#Ultimate questions philosophy pdf how to

For instance, most of the philosophers from all the traditions deal with permanence and change, freedom and determinism, the nature of the self, the grounds of value and obligation, and the nature of reference, although they have many different ways of formulating these question. But many of their other topics have bearing on religion. Philosophy of religion is only part of their work. Nearly all of these thinkers and texts have large philosophies that deal with many topics beyond religion, including for most of them metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of education, law, and politics (to use the Western labels) and most of them are systematic in one sense or other. I have culled these lists from standard histories and anthologies of translations into English, most of which have been around for decades (Fakhry, 2004 Radhakrishnan and Moore, 1957 Chan, 1963) but they have not been part of the paideia of many of us who teach and worry about philosophy of religion. If many of these non-Western thinkers are unfamiliar to you, this bespeaks a weakness in those of us who think about philosophy of religion. Of course there are many other philosophers from these traditions who have whole philosophies that say something important about religion. Chinese philosophers who say important things about religion include Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mengzi, Zunzi, Wang Bi, Mozi, Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yung, Zhang Zi, Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yang-ming. Philosophies in the Buddhist lineages include many texts from the Pali Canon, especially the Dhammapada and the Dialogue with King Malinda, and the philosophies of Nagarjuna, Vasubandu, Asanga, and Kumarajiva on the Chinese Buddhist side are Seng-chao, Chi-tsang, Hsuan-tsang, Chih-I, Fa-tsang, Shen-hsiu,and Hui-neng. Among South Asian philosophies that say something important about religion are the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Six Orthodox Schools of Hinduism, especially Yoga and Samkhya, Vedantins such as Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva, and Kashmir Shaivites such as Abhinavagupta. Individually we might have other favorites.Д«elow I shall argue for the importance of cross-cultural comparison, and so suggest that in addition to the mentioned Western philosophers, Islamic philosophers who say something important about religion include Al-Kindi, Ibn Al-Rawandi, Al-Farabi, Ibn-Sina, Abu Hayyan Al-Tauhidi, Al-Ghazali, Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Rumi, and Ibn Rushd. Few courses would be able to include all of these, but we can dream. Those figures are familiar to English speaking philosophers of religion, especially if they have studied some American philosophy. Courses with a Western orientation would include figures such as Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus, Bonaventure, Anselm, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Dewey, Whitehead, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hartshorne, and Weiss. This is illustrated by the philosophers we discuss when teaching philosophy of religion historically. The primary meaning of philosophy of religion is philosophy that says something important about religion. The paideia for philosophy of religion dealing with the Big Questions is discussed, as is the development of an interested audience for such philosophy of religion. Even if this hypothesis about ultimates is rejected in the long run, that will only be by the presentation of a better hypothesis about ultimates. The bulk of this article proposes such a philosophy as a plausible hypothesis. The key to advocating philosophy of religion that addresses the Big Questions is showing that it is plausible and possible to have a philosophy of ultimates.

#Ultimate questions philosophy pdf how to

The threats to the future of philosophy of religion come from those forms of the discipline that talk only about how to talk about religion or that only describe religious experience without giving a critical normative account of what is experienced as ultimate. Philosophy of religion is interesting only if it can say, with good arguments, whether we get ultimate realities right when engaging them. This requires setting philosophy of religion within a larger scale of philosophy that can deal with ultimates, how they are known, and how such philosophy can defend itself against attacks against the possibility of philosophies of ultimate reality. I define religion heuristically, for the purposes of philosophy of religion, as the engagement of ultimate realities, and ultimate dimensions of experience, in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. Whether philosophy of religion can have a robust future depends on whether it can develop forms that address the Big Questions of religion.