ABSTRACT

Beliefs are central components of selfhood. To think of them as mere bloodless propositions about the world is to ignore the fact that our system of core beliefs is the central nervous system of our identity. How we deal with ourselves and with what we encounter on our journey through life depends crucially on what we believe about ourselves, about our world, and about the worlds of others. Jonathan Glover notes how our beliefs about the world cohere ‘like a mental map of a city too large to be known’.1He reminds us of the English philosopher Frank Ramsay’s idea of a belief as ‘a map of neighbouring space by which we steer’.2Beliefs are not there at birth: they are acquired as part of the development of skills for living. The efficacy of living skills in turn depends upon the challenges and demands of the times in which we live. The practices of living which make up the lives of persons and societies are underwritten by systems of belief.