Bryan Rennie is Professor of Religion at Westminster College. We invited him to answer the question “What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Many norms and values have potential to define excellent philosophy of religion. A great deal depends on the priorities of the particular scholar. For me, one of the foremost, and one of the most often overlooked, is simplicity. The description and analysis of as-yet ill-defined behaviors such as the religious all too easily becomes baroquely complex. More than just avoiding the unnecessary multiplication of theoretical entities good philosophizing should begin from simple and secure foundations. In this instance, the simple approach is first to establish the norms and values of good philosophy before complicating the issue by the application of that philosophy to a complex and contentious class like religion.

It is common knowledge that philosophy as we know it originated with the pre-Socratics in Ionian Greece and found exemplary form with Socrates in Periclean Athens. That form relies on sound argumentation. Socrates’ insight may be difficult for us to appreciate in hindsight. The Socratic elenchus leads to what must have been, in the fifth century B.C.E., dramatically counter-intuitive: knowledge of the truth does not come from people of wisdom and power. It does not come from the gods or from oracles. Instead, it comes from words, properly arranged in sound arguments. This must have seemed like sheerest magic, which accounts for the tragically fatal suspicion in which Socrates was held and the accusation of “making the weaker argument stronger” (Plato, Apology 19b). What he demonstrated was both that when even true premises are wrongly related, conclusions apparently drawn from them may be false, but also, alternatively, that when true premises are arranged in valid relations they entail a necessarily true conclusion. Thus, while words alone can lead to false claims, they can, in the right circumstances, yield genuine new knowledge. Surely, words alone—it must have seemed—can be relied upon to show nothing more than the creative skill of the speaker. Surely, while observation can reveal knowledge concerning empirical objects, knowledge of unobservables must come from some other source; from the sage, the oracle, the gods, or authoritative texts recording pre-existing gnosis. Not so, says Socrates. Knowledge of unobservables can be derived from properly arranged linguistic representations—no matter their source.

This is the defining feature of philosophy as a discipline. As Bertrand Russell said, “Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge” (Problems of Philosophy, 154). It does not, however, do so by means of empirical observation, but seeks to uncover truths implicate in expressions of extant knowledge. Then, “as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science” (ibid.).

Socrates’ insight was formalized in Aristotelian logic, lost and found by the European academies, and led, infamously, to the various abuses of Mediaeval Theology. As the British historian of science, James Hannam says of the 14th century, “Students had logical constructions called syllogisms hammered into them until they could repeat them by heart” (The Genesis of Science, 151). So confident did European scholars become of syllogistic logic that they forgot its greatest stricture: in order to work, its premises must be true. Sensitivity to the form of valid argumentation cannot replace rigor in ascertaining the truth of all premises therein employed, truth ascertained by either empirical observation or by prior argumentation. The genealogies of almost all truths contain elements of both.

Where do these observations take us in philosophy of religion? First, we must recognize that any scholar attempting to reach conclusions based on anything other than direct observation and concerning anything other than observable data is doing philosophy. (That is one good reason is why most people who have a terminal degree in almost any discipline have a Philosophiae Doctoralis.) Anyone who makes claims about the origin or nature of religion is doing philosophy of religion since religion is not an observable entity but a taxonomic classification by which empirical observations can be organized. Since such scholars are doing philosophy of religion (whether they admit it or not) then it behooves them to do it right. This involves ensuring the truth of claims assumed as the premises.

Thereafter it is equally important that arguments constructed from corroborated truths are valid: Do our premises really entail our conclusions? Do we commit fallacies of reasoning such as irrelevant premises, perhaps invoking extensive knowledge of the evidence as itself support for the truth of conclusions? Charles Sanders Peirce in his 1877 essay “The Fixation of Belief” (Popular Science Monthly: 1-15, widely available online) with characteristic pragmatism uses the expression, “the fixation of belief,” to refer to the assertion of any claim. Such “fixation” may be permanent or it may be short-lived, but when we posit a conclusion with sincerity our doubts are satisfied and our belief fixed. Peirce describes four methods for the fixation of belief: tenacity, the a priori, authority, and the scientific method. Only the last is reliable, the first three being untrustworthy, leading to only temporary fixation of belief because they lack “any distinction of a right and a wrong way.” Peirce does not detail what “the scientific method” is, although he does say that “each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.” Most importantly, he tells us what the “scientific” method is not. It does not propose conclusions based on resolve, on personal taste, or on the authority of their source. These are all fallacies of relevance, symptomatic of which is the strategy of beginning research with a single hypothesis and inspecting the data to see what can be used to corroborate that hypothesis. Instead the greatest possible spread of data must be admitted, and alternative hypotheses entertained so as to ascertain which of them is best corroborated by the greatest number of well-reasoned arguments.

Excellent philosophy of religion, then, requires the rigorous corroboration of assumed premises, that is, extensive and reliable knowledge of the history of religions. It requires a knowledge of logic, understood as the methods and principles distinguishing correct from incorrect argumentation. It requires scrupulous avoidance of fallacious reasoning, especially the retention of conclusions that have not been reached by sound argumentation but are held because of unwillingness to change or ignorance of viable alternatives, because of personal predilection, or because of deference to authority (one’s own or someone else’s). These fallacies have been prevalent in the philosophy of religion before now to the extent that the discipline became de facto theology (even “philosophical” theology). It is crucial, not only that we address that failure, but also that we avoid such fallacious reasoning in the general history of religion, which is in no wise immune from it because of its avowed secularity.

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. We invited him to answer the question “What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Identifying Criteria of “Excellence” for a Philosophy of Religion of the Future

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – and now we near the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century – the question of what constitutes “excellence” in the philosophy of religion has always been intertwined with the fashions and protocols that rise and fall episodically in the enterprise of philosophy itself. Different approaches to what historically has been called “philosophy” routinely dictate cognate strategies for positioning how we do philosophy. At the same time, each of these approaches conditions what precisely we mean by “philosophy of religion.”

The term “philosophy of religion” itself is a product of the nineteenth century. Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion was the first to give it currency. Prior to Hegel, and for much of the modern period itself, the question of the “religious” was inextricably intertwined with theological issues pertinent to philosophy itself. From Descartes’ efforts in the Meditations to justify the certitude of the cogito through an appeal to the goodness of God to Kant’s quest for a “religion within the limits of reason alone”, the sorts of matters that preoccupied pre-Hegelian philosophy might be better characterized as concerns for a philosophical theology rather than what later came to be known as “philosophy of religion”. Of course, we still continue to ply these concerns (for example, the classical arguments for the existence of God) under the rubric of contemporary philosophy of religion.

Hegel, however, was the first to posit “religion” in the generic sense as a distinctive topic area for philosophical reflection. As one can easily deduce from his Lectures, he would not have had the appropriate context to frame the problem of religion in the manner he accomplished apart from the beginnings of what later would be called the “history of religions” movement in German Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As knowledge among Western scholars concerning the varieties, gradations, and intricacies of human religiosity increased exponentially later in the century, in no small part due to European colonial expansion and the rise of anthropology as a distinctive field of inquiry, the question of religion became less one of an epistemological evaluation of doctrine and belief and increasingly an effort to develop a methodology for making sense out of what religious adherents write and say as well as how they behave on a day-to-day basis. What figures such as Rudolf Otto, Willliam Brede Kristiansen, and Gerardus van der Leeuw characterized as a “phenomenology” of religion took its place alongside more traditional examinations of what were essentially theistic claims about God, the world, and the presumed supernatural order of things.

