What is Xenosophia? Philosophical Contributions to Prejudice Research
This chapter explicates the concept of xenosophia, detailing its philosophical roots and its psychological profile as opposite to xenophobia and prejudice. The Bielefeld Study on Xenosophia and Religion in Germany is based conceptually and empirically on a model which opens the perspective beyond the focus on the "pathogenic" outcomes such as xenophobia, Islamophobia and other inter-religious and inter-cultural prejudice. Instead, our research design has in-cluded attention also to the "salutogenic" predictors and outcomes. With reference to philosophical-phenomenological reflection about alienness/strangeness, this chapter explicates the concept of xenosophia as the wisdom that might emerge from the encounter with the alien/the strange. The chapter concludes with an outlook on our operationalization of xenosophia for psychology of religion research.