This semester, I’m teaching a Philosophy of Religion course at CUHK-Shenzhen. It may seem to be a peculiar course to teach at a university in China. While measuring religiosity is far from straightforward, especially in China, it is commonplace to be told that Chinese people are atheists or otherwise are not religious. A class like this might then seem like it would be irrelevant to contemporary students in China; yet, the class has been well enrolled.
If one has a more globally engaged conception of the field—as being internally varied, spanning histories, cultures, diverse religions, and multiple conceptions of philosophy and of religions—then philosophy of religion would be somewhat continuous with areas of philosophy, such as comparative philosophy and history of philosophy, areas that are well represented in China and East Asia. So, I would argue that globally engaged philosophy of religion (at least) is highly relevant to philosophy in East Asia.
When I teach the course, it is in many ways a course in metaphilosophy (as well as critical reflection on “religion”), drawing upon philosophical traditions from different cultural and historical locations. A key focus from week to week is how philosophers contend with particular religious and cultural traditions (e.g., Vedic philosophy, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, contemporary atheism, secularism) and with the claims and arguments philosophers make about the cosmos, the self, what the meaning of a belief or practice really is, or what a meaningful life is.
I have students conduct some informal interviews with students outside the course about topics relating to ethics, identity, tradition, and religiosity as part of an activity of brainstorming potential new topics for philosophical inquiry into religiosities. I'll comment on some insights we’ve gained from these conversations in a future post, but I'll say for the moment that I'm convinced philosophy of religion is potentially a very rich area for inquiry in China.
