Religion in Late Modernity

CHAPTER 12. Religions, Philosophies,and Philosophy of Religion

CHAPTER 12 Religions, Philosophies, and Philosophy of Religion The Impact of Scholarship on Philosophy of Religion The most dramatic change in the academic study of religion in the last twenty-five years has been the vast increase in the knowledge, by Western scholars, of the world’s diverse religious traditions. Before this, the background images of religion that came to mind were drawn mainly from European religions , often in their Enlightenment representations. This was so even when the topic of discussion was, say, Confucianism, and the question was whether it is a religion: the images, metaphors, associations, and weighting of the importance of specific ideas and emotions framing the question came from Christian and Jewish models plus a little Greek paganism for comparative breadth. The dramatic change in the academic study of religion caused by vastly increased knowledge is different from equally or more dramatic changes in the thinking of religious cultures other than those friendly to the Western academy. For those other religious intellectual cultures, perhaps particularly that of Islam, encounter with the Western academy itself has been extraordinarily dramatic. The topic here, however, is limited to the understanding of religion in the Western academic sense, acknowledging that the academy is expanding beyond its Western source through the participation of scholars steeped in other cultures. Although there remain important conceptual questions about the nature of religion as such, many scholars would prefer the operative phrase to be the study of religions, not the study of religion (see Hart 1991). A number of factors have contributed to this change. A general cause was the political temperament of anti-imperialism that made concerned interest in non-Western and primal religions an academic (and social) imperative and at the same time made the assumptions of the theistic problematic (existence of God, theodicy, epistemologies of revelation, and so forth) something of an embarrassment. This political temperatment was in full swing when the International Journal of Philosophy of Religion published its first number in 1970. A second contributing cause was the state twenty-five years ago of the philological study of religions with texts in non-European languages. The great pioneering efforts at making critical editions and translating texts into European languages, of course, were made in the nineteenth century. James Legge’s translations of Chinese texts and Max Muller’s editions of Sacred Books of the East are examples; also some of the great work in anthropology and phenomenology of religion was done then and in the early decades of the twentieth century (see chapter 6). But in 1970 there were flourishing graduate departments of Asian, East Asian, South Asian, or Buddhist studies and the like, or religion or philosophy departments with those specialities, at Hawaii, Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago, Wisconsin, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, as well as at other places in the United States and outside, and also at non-English-speaking European and Latin American universities. Though each of these departments might have had very few senior scholars at that time, nearly every graduate student had to edit or translate a text, or provide an historical analysis of the setting of some text or practice . In the intervening quarter century there has been thus an extraordinary multiplier effect of translations and detailed historical studies. The multiplier effect continues because universities such as Boston University, which in 1970 at its most exotic had a two-person program in Islamic studies, a Hindu teaching in its Methodist seminary, and a Pakistani Christian teaching religion, now offers philologically sound graduate programs in Islam (still), Hindu religions, Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and anthropology of religion, all taught by professors whose doctorates date since 1970 and who publish in technical journals. Whereas in 1970 there were good translations of the “great” texts, such as the Princeton Source Books (Radhakrishnan and Moore 1957; Chan 1963) in Chinese and Indian Philosophy,1 now there are good translations of less great texts, of the “alternatives,” and of secondary literature . In Chinese studies we now are in the midst of a revisionist controversy concerning the ways the academic giants of 1970 carved up the field.2 The result is that contemporary philosophers of religion have as much scholarly background now about the religions of Asia, Africa, and primal peoples as they did about Christianity, Judaism, and (for the daring ones) Islam in 1970. A third contributing cause is that increased economic, military, and political internationalization has stimulated vastly increased international scholarly contact. There has long been an international...