The End of Philosophy of Religion?

Knepper, Timothy D.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lft072

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…While attention to what Knepper (2013Knepper ( , 2014, following John Clayton (2006, pp. 5-6), terms "religious reason-giving" is and should be of interest and importance to philosophers of religion, there is no clear rationale for delimiting the use of thick description to the exposition and analysis of this area of religious life.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There has, in recent years, been considerable attention devoted in metaethics to "thick concepts," and it has occasionally been noted that this latter term, originated by Bernard Williams (1985), was probably influenced by Ryle's notion of thick description (Kirchin 2013, p. 60;Väyrynen 2013, p. 1); but discussions directly about thick description are few and far between in the philosophical literature. Among the exceptions to this is recent work by Knepper (2013Knepper ( , 2014, who has called for thick description to be undertaken specifically by philosophers of religion.…”

Section: Varieties Of Thick Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A term that has gained prominence in these more empirically oriented disciplines since the 1970s is "thick description," which many scholars, following Clifford Geertz (1973), have adopted to characterize forms of description that endeavour to go beyond the mere surface of a given event or situation or state of affairs-to show the various layers of meaning or significance that constitute its place within the broader context of human lives. The term "thick description" in fact has its origins in philosophy, having first been coined in a pair of essays by Gilbert Ryle (1968aRyle ( , 2009Ryle ( [1968b), and hence recent suggestions that philosophers of religion would do well to deploy thick description themselves (Knepper 2013(Knepper , 2014Burley 2015, p. 236) are not calls simply to help oneself to methodological resources from empirical disciplines: they are in a sense also calls for philosophers to revive and develop philosophical methods that have lain largely dormant for several decades.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Thickening description: towards an expanded conception of philosophy of religion

Burley

2016

Int J Philos Relig

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An increasingly common complaint about philosophy of religionespecially, though not exclusively, as it is pursued in the "analytic tradition"-is that its preoccupation with questions of rationality and justification in relation to "theism" has deflected attention from the diversity of forms that religious life takes. Among measures proposed for ameliorating this condition has been the deployment of "thick description" that facilitates more richly contextualized understandings of religious phenomena. Endorsing and elaborating this proposal, I provide an overview of different but related notions of thick description before turning to two specific examples, which illustrate the potential for engagement with ethnography to contribute to an expanded conception of philosophy of religion.Keywords Thick description · Expanding philosophy of religion · Radical pluralism · Ethnography · Interdisciplinarity · Animal sacrifice · Buddhism[I]f one wants to philosophize about religion, then one needs to understand religion in all its messy cultural-historical diversity. Insofar as one considers only a limited set of traditions or reasons, one's philosophy of religion is limited. (Knepper 2013, p. 76) What's ragged should be left ragged. (Wittgenstein 1998, p. 51) A common and thoroughly understandable complaint about much contemporary philosophy of religion is that its scope remains abysmally restricted. While purporting to investigate religion in general, most of what goes by the name of philosophy of religion continues to be preoccupied with a narrow range of questions

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Varieties Of Thick Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Thickening description: towards an expanded conception of philosophy of religion

Burley

2016

Int J Philos Relig

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“…The cottage industry of envisioning some sort of future for the philosophy of religion has almost uniformly and arbitrarily constrained its imagination to the locus of disciplinary reconfiguration and stylistics (Goodchild, 2002;Trakakis, 2008Trakakis, , 2013Crisp and Rea, 2009;Smith and Whistler, 2010;Wildman, 2010;Hewitt, 2012;Rennie, 2012a, b;Schilbrack, 2012Schilbrack, , 2014aStrenski, 2012a, b;Knepper, 2013Knepper, , 2014Crockett, Putt and Robbins, 2014;Irvine, 2014;McLachlan, 2014;Simmons, 2014;Lewis, 2015;Onishi, 2017;Draper and Schellenberg, 2018;Kanaris, 2018). This imaginative constraint reflects these projects being caught in the ongoing tug of war among anti-disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and postdisciplinarity, which may have value in its own right for the humanities broadly (Menand, 2010, chaps 2.5-6), but could easily lead to ruin for philosophy of religion due to its departmental dislocation.…”

Section: Whither Philosophy Of Religion?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional dimensions of the future of philosophy of religion

Whitney

2018

Palgrave Commun

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If there is going to be a future for the philosophy of religion, it is going to have to emerge out of and speak into a set of contested disciplinary, institutional, and ideological spaces as their boundaries are in the process of being renegotiated. In the first instance, philosophy of religion has traditionally been located somewhere among the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and religion, but each of these fields is undergoing transformation to which philosophy of religion must respond. At the same time, accreditation standards are requiring humanities disciplines to shift their pedagogical practices even as the commodification of higher education culturally and institutionally calls into question the value of humanistic formation. This paper outlines the points of tension that put pressure on philosophy of religion and suggests ways in which the subdiscipline might understand and locate itself at the heart of liberal and general education in the future.

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“…6). For discussion of this notion in relation to philosophy of religion, see Burley (forthcoming b) andKnepper (2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

“Mountains of Flesh and Seas of Blood”: Reflecting Philosophically on Animal Sacrifice through Dramatic Fiction

Burley¹

2017

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

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Despite recent moves among philosophers of religion to avoid undue abstraction by giving closer attention to religion's practical dimensions, such moves commonly remain limited to a relatively narrow range of religious traditions. What D. Z. Phillips has termed the "radical plurality" of religious and nonreligious forms of life, comprising morally troubling as well as edifying varieties, thus continues to be neglected. This article promotes an expanded approach to philosophy of religion with regard to both methodology and scope. Methodologically, it explores the potential of narrative works, and of dramatic fiction in particular, not only to constitute resources for philosophical reflection but also to actively philosophize themselves. To this end, two plays, by Rabindranath Tagore and Girish Karnad respectively, are discussed. With regard to subject matter, the article examines the complex phenomenon of animal sacrifice, and opposition to it, in South Asian contexts.

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The End of Philosophy of Religion?

Cited by 7 publications

References 14 publications

Thickening description: towards an expanded conception of philosophy of religion

Thickening description: towards an expanded conception of philosophy of religion

Institutional dimensions of the future of philosophy of religion

“Mountains of Flesh and Seas of Blood”: Reflecting Philosophically on Animal Sacrifice through Dramatic Fiction

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