"Virgin and Child"

"Virgin and Child," from Fujian Province, China (17th/18th Century) -- at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore

Chinese Religious Diversities and Philosophy of Religion

Statue of the Buddha triumphing over Mara (c.850-900, India)

 San Francisco Asian Art Museum

Earlier this month, I took part in my first face-to-face conference since 2019--the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. I've given a few papers during the interim, but those conferences have all been virtual. 

The SACP conference took place at the University of San Francisco. As I walked across the campus, I saw a Pro-Palestinian solidarity demonstration being held; I paused and listened to a student's speech, remembering anti-war and anti-Apartheid protests I had taken part in while an undergrad at Occidental College. 

This was, of course, quite different from the milieu of last SACP conference I had attended in 2017 at Beida (北大) in Beijing. Most of the papers at that conference had to do with Chinese philosophy, as one might imagine. (My paper was on Wittgenstein and Xunzi.) In San Francisco, the papers ranged across South and East Asian philosophical traditions, with a significant amount of engagement with Buddhist philosophy in particular; I was especially impressed by a pair of presentations on Buddhist ethics. 

For this conference, I presented a paper titled, "Chinese Religious Diversities and Philosophy of Religion." It's a paper that has long been in development. For the last seven years, I have been teaching at CUHK-Shenzhen, and one of my standard courses is Philosophy of Religion. Given the context, I approach that class in a globally-engaged, critical way. After spending three weeks getting acquainted with some of the central approaches in the history of Western philosophy of religion (especially theistic arguments and arguments concerning the logic of divine attributes), we spend the rest of the semester problematizing that approach and expanding together our understanding of what philosophy of religion could be in a global context. This involves explorations of South and East Asian philosophies and religions and their respective concerns, concepts, and arguments.

Wishing Ribbons at Hongfa Temple (弘法寺) in Shenzhen

Over the years, I have had numerous conversations with students on forms of religious engagement in China, and out of these conversations--and my continual study of Wittgenstein's writings--came the idea for this paper. Essentially, the paper is about challenging expectations about what religiosity in China is (and thus what religiosity may be in many other contexts). A key idea in the paper is that preconceptions about what religion must be and must entail can prevent scholars (and students) from seeing some of the ways in which people in China engage with religious ideas, practices, and institutions. Inspired especially by Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," the paper challenges common assumptions in philosophy of religion by advancing five themes about religions in a Chinese context: 

(1) The relevance of the reception and use of concepts of religion to globally engaged philosophy of religion; 

(2) The plurality of ways that religiosities may be combined; 

(3) The pragmatic ways that people may adopt religious practices, beliefs, values, and institutions; 

(4) The plausible combination of atheism with non-theistic religious ideas and practices; and, 

(5) The forms of state power over social manifestations of religions as well as what even may be classified as a religion. 

I got some good questions on definitions of "religion" and "atheism," but overall my sense was that this is a paper that has an audience. It was challenging to condense the manuscript into a conference draft. (My full draft is already over 8,000 words.) I have some ideas on what to do next with the paper, but first I've got to get through the rest of the semester.

As indicated above, the paper isn't just about China; the phenomena of Chinese religious diversities challenge several assumptions that remain fairly common in philosophy of religion today. First, there is the assumption that there is a single, relatively simple to grasp concept of religion that is capable of capturing what everyone means by the term (usually something to the effect that that religions essentially have to do with belief in supernatural beings). Second, there’s the view that avowed atheism is logically or existentially inconsistent with the holding of religious ideas or performing of religious rituals. Third, there is the prevailing perspective that religious observance/practice/belonging is just one sort of thing and always is mutually exclusive with other forms of religiosity rather than being potentially pluralistic. Fourth, there is the intellectualist presupposition that participation in religious rituals logically implies belief (or should imply belief, if the participation is sincere). Fifth, there’s the autonomy assumption that religions simply are what they are separate from the political or cultural influence and interference. Taking note of Chinese religious diversities reveals in vivid detail the distorting impact of assumptions like these. 

SACP 2023 Conference Program

Philosophical Problems in Diversified Philosophy of Religion

Liu Wei, Liberation No. 1 (2013) at the Rubell Museum in Miami

I've recently been delving into the history of Wittgenstein's reception in philosophy of religion, and this led me to reread D. Z. Phillips's The Concept of Prayer (1965). A paragraph at the very beginning of Chapter One caught my eye:

An interesting thing about this metaphor is that Phillips imagines philosophers of religion continuing to work on the Tower of Babel after, I suppose, God has confused the people's language and scattered them. In this circumstance, any builders remaining would have a difficult time communicating with each other. It's not clear from Genesis, at least, how extensive the linguistic confusion is among the people, but if we read the passage as a polemic against Babylonia, then perhaps the point is not so much that God confuses the languages as that God disperses the univocal Babylonian tower builders. And thus, our world is a world of linguistic differentiation and geographic dispersion of people. Perhaps Phillips's passage and the myth it invokes registers the idea of human beings having diverse projects, languages, and societies (and, of course, worldviews).

