Read more
This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their subject.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Sonia Sikka: Rescuing Religion from Faith
- 2: Yujin Nagasawa: Global Philosophy of Religion and Its Challenges
- 3: Stephen Maitzen: Against Ultimacy
- 4: Eric Steinhart: Religion after Naturalism
- 5: Mark Wynn: Renewing our Understanding of Religion: Philosophy of Religion and the Goals of the Spiritual Life
- 6: John Bishop: On Facing Up to the Question of Religion as Such
- 7: Robert McKim: The Future of Philosophy of Religion; the Future of the Study of Religion; and (Even) the Future of Religion
- 8: Wesley J. Wildman and David Rohr: How North American Philosophers of Religion See Their Field
- 9: J. Aaron Simmons: Continental Philosophy of Religion in a Kenotic Tone
- 10: Graham Oppy: Rationality and Worldview
- 11: Jason Marsh: On the Socratic Injunction to Follow the Argument Where It Leads
- 12: Clare Carlisle: Spinoza's Philosophy of Religious Life
- 13: Wes Morriston: Protest and Enlightenment in the Book of Job
About the author
Paul Draper is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he has taught since the fall of 2006. Prior to that, he taught for 19 years at Florida International University in Miami. He has also had three fellowships at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, including the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship in 2010-2011. Most of his published work is on the problem of evil and other topics in the philosophy of religion.
J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason and of a trilogy on the philosophy of religion: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, and The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion. The ideas of the trilogy, and his earlier work on hiddenness, are made generally accessible in two recent short works from Oxford: Evolutionary Religion and The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God.
Summary
This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their field. In the first part are chapters on how an emphasis on faith distorts attempts to engage non-western religious ideas; on how philosophers from different traditions might collaborate on common interests; on why the common presupposition of ultimacy leads to error; on how new religious movements feed a naturalistic philosophy of religion; on why a focus on belief and a focus on practice are both mistaken; on why philosophy's deep axiological concern should set much of the field's agenda; and on how the field might contribute to religious evolution. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of the standpoint of fifty-one philosophers of religion, and also addresses issues about humility needed in continental philosophy of religion; about the implausibility of claiming that one's own worldview is uniquely rational; about the Moorean approach to religious epistemology; about a Spinozan middle way between 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives; and about the unorthodox lessons we could learn from scriptures like the book of Job if we could get past the confessional turn in recent philosophy of religion.The goal of the volume is to identify new paths for philosophers of religion that are distinct from those travelled by theologians and other scholars of religion.
Additional text
[T]he vision of philosophy of religion that is being proposed herecross-cultural normative arguments about what is real and what is valuableis arguably what people today need most. Philosophy of religion understood in this way is not Christian apologetics but rather a crucial aspect of living with diversity. A philosophy of religion which lives up to its name ought to be defended as the center of the humanities, and this volume provides multiple tools with which to build such a defense.
