symposium: has philosophy of religion a future?
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The symposium aims to address the emerging new faces of philosophy of religion that expand on the wider cultural issues of theorizing religion today. Topics to be addressed range from how ideology critique has come to change the face of studying religion academically and whether theology and religious studies can or should, in the context of post-‐phenomenological debates, co-‐exist in the university, to whether traditional philosophy of religion, as distinct from philosophical theology and phenomenology of religion, is more properly philosophy of religious studies.
The subject matter is a pressing one. Philosophy of religion is changing so rapidly that many wonder, more now than ever, in what it consists. This often raises the urgent question whether philosophy of religion should persist. The symposiasts offer ways in which to mitigate the issues, underlining the importance of reflexivity in the context of religion and not philosophy alone.
9:00-‐10:30 SESSION 1 Welcome
Jim Kanaris (McGill University, QC)
The Future of Philosophy of Religion
Morny Joy (University of Calgary, AB)
This paper will focus on the implications of two edited volumes that I have recently published: Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (2011) and After Appropriation: Explorations in Intercultural Philosophy and Religion (2011) for the future study of philosophy of religion. In English-‐speaking regions, philosophy of religion has been principally identified with analytic philosophy, where the universal presumptions of an abstract reason, especially with reference to belief and its justification, have dominated. As a result, theists and atheists have debated long and often, according to tenets of propositional logic, on the particular merits of their positions on the above issues. In contrast, Continental philosophy does not demarcate a specific area that is designated as philosophy of religion, nor is it principally concerned with establishing ideals or verities. Instead, questions regarding religion are located with reference to specific themes within a worldview that has been influenced by a number of factors. These include: the “death of God,” the “phenomenological turn,” “a hermeneutics of suspicion,” and a questioning of modernity’s presumed objectivity and its ideologies. In its turn, Intercultural philosophy investigates certain errors that have resulted when the religions and philosophies of non-‐Western peoples have been interpreted by reducing or manipulating their ideas and values to fit with Western concepts and categories. The post-‐colonial critique and the effort of decolonialization together constitute one such undertaking. My aim is to investigate how philosophy of religion would change if (a) the presuppositions of Continental philosophy were accepted and (b) the concepts and of non-‐Western philosophies and religions were taken as being of equal importance.
9:00-‐10:30 SESSION 1 (CONT.)
Towards a New Paradigm for Philosophy of Religion
Maurice Boutin, Professor Emeritus (McGill University, QC)
We sometimes put research in the service of refusing to find anything out. (Peter Sloterdijk)
Do other images, other grammars, other repertoires exist that account for hope?
This question calls for critique of confusing finitude with limitation. Such a critique demands what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-‐1962) calls a “substantial” imagination. It gives rise to a paradigm that opens up thinking to so-‐called “felicitous” practices with reference to religious experience and human destiny.
Philosophy of religion is still fond of trying to peacefully implement impossible links: the link between human finitude and limitation, divine transcendence and the infinite. Philosophy of religion has a future as long as it avoids reducing finitude to limitation. Such a reduction is badly needed by a certain understanding of transcendence not only to affirm, but even to impose itself with the relatively clearly stated goal of rescuing its proper amalgamation with the infinite, thus avoiding to realize that agony of transcendence in such an amalgamation.
Philosophy of religion must rid itself of an idea of limitation that places human finitude under the tutelage that harmonizes with the transcendence of a world of ideas—not with god’s incarnation, which reveals that only a finite being can be a transcendent being.
