scholarly journals Religious Diversity: A Philosophical Defense of Religious Inclusivism

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
Bernd Irlenborn
Keyword(s):  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Religious Plurality ◽  
The Face ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Catholic Tradition

Faced by the challenge of religious plurality, most philosophers of religion view pluralism and exclusivism as the most accepted and fully developed positions. The third alternative, the model of inclusivism, held especially within the catholic tradition, has not received adequate attention in the debates in philosophy of religion, perhaps as it is based solely on theological grounds. In this essay I offer a philosophical defense of the position of religious inclusivism and give reasons why this position represents the most appropriate position in the face of conflicting religious truth claims. 

scholarly journals Redefining Religious Truth as a Challenge for Philosophy of Religion

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 139-159
Author(s):  
Peter Jonkers
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Ways Of Life ◽  
The Way

One of the most important features of contemporary Western societies is the rise of (religious) pluralism. Whereas (philosophical) theism used to serve as a common ground to discuss the truth-claims of religion, this approach seems to have lost much of its plausibility. What I want to argue in this article is that philosophy of religion as a critical intellectual activity still cannot do without the notion of religious truth, but also that it needs to redefine this truth in an existential way, i.e. by interpreting religions as concrete ways of life. In this paper I develop this idea of religious truth by interpreting religions as traditions of wisdom, being a kind of truth that is able to orientate humans’ lives without being swayed by the issues of the day. In order to substantiate my interpretation I discuss three fundamental aspects of wisdom, viz. the fact that it rests on a broadened idea of reason, the way in which it discovers the universal in the particular, and the insight that all life-orientations are based on a principle that is subjectively adequate, but objectively inadequate (Kant).

scholarly journals Hinduism and Universality in Religion

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-37
Author(s):  
Kusumita Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Time Variation ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Religious Plurality ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The One ◽  
The Universe

The essay first considers the terms “Hindu” and “Hinduism” with their continuing ambivalence as meaning both the ethnic or national and the “religious.” It then takes up the problem of definition and whether one may speak of a single “Hinduism.” The term “religion” and critiques of it as Western are discussed and an account of religion as worldview, ethics and practice, following Geertz and Smart, is proposed as viable and applicable to Hinduism as well as other traditions. Two senses of “universality” as empirical and normative are explained. Brereton’s general characterization of Hinduism is held up; drawing on Lorenzen, Nicholson and others it is noted that a self-conscious identity of “Hindu dharma” emerged centuries before the colonial period. The essay then turns to Swami Vivekānanda’s constructive exposition of universal dimensions of “Hinduism” in the context of modern religious plurality. He holds that the human aspiration to know God is universal, as are moral norms, and that this can be shown from the evidence but at the same time variation is an inherent pattern of the universe. Many religious truth-claims thus inevitably emerge as differing expressions of the search for the one transcendent Source of existence. These are complementary, not mutually exclusive, and an “absolute” truth is the sum total of all the variations. Moreover religion is evolving, so that revelation is open-ended and many more religions will appear. Vivekananda offers an inclusive pluralism rooted in Vedāntic ontology and the theologically normative view that religion is at its core a quest for union with one sacred ultimate reality variously apprehended.  

Humble Confessionalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Holley
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Viable Option ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Rule Out

Abstract: Much of the appeal of religious pluralism for those who take religious truth claims seriously arises from the sense that confessionalist alternatives to pluralism that affirm the truth of one particular religion are unacceptable. Pluralists try to foster this sense by portraying confessionalist views as implausible for one who is fully informed about the facts of religious diversity. However, when pluralists attempt to rule out confessionalism, they tend to characterize it in ways that overlook the possibility of what I call humble confessionalism. When humble forms of confessionalism are considered, representations of pluralism as the only viable option become less persuasive.

John Hick's philosophy of religious pluralism - A Critical Examination

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-182
Author(s):  
Janusz Salamon
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Religious Plurality ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The philosophical challenge that religious diversity poses for religious belief has become in recent years the focal point of a very engaging theological and philosophical debate. The debate began in the Christian context and it would be fair to say that its main issue remains the relationship of Christianity to other major religions. Traditionally Christian thinkers faced with the fact of religious plurality have assumed that Christianity is the only way to salvation, and the truth-claims of other religions can be refuted by way of argument. This position is described today as 'exclusivist'. John Hick's name has become synonymous with a radically different approach to the whole issue. Hick argues that all religious traditions make contact with the same Ultimate Reality ('the Real'), each encountering it through a variety of culturally shaped forms of thought and experience, but all offering equally effective paths to 'salvation/liberation'. Hick's pluralistic hypothesis, although very popular in some quarters, appears to many Christian and non-Christian thinkers as highly controversial.

Confession, the New Psychology, and Birth Control, 1920–60

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Psychological Benefits ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
The Face ◽  
Catholic Tradition

The chapter addresses challenges from empirical psychology and psychiatry that called into question some of the inherited conceptions of sin and guilt. Those relatively new sciences caused some in the Catholic tradition to oppose the psychological approaches as a threat to the confessional tradition and others to reconsider confession in the face of the emerging sciences and to emphasize the benefits of the new psychology for understanding neuroses and mental illnesses that confessors periodically encountered in the confessional. Some, too, underlined the therapeutic and psychological benefits of auricular confession that were consistent with the new sciences. The moral issue of birth control also arose for Catholics in the early 1930s when Pope Pius XI condemned the use of all artificial means of birth regulation. Anecdotal and statistical evidence seems to indicated that significant numbers of childbearing Catholics practiced birth control and a few ceased going to confession because of it.