Model of Ziggurat at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin

This sort of "dispersed" dynamic is at play in a good many subfields of philosophy. Comparative philosophy operates this way. The reasons why philosophers build connections or emphasize differences across areas or traditions of philosophy can be themselves quite varied. Perhaps the same could be said of history of philosophy. Yet, even if that's the case to some extent with these areas, it is quite strongly characteristic of philosophy of religion, and much more so today than in Phillips's time. 

Recent decades have seen an acceleration of efforts to diversify philosophy of religion from the more or less Christian theistic framework found prominently in analytic and continental approaches through the twentieth century to a more broad set of concerns which is inclusive of a wide diversity of religious and philosophical approaches. What was problematic in such earlier work was the tendency to suppose that what is true of Christianity would also be true of other religions (i.e., that Christianity was prototypical of religion). 

So, just as Phillips thought it prudent to frame his particular vision for what "philosophy can say about religion," it is a good idea to describe for one's audiences what one is going to try to do, what problems one will address, and what ends animate one's philosophical work. In this way, I was pleased to see Phillips quote one of my favorite remarks from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

I like this remark because it indicates that philosophical problems leave one with that sense of being a bit conceptually lost and also that if one finds oneself lost with respect to the use of (otherwise familiar) language, then it may be a philosophical problem that one is facing. Thus philosophy of religion may focus its attention not merely on "standard" or "classic" problems but also on those areas of discourse concerning religiosities that may leave one feeling uncertain or unclear about how to make one's "way about." In this way, philosophy of religion can be adaptive to its many contexts. This Wittgensteinian insight guides me in both teaching and writing about diversified philosophy of religion.

Approaching philosophy in a time of war

American propaganda posters from World War Two 

(National Museum of American History, Washington DC)

How does one approach philosophy in a time of war? This is both a straightforward question and also a performative expressing its impossibility or impropriety.

1. Concerning the impossibility of philosophy. For some, philosophy is impossible in times of war because those people are in danger. These days I am thinking of philosophers I have crossed paths with—for example, in graduate school or at conferences or even via social media—who are physically near sites of violence and destruction in Israel/Palestine. Philosophy is inherently reflective and at times, the conditions of life simply do not permit one to pause and reflect. Sometimes, too, philosophical argument (beyond silence) is impossible because powerful actors threaten the free exercise of speech.

Philosophy may be impossible also because of the intensity and immediacy of emotions. Grief and anger can be powerful philosophical teachers, sources of insights into meaningfulness in life, morality, justice, and even the possibility/impossibility of God, but these emotions can also at times distort one’s perception of these same matters. Perhaps there is much to be said about individuality here. Some may find grief to be clarifying. Anger may produce clarity in some and confusion in others. Strong emotions are identified by philosophers as varied as Xunzi and Sextus Empiricus as anti-philosophical, corrupting judgment; while for others, such as Mengzi and Hume, emotions are intimately connected to philosophical activity and moral development.

2. Concerning the impropriety of philosophy. Even if philosophy is possible in times of war, it may be improper. In the Socratic tradition, the impropriety of philosophy was perhaps inevitably a consequence of questioning claims to knowledge. Yet the impropriety of philosophy in times of crisis is all the more pronounced because of how the regularities of social grammar (so to speak) may become scrambled or otherwise difficult to see. 

Philosophical engagement is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of how to respond compassionately or ethically to another’s trauma, grief, or anger. Giving material support or keeping silent while listening to those who are suffering may be what is called for. Philosophy may be a proper response to one’s own pain or anger but not frequently another's. Of course, it's not so simple as that. People say and do things out of anger, grief, or trauma. Sometimes, those actions may call for a philosophically informed response (e.g., critique of Hamas massacring Israeli citizens and of Israel indiscriminately bombing civilians in Gaza and laying siege to the territory).

3. Approaching philosophy. Some approaches in philosophy can be helpful for taking stock of emotions, showing care for those who are suffering, and being reminded of one’s ultimate ends. For example, I find Xunzi’s account of philosophical contemplation (in the “Undoing Fixation” chapter of the Xunzi) to be helpful in structuring one’s attention to a situation and the people involved. Consider this short passage: 

From The Xunzi, Chapter 21: Undoing Fixation (Eric Hutton, trans.) 

To be sure, it is a privilege to be in a position to still the heart-mind, but it is also a practice that is envisioned here as a skill or habit that can be inculcated over time. Especially in times of crisis, knowing the Way will be elusive, all the more so when the crisis concerns the very nature of the social order in which one lives. Yet, as the text above reads, if one is overcome by “what one is already holding” then one will not be able to receive anything new. I think of this as referring to the capacity to take in new information or to adopt a larger perspective on a situation. In a highly charged and dynamic situation like war, this epistemic and affective deficiency will be morally disastrous.

In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell conceives of philosophy as making the self expansive as it comes to know the world, the non-self; taking some inspiration from Russell, perhaps empathy (another expansion of the self) can be an important potential outcome of philosophical reflection. One of the tragedies of war is the tendency that accompanies it to shrink down one’s capacity for empathy, whether driven by sources of group identity (forms of nationalism, racism, religiosity) or trauma.

