Once the semester ended, I shifted gears to research and have not been back to the blog over the last two months. Before writing about current projects -- and classes, which start in a couple weeks! -- I thought it would be good to write a little more about the philosophy of religion course.
As has been discussed in the philosophy blogosphere in recent weeks, many philosophers are uncertain about the place of the subfield in the larger field of philosophy. Even so, in that discussion at Daily Nous and later in a discussion over at NewAPPS, a number of constructive suggestions were offered for teaching philosophy of religion in a way that approaches the category of religion critically and the subfield itself with an eye to philosophical and religious diversity.
My goals in teaching this course were to teach it in a way relevant to contemporary Chinese students. Of course, above all, this meant that the course needed to treat the concept of "religion" critically, being as how it is not a natural kind term. Furthermore, the term which is used to translate "religion", "zongjiao" does not have the same associations the English term has. It was also important to spend time on this issue so that any areas of potential misunderstanding could be identified and dealt with.
It also meant that the conventional approach to the field in the West, of foregrounding issues relating to the existence and attributes of God (especially as reflected in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions) would not do. While we did read some of that history, it mainly served to show that the field has a lot of work to do to get up to speed with philosophical problems that arise in connection with twenty-first century religious movements. Much more relevant to these students are the philosophical traditions of Buddhism and Daoism, as well as the doctrines, institutions, and/or practices of the five recognized religious traditions in China: Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam, and Protestantism.
The students were particularly fond of the cross-cultural and pluralistic approaches to philosophy of religion, especially as advanced by John Clayton, John Hick, and Ninian Smart. Of course, these approaches are not mutually consistent with each other, but I think the students found the humanistic impulse behind each of these approaches refreshing. (Each of these approaches treats religious phenomena as above all human phenomena; if one is interested in understanding humanity in its diversity, then understanding religious systems will play a role in that understanding.)
Also of particular importance to students is the role that Confucianism will play in China's future. Of particular help here was Xiaomei Yang's overview article in Philosophy Compass, "Some Issues in Chinese Philosophy of Religion". The debate over the classification of Confucianism was particularly interesting to students, not least because some of them thought the "debate" consisted in Westerners raising the question of Confucianism's religion-status, and Chinese rejecting the charge. Seeing that this is also at times a debate among Chinese intellectuals helped my students approach this as a live issue (and not just as another example of foreigners misrepresenting Chinese culture).
Most of the students wrote about pluralism in one way or another for their final projects. In this way, the students perceived religions as potential sources of social disharmony; pluralistic approaches towards understanding religions -- and especially religious differences -- were of interest to the students insofar as they seemed to support the ends of mutual co-existence and of a smooth-functioning, orderly society. In this way, the students' attitudes were in line with Confucianism (and some of them explicitly so). I say "in line with" Confucianism, because I detect a layer of ambivalence about Confucianism among many students. While the tradition may be regarded with some measure of pride, most students seem to regard the tradition as irretrievable in the contemporary context (and they may well be right); any retrieval would be also a modification.
All in all, teaching this course was a fascinating experience, one that I'll be thinking about for a long time to come...
Monday, August 11, 2014
Sunday, May 18, 2014
"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.
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.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
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).
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).
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Teaching Philosophy of Religion in China
Over the next several weeks, I will be teaching a five-week, intensive course in philosophy of religion. At the college where I am on faculty, we teach one course at a time, six per academic year. During this time, I will be blogging from time to time about the course.
Since philosophical activity arises in response to problems, the course will be organized around problems involving religions. But which problems should the course address? My thinking here is influenced by Wittgenstein. In a passage included in Culture and Value, he writes:
Since philosophical activity arises in response to problems, the course will be organized around problems involving religions. But which problems should the course address? My thinking here is influenced by Wittgenstein. In a passage included in Culture and Value, he writes:
By the way in the old conception -- roughly that of the (great) western philosophers -- there were two sorts of problem in the scientific sense: essential, great, universal, & inessential, as it were accidental, problems. Our conception on the contrary is that there is no great essential problem in the scientific sense. (CV, p. 20e) [MS 110 200: 22.6.1931]For reasons that will become clear in future posts, I will not be teaching the course as an introduction to the classical problems in philosophy of religion; instead, I will begin the class as an investigation into sources of confusion that arise out of how people use terms like "religion". Thus one might expect philosophical problems to be different in different parts of the world (e.g. China and the U.S.).
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Book
My first book, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) will be published this summer.
Here is the jacket description:
The commonly held view that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion entails an irrationalist defense of religion known as ‘fideism’ loses plausibility when contrasted with recent scholarship on Wittgenstein’s corpus, biography, and other sources. This book re-evaluates the place of Wittgenstein in the philosophy of religion and charts a path forward for the subfield by advancing three themes. The first is that philosophers of religion should question received interpretations of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, as well as the meanings of key terms used in interpretations, such as ‘fideism’. The second theme is that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, across his corpus, pursues a particular end: a searching clarity or perspicuity. The third theme is that with the rise of various religious movements within societies and around the world in recent decades, philosophy of religion has important tasks in clarifying global conversations on living well amidst human diversities and contemplating philosophy as a vocation.
This book originates in my dissertation, Fideism and Wittgenstein’s Ethic of Perspicuity (Boston University, 2009), but over the last few years, I have written two new chapters and further developed the arguments of the others. Only “The Traditions of Fideism” remains largely unchanged from it’s earlier published form.
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