By the mid-twentieth century the hegemony and prestige of the natural sciences fostered a preoccupation with the degree to which religious convictions and concerns could be warranted by the fundamental canons of scientific rationality. The fashions in Anglo-American philosophy known as “logical positivism” and “linguistic analysis” (the latter deriving largely from the jottings and lectures of the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) turned the philosophy of religion for a season into an exercise in either repudiating religious language as “nonsensical” or trying to making it into something other than what it really was. The impact of French post-structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, especially with the celebrity status of Jacques Derrida across the spectrum of the humanities, together with new translations of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, precipitated the so-called “Continental turn” in philosophy of religion, which unsurprisingly gave birth to its own “theological turn” toward the end of the millennium.

The basic point is that trends in philosophy as a whole invariably set the standard for the criteria we employ to chart key agendas for the philosophy of religion specifically. Thus in order to bring the theme of this discussion – namely, what “norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion” – we have to ask ourselves what comparable measures or models shape what might be called “excellent philosophy” overall? In many respects philosophy itself, particularly in the Anglophone world, is more in doubt about itself than ever before. Growing social and political pressures and critiques from other disciplines and constituencies have rendered it impossible for philosophy to continue to couch its issues and go about attempting to resolve them in the somewhat self-congratulatory and insular manner that typified the field through much of the last century.

Burgeoning investigative terrains in cognitive and neuropsychology, for instance, have compelled researchers in the “philosophy of mind” – the discipline’s perennial and staple subspecialty – to ask entirely new questions than they have been accustomed to. Postcolonial literature, gender studies, ethnic studies, and such relatively fledgling subject interests as critical race theory have forced philosophy, even if extremely reluctantly, to reflect on, while coming to terms with, its own unacknowledged procedural biases, privileges, and epistemic blind spots in what are taken for granted as irreducible as well as inviolable norms of formalized “rationality”. The same apparatus of critical-theoretical assessment, which philosophy itself can no longer resist, applies straightaway to the philosophy of religion. The multifarious and increasingly interdisciplinary praxis that has come to be known as critical theory (far outpacing what the word signified a generation ago with its almost exclusive connotations of the output of the Frankfurt School) is perhaps the benchmark for much cutting-edge philosophy of religion today.

Figures such as Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, or Judith Butler, who would never have been considered luminaries in either philosophy, or philosophy of religion, as late as the early 1990s, are now cited almost as frequently as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. We are witnessing what might be termed the critical theoreticization of the philosophy of religion, and given the globalized and intercultural academic environment in which we are all now embedded, the swing in this direction is most likely to intensify, not abate.

Delineating “excellence” in the philosophy of religion, therefore, will mean that we have to broaden our range of vision concerning both the nature of “religion” itself and the kind of philosophy that pursues it. What Jacques Derrida identified in the early 1990s as the “return of religion” will not go away. But we are ever searching for more trenchant and complex meanings about religion as it persists in this post-secular age, and only the philosophy of religion, given its mastery of the critical machinery for wide-reaching scrutiny of diverse phenomena it developed two and a half millennia ago to be joined to the human sciences in their empirical sophistication, can really do the job.

We may be closer to what Nietzsche once called the “philosophy of the future” than we care to acknowledge. Similarly, we may also now be right on the cusp of a philosophy of religion of the future, which are just now scrambling to imagine.

Elizabeth Burns is Reader in Philosophy of Religion and Programme Director, University of London. We invited her to answer the question “What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion?” as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Those who teach philosophy of religion, at least in the United Kingdom, are usually required by their institutions to list the aims and learning outcomes for their courses or modules. While some might be tempted to regard this task as an exercise in pointless bureaucracy, perhaps we should, instead, see it as an important first step of any attempt to study philosophy of religion – whether this is an institutional programme or our own personal reading plan. It is, I would suggest, only when we have a clear idea of what we are trying to achieve and how we will know that we have achieved it that we will be in a position to judge what norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion.