Of course, not all philosophy is relevant to war, and sometimes, this is a blessing. Being consumed with pure thought (for example, theories of truth or the adequacy of the conventional translation of a philosophical term from another language) can be a welcome distraction from the troubles of one’s time. 

Yet, some philosophy is relevant to times of war. Critique of racial, ethnic, or religious stereotyping, bias, or claims of group superiority is perhaps most consequential in times of crisis, especially, but not only in times of war. Philosophical reflection on morality, justice, and war is crucially important during wartime even as it is also painfully lacking.

Michael Walzer on the principle of double effect, from Just and Unjust Wars (2015)

To this end, these days I’ve been finding the work of Just War theorists such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Michael Walzer to be informative. Not that I endorse Just War theory, but I find the identification of numerous and detailed ethical criteria for the cause, conduct, and conclusion of war to shine needed light through the many sources of confusion onto the complexity of a given conflict and what is at stake in a time of war. Practically speaking, all or nearly all wars would fail to meet these criteria. Yet, criteria like these are helpful for keeping in mind the specific ethical perils of war and where people (including philosophers) might direct their attention and care both during and after the conflict.

On Humility and Philosophy

Philosopher in Meditation, Rembrandt (via Wikipedia)

I’ve seen some remarks on social media concerning philosophy and humility lately that have got me thinking. It was in relation to some discussion of The Guardian review of Daniel Dennett’s new memoir, I’ve Been Thinking. Stuart Jeffries, in his review of the book, remarks on Dennett’s apparent recurring pride throughout the book, writing that Dennett’s inability to be humble gets in the way of the book possessing some of the higher aspirations of Dennett’s own approach to philosophy.

My own take on this issue is somewhat complex. For the purposes of the present discussion, I'm thinking of humility as related to magnanimity (i.e., knowing one's capacities and limits, a sort of removal of egotism from philosophical activity). I am also thinking here of humility as a virtue; knowing what humility is and being humble are two different things. In perhaps an Aristotelian sense, one might approach thinking of humility as a habit that one can (attempt to) put into practice.

I personally think humility is of the utmost importance when it comes to philosophy (i.e., as an aspiration). It’s important for teaching, to leave space for students to enter into the discourse explored in a class; without the evident sincerity of the teacher inviting students to speak, many of them just won’t. It’s important for research, to remember that perhaps a great many philosophers, and other figures, have already thought about (broadly speaking) what you right now are thinking about. (This is important especially to correct for the many sins of analytic philosophy which has all too often been stridently and unrepentantly ahistorical). Even when you think you’re the first scholar to find a topic or a perspective, if you look around you, there have likely been others who have had similar thoughts. It’s also important for working with others, to being a good colleague. This all seems obvious to me, but perhaps in other contexts or with different experiences in mind, humility wouldn’t be such a positive trait.

Yet, I also recognize that there are a large plurality of ways to do philosophy. This is a good thing. While some of my favorite philosophers are actually, successfully humble (I’m thinking here of Hilary Putnam), I get a kick sometimes out of philosophers who aren’t. When I think of Marx, Nietzsche, or even Wittgenstein, I think of philosophers who were massively ambitious in their philosophizing and ruthlessly blunt in communication, and sometimes, they were quite effective at achieving their philosophical ends for those reasons. While I would not put Dennett in this company, I find his writing and public speaking amusing and thought provoking. I particularly liked his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. I disagree strongly with what he has written in my area, philosophy of religion, and have written a little about this myself, but I think he is a clever and accessible writer who has brought some philosophical thinking to a broad audience, well beyond the usual confines of philosophy departments and the academy itself. There is real value in that. 

Perhaps, then, it is not a requirement for philosophers to be humble. Still, if there were fewer humble philosophers, I think it would be a real loss. Self-scrutiny and reluctance to speak for others can be genuine philosophical virtues.

Remembering John Clayton

It's been just about twenty years since John Clayton (1943-2003) died. He was Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University while I was a graduate student there. Clayton had a big influence on my early years in the program, when I was still searching out what sort of method or approach to take in philosophy of religion (continental hermeneutics, analytic philosophy of religion, Peircean pragmatism, Wittgenstein?). I took three classes from him while there--"Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Religion," "Reasons and Gods," and "Tillich"--as well as one directed study. While I learned a great deal from each of these courses, it was "Reasons and Gods" that had perhaps the greatest impact on how I would think about philosophy of religion.

View of Marsh Plaza & Chapel and the School of Theology Building at BU

The "Reasons and Gods" course invited students to explore philosophical terrain Clayton had surveyed in his Stanton Lectures at Cambridge in 1991-1992 and which later became the basis for his posthumous book, Religions, Reasons and Gods: Essays in Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (2006). The course offered both an overview of "classic" theistic arguments (ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral) through the history of Western philosophy as well as across diverse philosophical and religious traditions (especially Mediterranean, European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian). 

