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:

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.).

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.