Принцип недоверия помыслам

Философия. Журнал Высшей школы экономики. 2019. Т. 3. № 3. С. 243–267.

Mishura A.

This article examines and defends the principle of distrust to thoughts (pomysly).According to this principle, it is morally justifable for the agent to ignore any evidence forsome belief if he has sufcient evidence that this belief will cause him to act in a morallywrong way. To justify this principle I employ a number of ideas developed in Wittgenstein’s“On certainty”. In the frst section, I sketch the account of knowledge and belief from “OnCertainty” and narrow the scope of my defense of the principle of distrust to the particularsystem of beliefs, namely the beliefs of Orthodox Christianity. In the second section, I showa variety of senses of the word “pomysel” in Synodal Bible Translation and explain the relevantsense of “pomysel” using the vocabulary of analytic philosophy. In the third section, I discussa number of basic beliefs of Orthodox Christianity that substantiate the principle of distrust:the belief in God and his angels, the belief in original sin, the belief in the existence of passionsin the human soul, the belief on the existence of evil demons that try to manipulate the agentby generating thoughts in his consciousness. These beliefs are discussed and explained in thecontext of the principle of distrust. In the fourth section, I defend the principle of distrust andshow its superiority to the other Clifford’s principle formulated by P. van Inwagen. Finally, inthe ffth section, I provide a reader with a brief thought experiment involving good and evilneuroscientists in order to illustrate the meaning of the principle of distrust in naturalisticsystem of beliefs.

Keywords: православие, эпистемология, вера, убеждение, ethics, epistemology, Orthodox Christianity, belief, ethics of belief, Disbelief, этика веры, помыслы