Title:  Reasons for Believing Author:  Antonio Livi Series Contemporary European Cultural Studies Imprint:  The Davies Group, Publishers soft cover 190 pp. USD 24.00 ISBN 978-1888570762 September, 2005 For many years, Antonio Livi has addressed key issues concerning the logical basis of the act of faith, understood as the ascent to a reality that in itself is knowable yet beyond the ordinary limits of human cognition. In Reasons for Believing he attempts to recover an emphasis on the rationality of faith in Christian revelation. What makes the author’s approach interesting and timely is his insistence that there is a fundamental rational component to religious assent that can be examined and weighed against the backdrop of a ‘horizon of truth’, i.e., some claims by religions are true, and some are not. He refocuses the entire question concerning the rationality of belief, and he does so within an epistemological context referred to as alethic logic, (the epistemological investigation of the logical consistency of religious truth claims). By scrutinizing the logical structure of the principles of ‘common sense’ Livi explores the path that leads to the act of faith and defends the reasonableness of that path, employing a notion of truth that connects with scientific truth while also going beyond the limiting confines that science imposes on itself. This book is an English version of Razionalità della fede nella Rivelazione. Un’analisi filosofica alla luce della logica aletica (Rome: Leonardo da Vinci, 2003). Professor Philip Larrey has added a foreword, and the final chapter of the book, written by the author, is quite new. Contents Foreword Preface Introduction Part One: Philosophical Insight on Knowing and Believing Chapter One: What we Know About God Through Reason Alone Chapter Two: Rationality of Believing in General Part Two: Why Believing in Christian Revelation is Rational Chapter Three: What Believing in Divine Revelation Means Chapter Four: The Rationality of Faith in Divine Revelation Part Three: Why According to Some Modern Philosophers Christian Faith is Based on Skepticism Chapter Five: Modern Skepticism and Descartes’ Search for Uncertainty Chapter Six: Cartesian Epistemology at the Center of the Debate on Faith and Reason Conclusion References Author Antonio Livi is Dean of the Philosophical Faculty at the Lateran University (Rome). The main subject of his research is the truth-value of knowledge in its different levels or meanings: ordinary knowledge, scientific inquiry, and religious belief (especially Christian faith). He is the author of some twenty books and hundreds of essays and journal articles.