Inquiring about God: Volume 1, Selected Essays

Inquiring about God is the first of two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers. This volume collects Wolterstorff's essays on the philosophy of religion written over the last thirty-five years. The essays, which span a range of topics including Kant's philosophy of religion, the medieval (or classical) conception of God, and the problem of evil, are unified by the conviction that some of the central claims made by the classical theistic tradition, such as the claims that God is timeless, simple, and impassible, should be rejected. Still, Wolterstorff contends, rejecting the classical conception of God does not imply that theists should accept the Kantian view according to which God cannot be known. Of interest to both philosophers and theologians, Inquiring about God should give the reader a lively sense of the creative and powerful work done in contemporary philosophical theology by one of its foremost practitioners.

Introduction; 1. Analytic philosophy of religion: retrospect and prospect; 2. Is it possible and desirable for theologians to recover from Kant?; 3. Conundrums in Kant's rational religion; 4. In defense of Gaunilo's defense of the fool; 5. Divine simplicity; 6. Alston on Aquinas on theological predication; 7. God everlasting; 8. Unqualified divine temporality; 9. Suffering love; 10. Is God disturbed by what transpires in human affairs?; 11. The silence of the God who speaks; 12. Barth on evil; 13. Tertullian's enduring question.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University, and Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia. His many publications include Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (1995), John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (1996) and Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (2001, 2004).
Terence Cuneo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He is author of The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (2007) and editor of six books including The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid co-edited with René van Woudenberg (2004).