Posted by Jeremy Taylor  7/15/2018 3:36 pm | #11 |
I very much agree with Hypatia about dialogue between Western theistic philosophy and that of Indian philosophy, and also Islamic philosophy beyond Avicenna and Averroes.
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Posted by Hypatia 7/15/2018 4:08 pm | #12 |
DanielCC 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.
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Posted by John West 7/15/2018 4:22 pm | #13 |
I'm curious: what sort of shape, specifically, do you all think these inter-religion dialogues would take? (I mean even between Abrahamic religions.) I find, on here at least, that everyone likes the idea of inter-religion dialogues in the abstract, but things quickly break down once people get to the actual, concrete having of them.
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Posted by Jeremy Taylor 7/15/2018 4:42 pm | #14 |
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.
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Posted by John West 7/15/2018 5:47 pm | #15 |
I'm not sure what's being spoken of is interreligious dialogue, though, so much as the dialogue of religious philosophy.
Haha. Fair enough. For the record though, that is what I meant.
The same gulf exists between much pre-modern Western philosophy and contemporary philosophy.
Yes, but it presumably doesn't exist between (say) Thomism and Islamic philosophy.
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Posted by Jeremy Taylor 7/15/2018 6:04 pm | #16 |
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.
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Posted by Hypatia 7/15/2018 6:08 pm | #17 |
I'm curious: what sort of shape, specifically, do you all think these inter-religion dialogues would take? (I mean even between Abrahamic religions.) I find, on here at least, that everyone likes the idea of inter-religion dialogues in the abstract, but things quickly break down once people get to the actual, concrete having of them.
The first thing I'd like to see is more work from pantheists and panentheists, like the John Leslie books Daniel posted a couple days ago. If nobody is actually advocating for alternatives to traditional theism, then it would be a bit unreasonable to expect theistic philosophers to be responding to something that doesn't exist. But in terms of what does exist, I'd like to see things like Thomists defending their metaphysics from something like a Vedantic account of causality instead of just the usual suspects.
I do appreciate the Feser piece Jeremy just posted as well, though.
The same gulf exists between much pre-modern Western philosophy and contemporary philosophy.
And between analytic and continental philosophy. If continentally inclined theists are off dialoguing with the Zizeks of the world instead of the Plantingas, I think it's a bit unrealistic to expect people to reach far outside of their traditions just because they're religious. It's part of a bigger problem than philosophy of religion.
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Posted by Dave 7/16/2018 1:57 am | #18 |
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.
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Posted by John West 7/17/2018 6:34 pm | #19 |
I'm personally not that interested in a lot of philosophy of religion. I find natural theology very ritualistic. Everyone knows exactly what everyone else is going to say, and how to reply, and they all do so. Usually, if I'm doing philosophy of religion, it's because I've been led into it by investigations in ontology. I think there is some interesting work on divine sovereignty, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, but, like everything I post about online lately, that is “leisure time philosophy” and gets correspondingly less attention than other subjects. I have a lot of sympathy for the volume's general discontent with philosophy of religion.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people complaining that philosophy of religion isn't naturalist enough, which seems to me to miss the point. I agree with James that “religion”, as ordinarily used, probably has many meanings, but the one that most people with a “religious sensibility” are going to find interesting probably looks something like this. I don't think people serious about religion are going to take to a “religion centered on energy, drugs, raves, or art festivals” (though I agree with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (in some moods) that art—construed broadly to include music, theater and literature—is perhaps the closest we can get to religion without religion), and I don't think it's going to be very philosophically interesting.
I sympathize with the “more work on other religions” camp, in so far as I think Christianity has deep problems (in particular, that of the Incarnation) and not everyone is able to accept traditional mysterian answers. (That said, I also find Christianity the most beautiful of all the religions. I'm "imaginatively" out of sync with most of the others.)
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Posted by Jeremy Taylor 7/17/2018 8:04 pm | #20 |
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.
