traditional theism--focusing on the seminal work of Austin Farrer who was Warden of Keble College, Oxford until his death in 1968, and one of the most original and important philosophers of religion of this century. Conti traces the evolution of Ferrar's thought and shows why he preferred a (...) "personalist" approach over Aristotle's metaphysics of "being.". (shrink)

This analysis of Austin Farrer's philosophical theology joins the distinguished work by contemporary personalists, Embers and the Stars by Erazim Kohak and Being and Value by Frederick Ferré. Conti's work is more than an analysis of Farrer's understanding of the relation of faith and reason, the nature of God, and God's relation to other persons. Through a detailed, rigorous investigation of the changes in Farrer's thought from Finite and Infinite through Freedom of the Will to Faith (...) and Speculation, Conti provides us not only a clear, well-argued defense of personalist metaphysics but also insight into central currents in mid-century thinking in philosophical theology. (shrink)