A key idea of Clayton's was that theistic arguments have often served purposes in addition to putative justification for religious beliefs; knowing the context of an argument is thus critical to interpreting its particular goal(s), the idea being that arguments about gods frequently aimed to edify religious commitments, express a sense of wonder at divine creativity, or support a favored interpretation of doctrine--that is, target an intra-religious audience--rather than to justify belief in response to some imagined skeptic or naturalist.

(Clayton, Religions, Reasons, and Gods, 80)

One might detect in this contextualism a resonance with Wittgensteinian approaches to philosophy of religion (especially those inspired by Philosophical Investigations). Clayton concurred with this but he was also somewhat critical of the aversion to theistic arguments common in much Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion:

(Clayton, Religions, Reasons, and Gods, 81)

These ideas of Clayton's have exerted a very large influence on the way I approach philosophy of religion, as well as comparative philosophy and history of philosophy generally. In a way, this also influenced how I read Wittgenstein, although Juliet Floyd, my dissertation director, had a far greater influence on how I read Wittgenstein and think about his relevance to various areas of philosophy. I came to see a partial resemblance between Clayton's goal of clarifying philosophical contexts as well as identifying defensible differences between philosophical traditions and Wittgenstein's pursuit of clarity in addressing philosophical problems. That being said, Wittgenstein's "ethic of perspicuity" as I came to call it in my book, goes beyond the clarification of contexts and ends to consider also how "work on oneself" is relevant to the work of philosophy.

There are many insights to be gained from studying Clayton's work, but a key one for me has been how much philosophers tend to radically underestimate the differences in discursive situations when it comes to reading works from distant social or historical contexts. Following Clayton, when I read works from distant contexts, I look for the ends that would have been the focus of philosophical or religious activity. So, for example, reading the Warring States era Confucian philosopher Xunzi for his philosophy of language, while perhaps inspiring to contemporary philosophers looking for new problems to address, runs the risk of losing Xunzi in the process; attending to Xunzi and the ends that animated the text that bears his name can help one see that his concern for naming was not about finding the best theory of reference but about reestablishing the dao of the sage kings in a time of disorder. 

Furthermore, attending to differences in ends of argumentation and discourse (both those that are defensible and those that may be unspoken) is something that is endlessly helpful in cross-cultural situations. A day hardly goes by that I don't note the different ends that structure moments of cross-cultural or inter-religious encounter. Of course, I think about this perpetually in my teaching, both when designing class discussions and when interacting with students in real time. Taking some inspiration from Clayton as well as Wittgenstein, I would now also argue that the use of key terms--e.g., "fideism," "religion," and "philosophy"--also reflects the discursive differences between interlocutors. 

Clayton generally held his classes in the evenings at BU and then frequently invited grad students to join him for a drink down at the BU Pub. It was during these times that I learned of his fondness for whiskies, and I suppose it was also during this time that I developed my own appreciation. (In particular, I remember him introducing me to Lagavulin at the BU reception at the AAR.). Today, I am remembering our many conversations about philosophy and religions that took place across seminars, office hours, and of course in the Pub. 

I was lucky to get to know Clayton's ideas much more closely than I might have due to my work with Anne Blackburn on preparing Religions, Reasons, and Gods for publication. I read each of the chapters very closely many times over and even had the opportunity to travel to the UK to follow up on some research at the British Library Clayton had drafted for an unfinished chapter on the use of the design argument in early-modern British philosophy and theology. I am very grateful I had that chance as well as the good fortune to be able to study with him so many years ago at BU.

Cheers to you, John!

John Clayton (The photo is from tribute page to Clayton at Hardin-Simmons University)

Writing about reticence

Detail from Laurie Anderson's "The Weather" exhibit
Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC

For pretty obvious reasons, it's difficult to say something meaningful about silence, and yet, it has been a topic that one way or another has occupied the attention of philosophers among other writers. Famously, Wittgenstein ends the Tractatus with his enigmatic admonition to "pass over in silence" what we "cannot speak about" (Pears/McGuinness translation). But while silences generally are soundless, they can sometimes be pragmatically rich moments, not least in Wittgenstein's book.

One such way in which silences can be meaningful is via what Michal Ephratt calls "eloquent silence" (Ephratt 2008). The idea is that just as speech acts can have performative effects, so can silent moments (e.g., such as a gap in conversation); in this sense one might consider moments of eloquent silence to be silent speech acts. This seems to me to be such a rich idea, one that could be very helpful for the interpretation of cross-cultural discourse, as well as in moments of discursive failure. In this vein, I find Alessandra Tanesini's work on silence to be instructive (2018).

The Analects 1.3 (Ames and Rosemont Jr. 1998).

A few years ago, I wrote a paper on a topic that is related to silence, what I call moments of reticence. By "reticence," I have in mind a variety of actions in discursive situations, including an unwillingness to speak as well as redirection of conversation or inquiry. The paper focuses on the differential uses of silence and reticence in the Analects and in Wittgenstein's corpus. (Over the years, I have sensed a partial resonance between Wittgenstein and Confucianism, especially when it comes to ethics, practices, and language use.) 

