DanielCC wrote:

Hypatia wrote:

Why should philosophy of religion be multi-cultural when the rest of Anglo philosophy has decided that other cultures' approaches are not worth taking seriously?

Playing Devil's advocate - the very reason the rest of Anglo philosophy of doesn't take other cultures approach to philosophy seriously is because 90% said approach is related to a religious tradition.

Or a tradition that has been identified as religious and can therefore be written off accordingly, at least. It gets hard to differentiate between religion and psychotherapy in some of those Eastern traditions, so it's a shame that any insights they might have to offer barely even get a hearing.

On the other hand, I'm not sure to what extent people in these schools of thought are actually making an effort to be heard outside of their own traditions. Vedanta seems a bit on the insular side.

Dr. Feser made an attempt here.

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/03/nyaya-arguments-for-first-cause.html?m=1

I'm not sure what's being spoken of is interreligious dialogue, though, so much as the dialogue of religious philosophy. But I agree with Daniel about the role of religious tradition in these pholosophies, though the way I'd put it is more that it is a matter of a different way of philosophising, and a different understanding of what philosophy is and what's for. The same gulf exists between much pre-modern Western philosophy and contemporary philosophy.

John West wrote:

Yes, but it presumably doesn't exist between (say) Thomism and Islamic philosophy.

True. That would be an interesting encounter. I have seen, in fact, some interesting works in that vein, though far from enough and not perhaps from those who are strict adherents of Thomism or an Eastern school.

DanielCC wrote:

Dave wrote:

Vedic non-dualism strikes me less as a kind of "non-theism" than it does as some kind of "eliminative classical theism." Certainly, if we allow Plotinus among the ranks of classical theists, I don't see any principled way of excluding the non-dualists. Non-dualism may be an incoherent form of classical theism, but nobody said that EVERY version of classical theism would be coherent.

I was using non-theism to exclude theism in the strict sense i..e. in such a way as pantheism and panentheism might fall into the former category rather than the later.

That's what I assumed, seeing as you classified Vedic non-dualism as a form of non-theism - presumably considering it a form of pantheism.

My position is that, while the pantheism of Spinoza or the Stoics (say) arguably wouldn't count as theism (or, at least, that they're no closer to real theism than theistic personalism is), the "pantheism" of Advaita Vedanta (sp?) is arguably still classical theism.

I called Advaita  Vedanta "eliminative classical theism," because there's a striking similarity between theistic non-dualism and eliminative materialism. In both cases, what we have is the assertion of the primacy of one thing (matter, Brahman) and the rejection of everything else (intentionality, finite beings) as illusory. I'm not convinced that non-dualism is pantheism; certainly Brahman would be more at home with Plotinus than with Spinoza. Supposedly, Brahman is supposed to be without attributes, unchanging, and neither corporeal nor incorporeal.  Or, at any rate, that's the impression I've gathered. To the extent that my impression is correct, I don't think that the term "pantheism" is useful, as it generally connotes a simple God-world identity theory, and non-dualists seem to be eliminativists with respect to the world.

What would a more naturalistic philosophy of religion actually focus on, except the usual objections to theism? All I can imagine is a more sophisticated and philosophical riff on sociology, anthropology, and psychology of religion, and perhaps those attempts to explain the origins and place of religion without reference to its truth-value (religion arose out of an evolutionary need, etc.). That strikes me as a very tedious entreprise, and one that would remove most of whatever value analytical philosophy of religion has now. I think it would become very much a minor subdiscipline of philosophy. 

It is not that I discount sociology, anthropology, or psychology of religion entirely, but an entire subdiscipline aimed at studying religion solely in such terms, alongside evolutionary accounts and what have you, seems to me of relatively little worth.