Epistemic self-esteem of philosophers in the face of philosophical disagreement

Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-342
Author(s):  
László Bernáth ◽  
János Tőzsér
Keyword(s):  
Self Esteem ◽  
Moderate Level ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
Philosophical Beliefs ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Third ◽  
Epistemic Peers ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Performance

AbstractOur paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic self-esteem because they do not attribute substantive philosophical knowledge to themselves but still believe that they have epistemic right to defend substantive philosophical beliefs. In the fourth section, we analyse the attitude of philosophers who have a low level of epistemic self-esteem in relation to substantive philosophical beliefs and make no attempt to defend those beliefs. We argue that when faced with philosophical disagreement philosophers either have to deny that the dissenting philosophers are their epistemic peers or have to admit that doing philosophy is less meaningful than it seemed before. In this second case, philosophical activity and performance should not contribute to the philosophers’ overall epistemic self-esteem to any significant extent.

scholarly journals ‘That’s What Art Does’: Disclosing Religious and Ethical Possibilities Through Film

Sophia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikel Burley
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Religious Ethics ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Dead Man

AbstractThe significance of narrative artworks as resources for, and possibly as instances of, philosophical thinking has increasingly been recognized over recent decades. Utilization of such resources in philosophy of religion has, however, been limited. Focusing on film in particular, this article develops an account of film’s importance for a ‘contemplative’ approach to philosophizing about religious ethics, an approach that prioritizes the elucidation of possibilities of sense over the evaluation of ‘truth claims’. Taking Dead Man Walking as a case in point, the article shows how this film facilitates an enhanced comprehension of specific concepts, most notably the concepts of faith, truth and love, as they feature within a characteristically Christian form of life.

Neanderthal and the fossilization of the Third World

2020 ◽  
pp. 030631272098346
Author(s):  
Ryan Higgitt1
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Third World ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Investment Bankers ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Third World

Neanderthal is the quintessential scientific Other. In the late nineteenth century gentlemen-scientists, including business magnates, investment bankers and lawmakers with interest in questions of human and human societal development, framed Europe’s Neanderthal and South Asia’s indigenous Negritos as close evolutionary kin. Simultaneously, they explained Neanderthal’s extinction as the consequence of an inherent backwardness in the face of fair-skinned, steadily-progressing newcomers to ancient Europe who behaved in ways associated with capitalism. This racialization and economization of Neanderthal helped bring meaning and actual legal reality to Negritos via the British Raj’s official ‘schedules of backward castes and tribes’. It also helped justify the Raj’s initiation of market-oriented reforms in order to break a developmental equilibrium deemed created when fair-skinned newcomers to ancient South Asia enslaved Negritos in an enduring caste system. Neanderthal was integral to the scientism behind the British construction of caste, and contributed to India’s becoming a principal ‘Third World’ target of Western structural adjustment policies as continuation of South Asia’s ‘evolution assistance’.

“The Greatest Thrill I Get is When I Hear a Criminal Say, ‘Yes, I Did it’”: Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans, 1920–1945

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Adler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
A Cell ◽  
Short Time

On May 11, 1938, two New Orleans policemen entered the Astoria Restaurant, marched to the kitchen, and approached Loyd D. T. Washington, a 41-year-old African American cook. They informed Washington that they would be taking him to the First Precinct station for questioning, although they assured the cook that he need not change his clothes and “should be right back” to the “Negro restaurant,” where he had worked for 3 years. Immediately after arriving at the station house, police officers “surrounded” Washington, showed him a photograph of a man, and announced that he had killed a white man in Yazoo City, Mississippi, 20 years earlier. When Washington insisted that he did not know the man in the photograph, that he had never been to (or even heard of) Yazoo City, and that he had been in the army at the time of the murder, the law enforcers confined him in a cell, although they had no warrant for his arrest and did not charge him with any crime. The following day, a detective brought him to the “show-up room” in the precinct house, where he continued the interrogation and, according to Washington, “tried to make me sign papers stating that I had killed a white man” in Mississippi. As every African American New Orleanian knew, the show-up (or line-up) room was the setting where detectives tortured suspects and extracted confessions. “You know you killed him, Nigger,” the detective roared. Washington, however, refused to confess, and the detective began punching him in the face, knocking out five of his teeth. After Washington crumbled to the floor, the detective repeatedly kicked him and broke one of his ribs. The beating continued for an hour, until other policemen restrained the detective, saying “give him a chance to confess and if he doesn't you may start again.” But Washington did not confess, and the violent interrogation began anew. A short time later, another police officer interrupted the detective, telling him “do not kill this man in here, after all he is wanted in Yazoo City.” Bloodied and writhing in pain, Washington asked to contact his family, but the request was ignored. Because he had not been formally charged with a crime, New Orleans law enforcers believed that Washington had no constitutional protection again self-incrimination or coercive interrogation and no right to an arraignment or bail, and they had no obligation to contact his relatives or to provide medical care for him.

How rational is rational theology? A reply to Mikael Stenmark

1999 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-97
Author(s):  
VINCENT BRÜMMER
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Rational Theology ◽  
Truth Claims

In this response to Stenmark's critique of my views on rational theology, I concentrate on his distinction between the epistemic and the practical goals of religion and between descriptive and normative rational theology. With regard to the first distinction, I grant that truth claims play an essential role in religious belief and that it is indeed the task of philosophy of religion to decide on the meaning and rationality of such claims. I argue, however, that since such claims are internally related to the practical context of religious belief, their meaning and rationality cannot be determined apart from this context as is done in the kind of rational theology which Stenmark calls ‘scientific’. With regard to the second distinction, I reject Stenmark's view that philosophy of religion has a descriptive task with reference to religion, and hence also his claim that I have put forward a false description of ‘the religious language game’.

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