10:45-‐12:15 SESSION 2 After the End: Retractions and Reaffirmations of The End of Philosophy of
Religion
N.N. Trakakis (Australian Catholic University, Melbourne)
In my 2008 book, The End of Philosophy of Religion, and in a series of metaphilosophical papers both before and after this book, I had taken a highly critical line towards several strands of contemporary philosophy that has aroused a range of responses and emotions, from the celebratory to the condemnatory. In this presentation I will focus on three groups of criticism that have emerged in response to my metaphilosophical views: (i) critiques of my assessment of the so-‐called Wittgensteinian school, headed by D.Z. Phillips, and the allied realism/non-‐realism divide in philosophy of religion; (ii) responses to my criticisms of analytic philosophy of religion, either from friends of analytic philosophy (seeking to show that the nature of analytic philosophy has been misrepresented) or from foes (holding that the problems identified do not get to the heart of the matter as to what is wrong with the analytic program); and (iii) responses to my more recent attempts to identify serious deficiencies in Continental philosophy of religion. In (re)considering these responses, I will retract some aspects of my earlier metaphilosophy while reaffirming others, and in the process I will provide an alternative account of the nature and future of philosophy of religion, one that sees it as both contemplative and participatory in ways that are often neglected. From Post-‐Colonial Paralysis to Post-‐Correctional Progress: The Future of Philosophy of Religion as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry
Wesley J. Wildman, (Boston University, MA)
Postcolonial awareness and post-‐structuralist critique have conferred upon the few philosophers of religion who pay serious attention to religious studies a profound and multi-‐faceted problem. For these philosophers, crypto-‐theological approaches within philosophy of religion can no longer pretend to ignore their cultural-‐religious specificity. Comparative approaches can no longer pretend that key terms and categories are free from the influence of contextual conditioning and questionable translation decisions. Speculative approaches can no longer pretend that the natural and human sciences have nothing relevant to say about religious life-‐worlds and philosophical cosmologies. The result of this multi-‐faceted challenge has been abandonment of the rollicking high-‐seas adventures of philosophy of religion and the confinement of research effort to the relatively safe harbors of historical and analytical approaches. But even historical and analytical approaches can no longer pretend that they are immune from the infection of critical self-‐awareness. The way forward for philosophy of religion in this situation is to exchange the paralysis that comes with critical self-‐awareness for the productivity of seeking correction of hypotheses
10:45-‐12:15 SESSION 2 (CONT.) wherever possible. If philosophers of religion already always operate in the post-‐colonial aftermath of potentially poisonous cultural blindness and interpretative habits, then we should surrender the delusion of epistemic foundationalism with its heartwarming but false moral reassurances and just launch into inquiries without apology for the determinate and flawed character of their leading hypotheses. Thereafter, we should ceaselessly strive to correct those hypotheses with as much energy and as many comparative and disciplinary engagements as possible. This is the post-‐foundationalist, correctional shift in theories of inquiry. The way forward for philosophy of religion is therefore to move from post-‐colonial paralysis to post-‐correctional progress. This is to conceive philosophy of religion not as a discipline but as a family of loosely related multidisciplinary comparative inquiries exploiting whatever modes, techniques, and resources prove relevant for advancing inquiry. What Can Non-‐Philosophy do for Continental Philosophy of Religion?
Clayton Crockett (University of Central Arkansas, AR)
The philosophy of François Laruelle is being increasingly translated and engaged in English-speaking contexts. This paper will sketch out some of his ideas, and offer some critical engagement. My desire, however, is not so much to introduce Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, but rather to examine what kinds of insights it provides to re-conceptualize Continental Philosophy of Religion. In some respects his terminology appears idiosyncratic and his conclusions naïve, but I will argue that there are some valuable insights to be applied. First, to understand the role of non-philosophy is to embrace the fact that Continental Philosophy of Religion can never be sufficiently philosophical to justify itself as analytic or post-analytic philosophy of religion. Second there is a turn to the sciences in recent Continental philosophy, including Badiou, Meillassoux, and Malabou. Laruelle’s work continues this trajectory, although he appeals less to mathematics and more to physics, specifically quantum physics in his book Philosophie non-standard (2012). Finally, Laruelle’s work specifically on religion and religious themes is interesting in its own right, including heresy, Gnosticism and the figure of Christ. These themes culminate in a politically charged vision of insurrection.
1:30-‐3:00 SESSION 3 The Enecstatic Jig: Personalizing Philosophy of Religion
Jim Kanaris (McGill University, QC)
The reference to the dance in my title pays homage to Nietzsche as does the neologism “enecstasis” to Heidegger. Both men radically reshaped philosophy providing for understandings of personal reflexivity that foundationalist programs ineluctably misplace. This aporia suffusing the desire for engaged thought points to a complex history. As a result it has metastasized (hence ever precarious) into a peculiar form of transcendental reflection in contemporary Continental philosophy. As deracinating and subversive, this enecstatic form disrupts the intonations of an invariable program. As hyper-vigilant and affirming, it incites the participation of the concerned individual whose horizon for theory selection is determined by context-specific needs. Reminiscent perhaps of the simple two-step, the musical measure here is far more difficult to follow not only because of its erratic rhythm, but also because its interpretation is exclusively agent dependent.
Enecstatic philosophy of religion broaches these issues in the context of religious studies where Analytic philosophy continues to have remote relevance. Consequently I reconfigure the personalist gesture of phenomenology of religion in line with developments in Continental theorizing of religion. Sui generis religion is replaced by a topology within which individuals philosophize variant cultural forms, nurturing their own appreciation of and for “transcendence”. I call this: disruptive agential self-possession. Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Genre
Jin Y. Park (American University, Washington, DC)
In his recent book, Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), the author discusses how in East Asian languages, the term “religion” (宗教, J. shūkyō; C. zōngjiào; K. chonggyo ) was born in 1853 when an American warship arrived in Japan and issued a demand, among others, for freedom of religion. The word “religion” did not exist in East Asia until the late 19th century. The same is true for the word “philosophy.” The East Asian word “philosophy” (哲學, J. testugaku; C. zhéxué; K. ch’ŏhak) came into existence only in the late 19th century when Japanese philosopher Nishi Amane (西周 1829-‐1897) used the expression in his book Hyakuichi shinron (百一新論, One hundred one new ideas, 1874). What does it mean that the words “religion” and “philosophy” became language in East Asia only in the late 19th century? It might be easy to dismiss the situation with a simple assertion that neither religion nor philosophy existed in East Asian until its encounter with the West in the 19th century. However, we know that the phenomenon is much more complex. The very lack of vocabulary for “religion” and “philosophy,” not to mention the discipline of “philosophy of religion,” which is the topic of this conference, offers us an occasion to reconsider the apparent borders of the discipline of “philosophy of religion” when we think about the field with East Asian religious and philosophical traditions in mind.
1:30-‐3:00 SESSION 3 (CONT.) What happens to philosophy of religion in a tradition in which the disciplines of
“philosophy” and “religion” are deeply intertwined, as is the case in East Asia? Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, all contain what in the West would be traditionally considered both philosophy and religion. How does this “other” to the tradition of philosophy of religion influence our understanding of philosophy of religion? This is not merely an issue of categorization (i.e., “genre”) or naming. As Jacques Derrida persuasively argued in Margins of Philosophy (Marges de la philosophie, 1972) and Du droit à la philosophie (1990), among other works, the issue of naming is an issue of right and, thus, of the rightness and power. This paper will explore this chiasmic dimension of philosophy, religion, and the Eastern and the Western traditions by examining this emerging discussion of philosophy and religion in East Asia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and considering how the incorporation of religious-‐philosophical traditions of East Asia will require a new perspective on the traditional subjects of philosophy of religion, including the relation between philosophy and theology, the existence of God and evil, and the nature of immorality, among many others.
Signs Outdistancing the Times: How Globalization and Post-‐Colonial Theory Is Redefining Contemporary Philosophy of Religion
Carl Raschke (University of Denver, CO)
While Western philosophers and philosophers of religion continue to wrangle over whether philosophy and theology can have anything to do with each other anymore, especially in a university setting, or whether “the future” of the philosophy of religion should be extrapolated from the latest innovations in phenomenology, linguistic research, cognitive science or physical, or whatever, a trend barely noticed in the traditional academy is shifting the entire scene of emergent discourse. It is the decline of the West not so much in Spengler’s sense, but the decline of the importance and utility of the very inferential system—what I call the “hermeneutical engine” of discourse itself—in which we as academics are accustomed to pose these questions in the first place. It is something far more monumental than Thomas Kuhn’s now famous, and often clichéd, “paradigm shift.” Paradigm shifts occur, as Kuhn pointed out, within the orbit of “normal science.” The insight can be applied analogically to the way in which Western philosophy frames questions and stakes out positions. But rarely does the framework for the establishment of the paradigm itself, or the hermeneutical engine as a whole, come into question.
This paper will argue that two global and broad-‐based trends (in both the spatio-‐temporal and conceptual sense) are raising significant doubts and generating conundrums regarding the very hermeneutical engine of Western philosophy, which has operated fairly consistently and efficiently since the age of the ancient Greeks. These trends are all interconnected with each other in a larger perspective, but we will focus on the two main factors or forces that are challenging the current state of affairs: the phenomenon increasingly understood as “globalization” as well as the new “geo-‐philosophical” (Gilles Deleuze’s term) language incubated within the cross-‐disciplinary field of the humanities
1:30-‐3:00 SESSION 3 (CONT.) and religious studies known as “post-‐colonial theory,” or more recently “de-‐colonial theory.” Both globalization theory and post-‐colonial discourse have their origins in late twentieth and early twenty-‐first century Continental philosophy of religion. However, just as the emergent and former colonized nations of the world have turned have turned the mechanisms, institutions, and policy-‐strategies of Western capitalism against itself to create a vast, brave new kind of economic order, so Western educated philosophical elite of these cultures have stood Western philosophy on its head with an even more radical reformulation of what Foucault would call the current “episteme” than even the French post-‐structuralists of the last generation might have imagined.
The paper will explore how these trends are mirrored in the work of certain current academic writers and theorists who have critical relevance for the traditional task of the philosophy of religion. I will attend largely to the publications of Homi Baba, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Mignolo, and Ian Almond. I will seek to demonstrate how the efforts of these post-colonial theorists, conventionally considered as simply derivative when it comes to contemporary philosophy, actually concentrate and more finally attune the thought of such well-known, “card-carrying” philosophical luminaries as Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, and Charles Taylor.
3:15-‐5:30 SESSION 4 Reverence and Criticism in Philosophy of Religion
Tyler Roberts (Grinnell College, IA)
Ordinarily, philosophers of religion think about philosophy as a critical discourse that takes religion as its object or data: philosophy of religion thinks critically about religion. Recent work I’ve done on how the boundaries between religious thought and philosophy are named, drawn, transgressed or blurred, has led me to focus, increasingly, on the critical possibilities for a philosophy that thinks with, not just about, religion. I am provoked to this kind of question by William Desmond, who writes about a “two-way intermediation or communication between religion and philosophy, not just a singular direction from religion to reason”; by Stanley Cavell, who rethinks philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, from the “re-beginning” he finds in the “sacred yes” of Emerson and Nietzsche; and by Willi Goetschel who shows us how Jewish philosophy questions the universalism of western philosophy at the “nexus between philosophy and the messianic vision of redemption.” These thinkers raise historical and genealogical questions about how mainstream traditions of philosophy, whether analytical or continental, have understood critique, cultural criticism, or critical thinking more generally. And they also raise constructive questions about the potential for rethinking philosophy and criticism in terms of religious moods, practices, and concepts such as gratitude, praise, reverence, and the messianic. My paper pursues these lines of thinking by identifying the religious resources these thinkers offer for reorienting philosophical criticism in an affirmative direction and by articulating the questions and challenges their claims present for a future philosophy of religion. Where Can Radical Theology Find a Home?
John D. Caputo, Professor Emeritus (Syracuse University, NY and Villanova University, PA)
Where can radical theology find a home? Where and how can it have a place in the churches or the university? How can it acquire an institutional body? Does it have it any place at all? Does it even exist? Or is it irreducibly homeless, maybe even inexistent? If so, might it still have a reality or force of a different sort? Might it have a way of insinuating itself into thinking in a way that gives theology no peace, that gives us no peace? Might it have a mode of insistence without existence, a way to be without enjoying a robust and full-‐fledged existence? Might it not exist but have a kind of spectrality, like the un-‐dead, which haunts the houses of confessional theology and even haunts the university? Perhaps radical theology calls for a new species of theologians, for a university to come, for a church to come, which will be more welcoming of specters. Perhaps the subject matter of radical theology is the specter of the “perhaps” itself, the “might-‐be” that insinuates itself into everything, including even and especially God “almighty.” Perhaps we should be asking not where radical theology exists but how it insists, not where it has a place but how it may take place, not where it can find a home but how it may happen, how something homeless and uncanny, something un-‐heimlich, can nevertheless be of the greatest import.
3:15-‐5:30 SESSION 4 (CONT.) Re-‐visioning ‘life’ in Philosophy of Religion
Pamela Sue Anderson (University of Oxford, UK)
Traditionally moral and religious philosophers have defended ‘life’ as something of great value. ‘Pro-‐life’, ‘sanctity of life’, ‘quality of life’, ‘life after death’ are just some of the conceptions employed when taking an unequivocal stance on life. Yet such a stance requires philosophical justification; and this has generally come at a price. Too often a closed morality has been thought necessary to protect the sacredness of life, while a static religion has ensured strict obedience to moral imperatives. The problematic result of this closure, which is decisive for my argument, has been exclusion, conflict and wars of religions. My paper will propose a ‘re-‐visioning’ of life, in order to create openness to a dynamic future in philosophy of religions. I aim to develop this practice of re-‐visioning, which I began in Re-‐visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012), in order to bring about openness to creative emotions and a generative flow of life and living relations. With the help of feminist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Michele Le Doeuff and Elizabeth Grosz I will argue for ‘life’ as a process of generating new forms of loving and being loved. Love like joy can be creative in bringing about an assured confidence that sustains dynamic forms of living life together: and this human conception of life, I propose, should be at the heart of contemporary philosophical debates about religions.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS
Jim Kanaris, McGill University Nathan R. Strunk, PhD candidate, McGill University
Special thanks to:
Francesca Maniaci Alex Sokolov Bruna Salhany Ian Pattenden Susan C. Su
Sally Trace, cover artwork:
“Fullness of Manifestation” © 2012 Sally Trace at www.sallytrace.com
This conference was made possible through the generous support of:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada
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