"Religion" and Philosophy of Religion

As I have mentioned before, I am presently teaching a course in philosophy of religion. The opportunity to teach this course in Shanghai is raising all sorts of philosophical problems concerning the content, methods, and history of the philosophical subfield. While the first part of my course on philosophy of religion concerns theories and definitions of "religion", the second part deals with the history of the subfield self-consciously named "philosophy of religion". Where to begin a history of a topic in philosophy is itself a philosophical problem. What counts as the first iteration of a concept, a problem, or an area of inquiry?

My goal in using contemporary work on the concept of religion at the beginning of the course was to problematize uncritical use of the category of religion, especially in cross-cultural contexts. For the second part of the course, we have been following Charles Taliaferro's history of philosophy of religion, Evidence and Faith. Taliaferro's book is generally very good and well-written. That said, the narrative he traces in this book is largely about the emergence of philosophy of religion out of the philosophical, political, and religious-secular controversies of the last few centuries (especially in European philosophy); this point of origin and historical trajectory for the field may go a long way toward explaining its current tendency towards parochialism (i.e. its primary focus being on assessments of the rationality of claims and entailments of Christian theism, to the neglect of other traditions or problems concerning religions in the contemporary world).

To correct this, one might investigate philosophy of religion as a global phenomenon. By incorporating a plurality of philosophical and religious traditions into the history of the subfield, this approach would seem to go a long way towards addressing the parochialism problem, but one lesson that comes from Tomoko Masuzawa's and Brent Nongbri's respective works is that words like "religion" and "world religions" bring along their respective histories of use, including their uses in nineteenth and twentieth century histories of religion that have had a tendency to privilege modern European forms of Christianity. In other words, "religion" itself does not seem to be a tradition-neutral category to apply cross-culturally; instead, Masuzawa and Nongbri trace the history of the concept as a culturally-embedded term that may or may not be helpful for the interpretation of ways of life historically or culturally distant from its context of origin.

Whatever philosophy of religion might become in the twenty-first century, if it is to aid in understanding and addressing problems arising from human diversities (including those that people frequently associate with religions), the field would need to take into consideration varying conceptions of "religion" as well as different contexts and histories of philosophical dispute concerning what is identified as religious.

On the concept of religion

As I mentioned in a previous post, currently I am teaching a class on philosophy of religion. The starting point for the course is concepts of religion. We're approaching a cluster of issues concerning definitions or identifications of "religion" through reading excerpts from Ninian Smart's Dimensions of the Sacred, Brent Nongbri's Before Religion, and Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions.

Partly at issue between Smart's and Nongbri's respective analyses is whether the parochial connotations of "religion" (too often a part of how philosophy of religion is currently practiced) can be shed in favor of broad, cross-cultural (perhaps universal?) category of human experience. Smart deals with the problem by subsuming religions under the genus of worldview, a concept that he analyzes by means of his seven (or eight) dimensions or components (i.e. ritual/practical, doctrinal/philosophical, mythic/narrative, experiential/emotional, ethical/legal, organizational/social, material/artistic...and political); these dimensions apparently interact in a dialectical way with each other.

So while Smart seems to seek to stretch the connotations of "religion" (even while acknowledging the term's limitations) so that it can range over a diverse array of traditions, Nongbri argues, along Wittgensteinian lines, that the term's meaning is already well-established in use: "religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity." (Nongbri, 2013, p. 18) Use of the word cross-culturally -- and more to his point: historically -- may mislead scholars and students into thinking that contemporary constructions are universals, that the referents for the term really exist as such and not as constructions of the scholar. In short, use of the term may invite confusion into one's analysis of a text, tradition, or way of life.

Nongbri may well be right, and the spirit of his approach is very much in line with my own concerns over introducing confusion through careless use of certain terms. Even so, I'm not sure yet if my own reading of Wittgenstein would support an analysis that goes in the direction Nongbri takes. After all, it is an empirical question whether the linguistic behavior of English speakers supports Nongbri's claim. (I suspect it might, but let's see.) Also, and perhaps more importantly, words like "religion" as well as other terms that are inter-translatable with "religion" are present in many other contemporary languages. These terms may have connotations that "sufficiently resemble modern Protestant Christianity", but then again, maybe they do not. These too are empirical questions.

Reference

Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).