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ABSTRACT
This article considers the relationship between philosophy of religion and an approach to the study of religion, which prioritises the experience of lived religion. Considering how individuals and communities live out their faith challenges some of the assumptions of analytic philosophers of religion regarding the position the philosopher should adopt when approaching the investigation of religion. If philosophy is understood principally as a means for analysing belief, it will have little space for an engagement with what it feels like to live out one’s faith.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See for example: Beattie, ‘Redeeming Mary’; Hollywood, ‘Practice, Belief and Feminist Philosophy’; Jantzen, Becoming Divine; Phillips ‘On Not Understanding God’; Trakakis, End of Philosophy of Religion; Cottingham, How to Believe.
2. See for example: Alston, Perceiving God; Gellman, Mystical Experience of God; and Franks Davis, Evidential Force of Religious Experience.
3. Wynn, Emotion, Experience and Religious Understanding.
4. Scrutton, Thinking Through Feeling.
5. Phillips, ‘On Not Understanding God’, 166.
6. See Swinburne, Coherence of Theism, 1, for this definition of God.
7. Phillips, Faith after Foundationalism, 7.
8. See Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem’, for a critique of this kind.
9. Wiesel, Night, 34.
10. Stein, Science of the Cross, 31.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. Quinn and Taliferro, A Companion to Philosophy, 1.
13. See MacCulloch, The Reformation, for a flavour of the disputes within a faith, but also the variety of faith positions possible within one religious tradition.
14. Hollywood, ‘Practice, Belief and Feminist Philosophy’, 226.
15. Beattie, ‘Redeeming Mary’.
16. Note the concern with discipleship and what it means to follow Christ for one’s daily life in the writings of theologians: Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship; Kung, On Being a Christian; and Williams, Being Disciples.
17. Williams, Being Disciples.
18. Jantzen, Becoming Divine; and Anderson, Feminist Philosophy of Religion.
19. Kant, Beautiful and Sublime, 78.
20. Ibid.
21. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 608.
22. Ibid., 609.
23. Ibid., 613.
24. Michele Le Doeuff’s reflections on Simone de Beauvoir’s refusal to call herself a philosopher is a disturbing example of the internalisation of such thinking: see Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice; and ‘Simone de Beauvoir’.
25. See Anderson, ‘The Case for a Feminist Philosophy’.
26. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 62.
27. Cottingham, How to Believe, 143.
28. Ibid., 82.
29. Ibid.
30. For a fuller discussion of this connection, see Clack and Clack, The Philosophy of Religion, chapter 6.
31. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire.
32. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.
33. This question is as old as Western philosophy: see Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 1:5.
34. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics.
35. For key commentators on neoliberalism see Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis; Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; Standing, Precariat; Brown, Undoing the Demos; Rose, Governing the Soul; and Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason.
36. Standing, Precariat, 1.
37. Harvey, Neoliberalism, 2.
38. For a discussion of how neoliberalism shapes subjectivity, see Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism.
39. A point made most powerfully in McLuhan, Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment.
40. See Bellah, ‘Religious Evolution’; Hamilton, ‘Homo Religiosus and Historical Faith’; and Miller “‘Homo Religiosus” and the Death of God’ for discussion of the variety of ways of understanding the history of religion through this lens.
41. See for example Eliade, Sacred and the Profane.
42. Tillich, Theology of Culture.
43. Barth, No! Answer to Emil Brunner.
44. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 327.
45. For an analysis of the dangers of capitalism for the environment, as well as a challenge to conservative forms of religion, see Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion.
46. For a rehearsal of these definitions, see Clack and Clack, Philosophy of Religion, 1–7.
47. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 424.
48. Durkheim, Elementary Forms.
49. Freud, ‘Obsessive Practices’, 1919.
50. Freud, ‘Case of Obsessional Neurosis’.
51. Freud, ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’.
52. Ibid., 169.
53. Ibid.
54. We might conclude this from the connection Freud makes between religious rituals and obsessive practices in his ‘Obsessive Practices’. While this might be read as part of his critique of religion, it can also be read as suggesting something of the way in which religious practices are rooted in human attempts at connection.
55. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 204–26.
56. Ibid., 227–53.
57. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 9–10.
58. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 61.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Beverley Clack
Beverley Clack is Professor in the Philosophy of Religion at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Freud on the Couch (2013); Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, co-edited with Pamela Sue Anderson (2004); Sex and Death: A Reappraisal of Human Mortality (2002); Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition (1999); and The Philosophy of Religion, co-authored with Brian R. Clack in 1998 (a fully revised second edition of this book was published in 2008). She was recently involved in the ESRC-funded Seminar Series ‘Changing Notions of the Human Subject: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Emotional Well-being and Social Justice in Education Policy and Practice’, and is currently working on a book on Failure and Loss.