Robert Audi

Robert Audi (b. 1941) is an American analytic philosopher best known for foundational work in epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of action. After studies at Colgate and a doctorate from the University of Michigan, he held longstanding posts at the University of Nebraska and later at the University of Notre Dame, where he is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy. Audi developed a moderate foundationalist epistemology distinguishing perceptual, memorial, introspective, and rational sources of justification, and elaborated a Rossian intuitionist ethics in works such as 'The Good in the Right'. In philosophy of religion he has defended a moderate evidentialism compatible with rational religious commitment, examined the relations between faith, reason, and moral motivation, and engaged the ethics of belief alongside critics such as Alvin Plantinga's reformed epistemology. His 'Religious Commitment and Secular Reason' (2000) advances a theory of liberal democratic citizenship requiring religious citizens to offer secular reasons in public political advocacy, a position contested by Nicholas Wolterstorff and others as overly restrictive of religious voice. Audi's editorship of 'The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy' shaped a generation of analytic reference work. His writings on doxastic voluntarism, testimony, and the rationality of faith remain points of reference in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion.