Gary Colwell is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Condordia University of Edmonton. We invited him to answer the question “Is there a future for the philosophy of religion?” as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Thesis: As long as there is a future with a sufficient number of humans philosophy of religion will have a future.
(For, if there is no future, nothing has a future; and if there are no humans, no human endeavour has a future; and if there is not a sufficient number of humans philosophy of religion may not be one of the human endeavours.)

Definition PR: Philosophy of Religion is philosophical thinking about a religion.
(Briefly, it’s questioning the foundations of religious belief; i.e., deep questioning involving analysis and synthesis. PR is here taken to refer to a human cognitive activity, one not limited to the requirements of an academic course titled “Philosophy of Religion.”) Continue reading →

Nathan Eric Dickman (PhD, The University of Iowa) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of the Ozarks. He researches in hermeneutic phenomenology, philosophy of language, and comparative questions in philosophies of religions, with particular concerns about global social justice issues in ethics and religions. He has taught a breadth of courses, from Critical Thinking to Zen, and Existentialism to Greek & Arabic philosophy. His book titled Using Questions to Think (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the roles questions play in critical thinking and reasoning, his book titled Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Priority of Questions in Religions (Bloomsbury, 2022) examines the roles questions play in religious discourse, and his book titled Interpretation: A Critical Primer (Equinox, 2023) examines the role of questions in the interpretation of texts. We invited him to answer the question “Is there a future for the philosophy of religion?” as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Sometimes critics are accomplices. Many critics misrecognize that we contribute to the very creation of the object about which we have objections! This is the case with many recent challenges to what has passed for “the philosophy of religion” over the last forty years or so. That is, critiques posed by scholars in the last twenty years create and bolster, rather than re-envision or expand, so-called “the” philosophy of religion. Consider, for example, the call for contributions to this discussion. As DuJardin writes, “The business of evaluating religious truth claims and beliefs, once our meat and potatoes, is now thought to be fraught with bias and ideology…” When was this “once”? I think the primary impetus was Plantinga’s faith-based epistemological rhetoric influential in the 1980s and through the 1990s (Schilbrack 2014, p. 200). However, before that—and happening concurrently throughout the last four decades—many philosophers have examined religions and developed religious philosophies in hermeneutic, feminist, and other terms. What of Ricoeur’s approach to the symbolism of evil, for example (1969)? Or, Irigaray’s philosophies of divine women (1993) and Pamela Sue Anderson’s feminist philosophy of religion (1998)? Or, Nasr’s perennialist approach to comparative religions (2006)? Or, Nishitani’s philosophical developments of shunyata (1983)? Or, Tillich’s analysis of the truth of religious language (1957)? I could go on, but I highlight these as some among many philosophies of religions that are rarely mentioned within institutionalized philosophy of religion or even by recent critics of it. Continue reading →

Robert C. Roberts is Professor Emeritus at Baylor University. We invited him to answer the question “Is there a future for the philosophy of religion?” as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

I am not a professional philosopher of religion, and am not up to date in my reading in the field. I am writing in response to an invitation from the editors, who apparently think some remarks will be of interest to the blog’s readers. Many of the questions the editors posed as topics of a possible blog post are ones I am unqualified to address.

I am not a philosopher of religion, but I am a Christian, am a philosopher of sorts, and write about Christian topics, especially topics in Christian ethics and moral psychology. I taught philosophy in philosophy departments from 1973 to 2015. I’ll take this opportunity to describe for you what I do by way of applying philosophy to the religion that I know something about. Continue reading →