So, what are we aiming to achieve when we study philosophy of religion? And in what respects will it make us different? Religion is an internationally important phenomenon; according to the Pew Research Center (2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/05/christians-remain-worlds-largest-religious-group-but-they-are-declining-in-europe/), in 2015, 6.2 billion of a world population of 7.3 billion had some kind of religious affiliation. Since, for many of these people, religion is a primary source of personal, social and, perhaps, political values, it is important that as many people as possible have an opportunity to consider whether religious beliefs are rational, or what a rational form of religious belief might look like, and the practical implications – both positive and negative – of religious beliefs. So, important aims of philosophy of religion might be:

i. To facilitate understanding and analysis of our own beliefs about religion and those of others;

ii. To promote beliefs about religion which are both rational and enable the flourishing of sentient beings.

The outcomes of our learning – although, admittedly, difficult to measure – might be assessed by examining the extent to which it leads to the changing or modification of beliefs which contribute to social cohesion and the transformation of individuals and communities.

So what methods should we use in order to achieve our aims and learning outcomes? Broadly speaking, analytic-style philosophy of religion prizes structure, clarity and precision, and proceeds towards its conclusions by means of analysis of step-wise arguments, while continental-style philosophy of religion focuses on ways in which we might change our thinking in order to transform the lives of individuals and communities, despite the inescapable difficulties of human existence.

At least some analytic philosophy of religion seems to lose sight of the aims and intended outcomes of writing and reading a text, however, and gets lost in the complexity and obscurity of arguments, sometimes translated into the symbols of symbolic logic which can be understood only by those with relevant training. The conclusions reached may seem trivial and/or uncertain; perhaps there is a form of the design argument which supports some kind of religious belief, for example, but even this would seem to fall far short of the level of significance and certainty on which someone might base their life and address the difficulties which they will inevitably encounter. Even the degree of precision afforded by the use of symbolic logic leads only to a conclusion which is dependent upon the nature of the values which are given to the symbols before the argument begins.

Those writing continental-style philosophy of religion often have a clearer focus on the practical relevance of their texts, but their relative lack of structure, clarity and precision, and sometimes the sheer length and complexity of their publications, make it hard for any but the most intellectually able and determined readers to identify the ‘message’ which they aim to convey. Sometimes, of course, part of the ‘message’ conveyed by the method is that the matters under discussion are complex and ambiguous and therefore difficult to communicate succinctly, but the reader’s task of discernment and evaluation remains challenging – perhaps too challenging for many who might otherwise have much to gain.

Complexity and obscurity in philosophical writing might sometimes be difficult to avoid in the initial stages of exploring a new philosophical position, as we struggle towards new solutions to complex problems, perhaps trying to say what has never before been said. But structured, clear and precise arguments of the kind valued by analytic-style philosophy of religion can help us to rule out positions which are unlikely to be true, and to maintain or adopt as the basis for our lives beliefs which are more likely to be true.

Part of the way in which we identify positions which should be rejected and choose those on which to base our lives is likely to involve an appeal to their practical implications, however. These are the reasons for belief which we commonly find in continental-style philosophy of religion and are often derived from the findings of other related disciplines such as ethics, psychology, sociology, politics, literature and other forms of art.

Perhaps our best hope of achieving the aims and learning outcomes of philosophy of religion, then, lies in embracing a hybrid-style philosophy of religion such as that proposed by John Cottingham in Philosophy of Religion: Towards a Humane Philosophy of Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), which preserves the positive aspects of analytic-style philosophy of religion but argues that our conclusions about religious belief should also be informed by ‘all the resources of human experience that are relevant to the shaping of a philosophically-rounded worldview’ (176).

In conclusion, then, if the primary aims of philosophy of religion are to enable us to consider the rationality of religious beliefs and their practical implications so that individuals and societies might be transformed for the better, excellent philosophy of religion needs to have the following features:

i. A discernible structure;

ii. Clarity, avoiding uncommon language and technical terms where possible;

iii. Precision;

iv. Brevity, avoiding any unnecessary repetition;

v. Supporting evidence from other relevant disciplines, where applicable.

Philosophy of religion texts which have these features are likely to be accessible not only to professors and some of their students, but also to a much broader human constituency, thereby substantially increasing the beneficial impact of their ideas upon the wellbeing of humankind and other sentient beings.