In passage 1.3 above, the Master highlights a theme that runs through the Analects, a suspicion of eloquent speech that is not accompanied by virtuous conduct. Sometimes this suspicion carries over into condemnations of glib speech and the importance in some circumstances of being "slow to speak." A remark of Wittgenstein's collected in Culture and Value suggests perhaps a similar attitude: "This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'" (Wittgenstein 1998, 91)

Periodically, I think about the topic of reticence, especially when it comes to religious and interreligious discourses. Sometimes, philosophers and religious writers have remarked on the difficulty in saying something, either because the topic is very abstract (as with apophatic theology, for example) or perhaps because the audience must be prepared for the message in some way before they are able to receive it. I envision one day of going beyond Wittgenstein and Confucianism and doing a close study of some Christian, Buddhist, and Daoist texts as well when it comes to discursive uses of silences and other forms of reticence in spiritual and/or philosophical projects. 

References

Ames, Roger T., and Henry Rosemont, Jr., trans. 1998. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books.

Ephratt, Michal. 2008. “The Functions of Silence.” Journal of Pragmatics 40, no. 11:1909–1938. 

Tanesini, Alessandra. 2018. “Eloquent Silences: Silence and Dissent.” In Voicing Dissent: The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public, edited by Casey Rebecca Johnson, pp. 109–128. London: Routledge.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value: Revised Edition, edited by G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman and translated by Peter Winch. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Some thoughts on teaching core texts courses

CUHK-Shenzhen

At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, I teach a variety of classes in Philosophy and Religious Studies, but I also teach a core (or "foundational") course in the humanities. It’s called "In Dialogue with Humanity," naturally enough, and was first designed and implemented at our “parent” campus in Hong Kong. 

In Dialogue with Humanity is primarily a seminar-style course. Most of the time spent in the class is in discussion sections (or "tutorials") in which close reading of global core texts is the main activity. Thus, the overall aim of the course is to acquaint students with a variety of important texts from different cultures, religions, and historical periods and to challenge students to develop the skills to approach and critically engage with difficult texts. Readings include Plato's Symposium, the Analects, the Zhuangzi, excerpts from the Bible and Qur'an, the Heart Sutra, Huang Zongxi's "Waiting for the Dawn," Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. To this, I also add excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita and Elie Wiesel's Night. The faculty teaching this course give short lectures each week to help frame the texts so that students know better how to approach them in an informed way, but again, the main focus of the course is digging into passages and forming reasonable interpretations or applications of the ideas contained within. 

Passage from Sura 2 of the Qur'an (Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia)

While I'm fascinated by these texts generally, I am particularly fond of the Warring States era Chinese philosophical text, The Zhuangzi (and especially in the context of this course). I first read from this book as an undergraduate at Occidental College, and I have long found its combination of humor and absurdity along with philosophical reflection to be delightful and confounding. The freedom that one finds in the pages of The Zhuangzi is freedom from the commitments and views of particular ways or “courses” (to follow along with Brook Ziporyn’s translation of dao (道). The freedom or spontaneity (ziran 自然) advanced in that book has, I think, the value of not judging or limiting a thing by standards that apply naturally to some other thing. This seems an important consideration to keep in mind when encountering texts important to distant times and places or for students to remember when reading texts rather distant from their major fields. I find this practical sense of freedom very attractive if also elusive and challenging to put into practice.

Brook Ziporyn's translation of The Zhuangzi

As students work through these varied texts, there's another sort of freedom that emerges from their studies. The freedom I have in mind is freedom of thought, which one develops through developing the capacities to think critically for oneself. There’s no one course that teaches this, or that could teach it, but different General Education courses collectively teach approaches to critical thinking rooted in particular fields and topics in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. 

Of course, one never really completes the process of learning how to think critically, freely. While I am in the role of teacher for courses like these in the General Education program, I also learn a great deal from my students in these courses as well as from rereading course material with the different experiences of a given year of my life before me. Hopefully, students will develop their own sense of appreciation for the values and skills of critical thinking (broadly construed) and they will continue to think and read about those areas, e.g., Philosophy or History, long after they have graduated.

In Dialogue with Humanity is just one course but it is a very important one at the university, challenging students to encounter a dramatically diverse set of views on big questions about life, meaning, the self, and society. The course offers students provocation to think for themselves and to become acquainted with texts that have been prized, even held as sacred (by some), across long histories and varied cultures. I love teaching the course and learn new insights into these texts and their ongoing relevance to critical thought every time I teach it.

