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.
