Gordon H. Clark (1902-1985) war ein profilierter reformierter Philosophe und Theologe. Hier geht es zu einer Einführung in sein Werk.
If I was to summarize Clark’s philosophy of Scripturalism, I would say something like this:
Nach Clark sind drei kognitive Zustände zu unterscheiden:
There are three sorts of cognitive states: knowledge, opinion, and ignorance. Ignorance is simply the lack of ideas. Complete ignorance is the state of mind that empiricists say we are born with: We are all born with blank minds, tabula rasa, to use John Locke’s phrase. (Incidentally, a tabula rasa mind – a blank mind – is an impossibility. A consciousness conscious of nothing is a contradiction in terms. Empiricism rests on a contradiction.) At the other extreme from ignorance is knowledge. Knowledge is not simply possessing thoughts or ideas, as some think. Knowledge is possessing true ideas and knowing them to be true. Knowledge is, by definition, knowledge of the truth. We do not say that a person “knows” that 2 plus 2 is 5. We may say he thinks it, but he does not know it. It would be better to say that he opines it.
