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).
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.