The Gutenberg Bible (Library of Congress, Washington DC)

James Baldwin on San Francisco -- "Take this Hammer" (1964)

 Still image taken from "Take this Hammer (The Director's Cut)" (1964)

Today (August 2) is James Baldwin’s birthday. In honor of it, I thought I’d post some thoughts I wrote a while back (on Mastodon) on Richard O. Moore’s 1964 documentary (originally aired on PBS) “Take this Hammer,” which follows Baldwin on a visit to San Francisco. The point of the visit is to explore what the real situation is for Black San Franciscans, despite the myth of SF being a "liberal" city and what that might otherwise seem to suggest. A low quality version of the PBS version of the documentary is also available on YouTube:

Much of the film has to do with showing the structural racism (but not only structural racism) on display in SF, with the development and redevelopment of neighborhoods for profit and the forcing out of Black residents. Parts of the film may be familiar to viewers of other documentaries on Baldwin. At one point in the film, Baldwin says (as I attempted to capture it):

“I conclude that all this has something to do with money. The land has been reclaimed for money, and that the people who are putting up their houses expect to make a profit, but it seems to me I’m attacking what’s called a profit motive. There are some things that are more important than profits. I live in New York City, and it’s been turned into a desert really, for the same reason. And what’s happening in San Francisco now is that the society made the assumption or certainly acts from the assumption that to make money is more important than to have citizens.”

The film also deals with topics relating to religion, racism, and Black spiritual/cultural life. The themes relating to religion seem quite similar in general to the themes Baldwin explores in The Fire Next Time (1963). About 30 minutes in, Baldwin remarks, while looking at the burnt ruins of old St. Mary’s Cathedral (again, please forgive any errors in transcribing):

“I was raised a Christian, you know. My daddy and my momma were very religious. They knew that white Christians were not Christians because of the way they treated Black people. And the Christian Church in this country has never in my experience, never as far as I know, been Christian. The record is much more than shameful…The record proves that as we stand here as of this moment, the Christian church is bankrupt.”

There's also a director's cut of "Take this Hammer," which has an additional 15 minutes of content not included in the PBS version (with also a slightly different ordering of the conversations). It's available online at the Bay Area Television Archive at San Francisco State University.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518

This excerpt from the "about" section on the director's cut is telling:

In either form, I strongly recommend this film, especially for people interested in James Baldwin, the history of San Francisco, facing up to racism in American life, or all of the above.

Some Thoughts on Experiential Learning

Hong Fa Temple (弘法寺) in Shenzhen

This summer, I have been teaching a World Religions course at CUHK-Shenzhen, and the culminating assignment has students go to religious sites and write a paper analyzing what they encountered at the site, drawing on theoretical approaches we have been using in the course. Mostly, this winds up being a critical mixture of Ninian Smart's dimensional analysis of worldviews, Bruce Lincoln's four domains approach to understanding religions, and Tomoko Masuzawa's historical-critical historiography of "world religions" discourse.

This assignment is the highlight of the course for me. While I provide students with a list of sites around Shenzhen, Guangdong, and Hong Kong, I allow students to choose their own sites if they’d like. So, through their eyes, I get to learn not just about the sites I have preselected for them but also about temples in Fujian and Sichuan provinces and mosques in Beijing and Jakarta. 

Prayer Hall of the Niu Jie Mosque (牛街清真寺) in Beijing

In addition to being my favorite assignment, it's a real highlight for students. As one student mentioned in an email: “It was fun to take what we learned in class and use it to understand real-world religion. It made everything we learned feel alive and relevant.” Another student wrote about visiting a Buddhist temple with her mother to offer thanks to the Buddha for the daughter's good gaokao (university entrance exam) score, something the mother had prayed for a year ago. Somehow, it seems fitting that a university assignment would send the student to that temple with her mother, now as a cultural informant. 

One thing students are frequently surprised by is the amount of religious hybridity one finds at temples identified as Buddhist or Daoist or otherwise related to what scholars call Chinese popular religion. (Previously, we had explored this inclusive local pluralism in class discussion.) When students discover elements in temples that otherwise defy their presuppositions about what religions are like, it is a real insight on the students' part. 

Wong Tai Sin Temple (黄大仙祠) in Hong Kong

A key reason why I think experiential learning is so valuable is because it interrupts the familiar track of education being about distributing and receiving facts. When there’s so much that’s new to students about religious or philosophical traditions, it’s all too easy (for students, and sometimes professors) to fall into and follow that track. What’s more difficult but much more valuable is learning how to learn for oneself. Of course, I don’t always succeed at inculcating this sensibility in my courses, but I think experiential learning assignments are just about the best way to provoke this sort of self-directed inquiry on the part of students. And this site analysis project appears to be particularly successful at that goal.

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion (edited by Robert Vinten) -- published today

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion was published today. My chapter is "Wittgenstein, Naturalism and Interpreting Religious Phenomena." In it, I explore in what senses Wittgenstein might be taken to support as well as to oppose naturalist approaches to interpreting religious phenomena. First, I provide a short overview of some passages from Wittgenstein’s writings—especially the “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”—relevant to the issue of the naturalness of religious phenomena. Second, I venture some possibilities regarding what naturalism might mean in connection with Wittgenstein. Lastly, I explore the bearing of Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion for the interpretation of religious phenomena. Ultimately, I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion depict a way of thinking about the naturalness of religious phenomena, and that naturalistic depiction is part of the clarificatory work of philosophy. Wittgenstein reminds himself and his readers that religiosity is not something mysterious, per se; it is a core possibility within human life, one which can anchor meaningful living.

