TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Religion’ as a Philosophical Problem
T2 - Historical and Conceptual Dilemmas in Contemporary Pluralistic Philosophy of Religion
AU - Amesbury, Richard
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2014/12
Y1 - 2014/12
N2 - In the late nineteenth century, European philosophical theologians concerned about the perceived threat of secularity played a crucial role in the construction of the category of ‘religion,’ conceived as a transcultural universal, the genus of which the so-called ‘world religions’ are species. By reading the work of the late John Hick (1922–2012), the most influential contemporary philosophical advocate of religious pluralism, through an historically informed hermeneutic of suspicion, this paper argues that orientalist-derived understandings of religion continue to play a significant (though often unacknowledged) role within the philosophy of religion today. Though couched in the language of pluralism, Hick’s later work in the philosophy of religion functions apologetically to maintain a version of the religious–secular distinction that, while theologically and politically loaded, is, I show, philosophically arbitrary. Moving the philosophy of religion beyond Eurocentrism, I argue, will require freeing it from the logic of the modern understanding of religion.
AB - In the late nineteenth century, European philosophical theologians concerned about the perceived threat of secularity played a crucial role in the construction of the category of ‘religion,’ conceived as a transcultural universal, the genus of which the so-called ‘world religions’ are species. By reading the work of the late John Hick (1922–2012), the most influential contemporary philosophical advocate of religious pluralism, through an historically informed hermeneutic of suspicion, this paper argues that orientalist-derived understandings of religion continue to play a significant (though often unacknowledged) role within the philosophy of religion today. Though couched in the language of pluralism, Hick’s later work in the philosophy of religion functions apologetically to maintain a version of the religious–secular distinction that, while theologically and politically loaded, is, I show, philosophically arbitrary. Moving the philosophy of religion beyond Eurocentrism, I argue, will require freeing it from the logic of the modern understanding of religion.
KW - Cultural history of the study of religion
KW - John Hick
KW - Orientalism
KW - Philosophy of religion
KW - Secular
KW - Secularization
KW - World religions
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U2 - 10.1007/s11841-013-0394-9
DO - 10.1007/s11841-013-0394-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84893644425
SN - 0038-1527
VL - 53
SP - 479
EP - 496
JO - Sophia
JF - Sophia
IS - 4
ER -