‘Religion' as a Philosophical Problem: Historical and Conceptual Dilemmas in Contemporary Pluralistic Philosophy of Religion
Amesbury, Richard
In: Sophia, 2014, vol. 53, no. 4, p. 479-496
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- In the late nineteenth century, European philosophical theologians concerned about the perceived threat of secularity played a crucial role in the construction of the category of ‘religion,' conceived as a transcultural universal, the genus of which the so-called ‘world religions' are species. By reading the work of the late John Hick (1922-2012), the most influential contemporary philosophical advocate of religious pluralism, through an historically informed hermeneutic of suspicion, this paper argues that orientalist-derived understandings of religion continue to play a significant (though often unacknowledged) role within the philosophy of religion today. Though couched in the language of pluralism, Hick's later work in the philosophy of religion functions apologetically to maintain a version of the religious-secular distinction that, while theologically and politically loaded, is, I show, philosophically arbitrary. Moving the philosophy of religion beyond Eurocentrism, I argue, will require freeing it from the logic of the modern understanding of religion.