My work on this chapter drew significantly from insights I gained while studying the "Remarks on Frazer" at the same time I was teaching Philosophy of Religion at CUHK-Shenzhen. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on one way in which I found Wittgenstein's insights to be helpful for thinking about the "radical differences" (to borrow an expression from Mikel Burley) that may appear when it comes to religiosities across cultures.

A reductive naturalist approach to studying religion may encourage conceptions of religiosity that distort the phenomena supposedly being investigated. Some relevant examples that challenge the interpretive adequacy of reductive naturalism emerge from a project I assign to students in my Philosophy of Religion course at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; in this assignment, students are tasked with interviewing some of their classmates about matters relating to beliefs and practices that are associated with religions. One characteristic example is as follows: just before taking the university entrance exam (the gaokao), a high school student in China visits a local Buddhist temple, lights incense and bows marking the four directions, and then kneels before an image of the Buddha in prayer. The student performs these actions not necessarily because she believes certain truth claims about the Buddha’s powerful abilities and will to act in the world to benefit those who show devotion with a good exam score, but a significant number of students may perform these or similar acts anyway. As one interviewee put it: ‘it can’t hurt’. In fact, those same students do believe that years of very hard work studying for the university entrance exam will ensure the best possible score; and that is surely why so many students work countless hours preparing for the exam. If asked, the students who visit the local temple would likely claim not to be Buddhists and perhaps would identify as atheists. Even so, a significant minority of university students who disavow belief in supernatural beings might still believe in karma or that biological death is not the end of personal identity or that ancestors still exist in some sense beyond their deaths. 
What this suggests to me is that the spiritual or religious imagination of university students in China – amongst other places – is far more vibrant and diverse than labels such as ‘Marxist atheist’ would seem to suggest.  (119f)

I'm grateful for conversations with Rob Vinten and Guy Axtell regarding earlier drafts of the chapter and for questions and comments on the original conference paper. Now that the book is published, I can read the other chapters, many of which I also first heard at the conference. 

Reference:

Carroll, Thomas D. 2023. “Wittgenstein, Naturalism, and Interpreting Religious Phenomena,” in Robert Vinten (ed.) Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion, Bloomsbury Publishers.

Wittgenstein, Catholicism, and Ambiguous Religiosity

Plaque at the Bevans's house in Cambridge, where Wittgenstein lived until his death

I read earlier today Neil O'Hara's short piece "Some anecdotes about Wittgenstein," which is forthcoming in Philosophical Investigations. (It's amazing to think that there are still instances of the person Wittgenstein being in the living memory of people; Br. Herbert Kaden OSB, whose memories are conveyed in the short piece, just passed away within the year.) 

One anecdote included is possibly significant when it comes to the vexing question of Wittgenstein's engagement with Catholicism (and perhaps, his "religiosity"). It concerns his relationship to Father Conrad, who he met with in the months before his death and who, when Wittgenstein was on his deathbed, also performed the office for the dying and gave absolution for Wittgenstein.

Exterior of the Bevans's house

There's some ambiguity on how to think about the Catholic rites performed for Wittgenstein before and after his death. Ray Monk describes Drury’s uncertainty about the fittingness of the ceremonies for Wittgenstein in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. According to Fr. Conrad, Wittgenstein took communion & wished "to be reconciled to the Church.” That's a significant piece of information because it suggests more personal engagement with Catholic tradition at the end of his life than I had been aware of.

It’s a good idea not to jump to conclusions here. This doesn't mean that it's right to think that Wittgenstein was a Catholic (whatever that might be taken to mean). It's never that simple with Wittgenstein at least. This anecdote should be read in concert with the other perspectives and memories that are available (and that one finds especially in The Duty of Genius). The ambiguity one finds in Wittgenstein's connection to Catholicism may well remain.

If one tries to force Wittgenstein into some previously established mold of what it is to be religious or to be Catholic, then these anecdotes are especially perplexing. Instead one might draw another conclusion: that ambiguous engagement with a religion is still a form of engagement with religion. This latter point seems quite apt today when religious language and practices may remain meaningful for people even if their connections to institutional forms of religiosity have collapsed or are otherwise irretrievable.

Wittgenstein's grave at the Ascension Parish Burial Grounds  (formerly St. Giles)

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion (ed. Robert Vinten) - Bloomsbury 2023

This book is coming out in the next month or so. I've got a chapter in it (please forgive the self-promotion). The book originated from a pair of conferences in 2020 organized by Robert Vinten having to do with Wittgenstein, naturalism, and CSR, part of the larger project at Nova University Lisbon, "Epistemology of Religious Belief: Wittgenstein, Grammar and the Contemporary World," which was directed by Nuno Venturinha and Sofia Miguens. I learned a lot being a part of the project and look forward to seeing the completed book. I believe there will be another book coming out eventually on Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religious Belief, having to do significantly with hinge epistemology and philosophy of religion. But that will be a post for another day.

