I'm done with "The Semantics of the Grammar" in Faith and Philosophy Vol 7 (April 1990) 218-228, I forget who it is by, I'll post that later (update: Frederick J. Crosson). This was a very good article. the one problem was that it was too short. The insights were significant. The author dealt with the meaning of "image" and "imagination" in Newman.

The issue is that for Newman, to assent to something there has to be a real apprehension of the thing. Assent is to a proposition of a thing and not a notion. And real things come with images that excite or intensify apprehension (I hope I'm saying that right). So we can have an image of a boy playing football and assent to that because the aprpehension is real but if we say "the Economy is healthy," that is notional.

For Newman, Religion is real and theology is notional and so the problem that is created is that how can we assent to the Trinity or doctrine of God if we don't have a real apprehension. Commentators have said that you'd almost have to conjure up an image of God as an old man to have a real apprehension to assent to, but this article says that Newman would not support that view. Rather, for Newman, the proposition itself is the image. That is an awesome insight, it shows how Newman is at heart a transcendental phenomenologist. Interpreting Newman requires following the subtle shifts in intentionality.

I'm done with Dulles' article called "The Cognitive Basis of Faith." I was very dissappointed, it really said nothing new nor was it incisive. Basically, he says that neither faith alone nor reason alone is right, that the issue is more sophisticated and Newman can make both sides communicate with each other. Tell us something new.

On the other hand I just started reading an article called "The Semantics of the Grammar" in Faith and Philosophy Vol 7 (April 1990) 218-228. This article is showing lot of promise, already I have found a few quotes for the dissertation. Hopefully, I should be done with it by the end of the day tommorrow.

I just finished the Armour article defending Newman's position that love is the safeguard of faith. Quick and dirty background: faith is a kind of knowledge, but faith works in the absence of . . . what am I thinking . . .the visible? Let me say this another way. In regular knowledge we deal with explicit things that lead to knowledge, in the case of faith we dealing with implicit evidence that leads to knowledge. So one can claim to know that which is not explicitly evident. Regular knowledge is guarded by error because there is explicit criteria to judge it by but what prevents faith or implicit knowledge from erring? Newman in his Oxford Sermons says it is love.

Armour is defending this position by saying that in our experience of the world, we come up against the limits of our knowledge but yet we have to fill in the fullness of our view of the world in order to act and be in the world. Love is the experience that fills out our necessarily incomplete view of the world. Of course, Armour is working with a specific, broad and rich view of love.

I am now reading Dulles' article called "The Cognitve Basis of Faith" in Philosphy and Theology 10 no. 1 1997, pp.19-31. It seems like it is a Newman meets Aristotle and Thomas paper. We'll see.

I copied a bunch of articles today. I am reading one by Leslie Armour called "Faith, Reason, and Love: A Reply on Behalf of Cardinal Newman," Scottish Journal of Theology volume 34, pp. 437-446. Armour is responding to an article by Jay Newman called, "Newmanon Love as the Safeguard of Faith," in the same journal written a couple of years earlier in 1979.

I can't concentrate because I am falling asleep but the articles have to do with the role of love in safeguarding faith from error, a position Newman took in his Oxford Sermons, but developed in the Grammar.