Nathan Eric Dickman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of the Ozarks. 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 →