Here's a little bit about my chapter: "Wittgenstein, Naturalism and Interpreting Religious Phenomena"

Abstract: In this chapter, I explore in what senses Wittgenstein might be taken to support as well as to oppose naturalist approaches to interpreting religious phenomena. First, I provide a short overview of some passages from Wittgenstein’s writings—especially the “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”—relevant to the issue of the naturalness of religious phenomena. Second, I venture some possibilities regarding what naturalism might mean in connection with Wittgenstein. Lastly, I explore the bearing of Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion for the interpretation of religious phenomena. Ultimately, I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion depict a way of thinking about the naturalness of religious phenomena, and that naturalistic depiction is part of the clarificatory work of philosophy. Wittgenstein reminds himself and his readers that religiosity is not something mysterious, per se; it is a core possibility within human life, one which can anchor meaningful living.

Here's what the publisher's website has to say about the book:

Description

Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists.

Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the frameworks and practices of cognitive scientists of religion. Employing philosophical tools as well as drawing on case studies, contributions not only illuminate psychological experiments, anthropological observations and neurophysiological research relevant to understanding religious phenomena, they allow cognitive scientists to either heed or clarify their position in relation to Wittgenstein's objections. By developing and responding to his criticisms, Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion offers novel perspectives on his philosophy in relation to religion, human nature, and the mind.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Robert Vinten (New University of Lisbon, Portugal)

1. Wittgenstein, Concepts and Human Nature, Roger Trigg (University of Warwick, UK)

2. On Truth, Language and Objectivity, Florian Franken Figueiredo (New University of Lisbon, Portugal)

3. Pascal Boyer's Miscellany of Homunculi: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Religion Explained, Robert Vinten (New University of Lisbon, Portugal)

4. The Brain Perceives/ Infers, Hans Van Eyghen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)

5. The Imaginary Inner Inside the Cognitive Science of Religion, Christopher Hoyt (Western Carolina University, USA)

6. Cognitive Theories And Wittgenstein: Looking For Convergence Not For Divergence, Olympia Panagiotidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

7. Wittgenstein, Naturalism, and Interpreting Religious Phenomena, Thomas Carroll (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

8. Natural Thoughts and Unnatural Oughts: Lessing, Wittgenstein, and Contemporary CSR, Guy Axtell (Radford University, USA)

9. Normative Cognition in the Cognitive Science of Religion, Mark Addis (London School of Economics, UK)

10. Brains as the Source of Being: Mind/Brain Focus and the Western Model of Mind in Dominant Cognitive Science Discourse, Rita McNamara (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

11. On Religious Practices as Multiscale Active Inference: Certainties Emerging From Recurrent Interactions Within and Across Individuals and Groups, Inês Hipólito (Humboldt University, Germany) and Casper Hesp (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Existentially Important Issues & Philosophy of Religion II

Christo and Jean-Claude, Diagram for "Surrounded Islands" Project 

for Biscayne Bay, Miami (1983)

I'd like to pick up the thread I left a few months ago. Since I've been teaching Philosophy of Religion again this term, I figured it might be a good idea to pick up this theme on existentially important issues in philosophy of religion. The idea behind this question was that while much philosophy of religion comes from quite different times, insights from the past might be helpful for shedding light on contemporary issues of practical, even existential urgency. 

In class discussions, a wide variety of issues came up. Students' responses clustered around three broad areas: 

1. Philosophy of religion could play a constructive role in addressing the philosophical underpinnings of our emerging environmental crises relating to climate change. Here, I think Martin Hägglund's ideas, and especially his notion of "secular faith," were particularly inspiring for students. A lot of this no doubt has to do with many students holding to some combination of materialism and atheism. A robust social ethic grounded in a sense of what is at stake in our shared world appeals to a good many of my students.

2. Philosophy of religion could help facilitate intercultural communication, especially when it comes to understanding and interpreting traditional beliefs and practices across cultures and historical periods. Importantly, this sensibility had to do with living in pluralistic societies (including but not exclusively China) or with awareness of international business contexts in which students might find themselves someday. One student specifically drew on Simone Weil's work on attention (to God, to neighbors) as a resource for intercultural communication.

3. A good many students also reflected on the dynamics of war and violence in the contemporary world and the constructive role philosophy of religion could play. In particular, students mentioned that philosophy of religion could help with interpreting and applying relevant religious teachings (e.g., "non-violence," "turning the other cheek") and in the contemporary world. Some students also considered how philosophy of religion could play a critical role by countering misuse of religious texts or doctrines in justifying violence or warfare.

A smaller but still significant number of students identified topics relating to gender and identity and the important role philosophy of religion could play in questioning interpretations of sacred texts that have been used to support traditionalist accounts of gender roles.

Especially in contexts where overt identification with religious identities is low, reflecting on the existential importance of philosophy of religion is helpful. Not only does it bridge historical work in global philosophy with our own contemporary world and its problems, but it also may be helpful for generating new insights into (and possible new ways of addressing) difficult problems. I'll be keeping issues like these in mind as I revise the course for the future and as I consider possible future writing projects on existential issues and contemporary philosophy of religion.