Recommended Reading in Philosophy of Religion?
Posted on October 27, 2009 at 7:54 pm by Dr. Jim
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Previous entry: Dr Jim’s Kittehs on I Can Haz Cheezburger!
Next entry: Best Book of Samuel Cartoon EVER! Far Left Side Rules!
October 27, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Mircea Eliade ‘the sacred and the profane’, Rudolph Otto ‘the idea of the holy’
October 28, 2009 at 5:39 am
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
by Pascal Boyer
Good philosophy needs to be up on current science.
Boyer’s work offers data that could be used to test any contrived Philosophy of Religion. Theories need data to test.
Wow — “Eliade” — it has been 30 years since I read that chap — he was great help back then.
October 28, 2009 at 5:58 am
Check out this cartoon — it made me smile — concerning philosophy of religion and evolution. God guided me to it right after I wrote the post above.
Wow, God is so cool !
October 28, 2009 at 6:59 am
I was going to mention Eliade but he never really struck me as a philosopher. I really like his ideas although they don’t work as well as he thinks. I’m also unsure about the whole irreducibility of religion, though.
October 28, 2009 at 8:14 am
I ditto the Hume and would add Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals or Beyond Good and Evil. I would veto Eliade and Otto. Eliade is not a philosopher and both Eliade and Otto were finally fully debunked in the 1990s. If they are interested in sociological or anthropological explanations of what’s really going on with religion claims (as opposed to philosophical evaluations of the truth or falsehood of religious claims) then I suggest David Kertzer’s Ritual, Politics, & Power and Bruce Lincoln’s Discourse and the Construction of Society, as well as his follow up, Authority: Construction and Corrosion. Wayne Proudfoot’s critique of religious experience in his book Religious Experience deserves a nod as well.
October 28, 2009 at 9:14 am
no he’s not really but I enjoyed him (and Otto) as interesting light relief from the heavy boring philosophy of philosophers pure proper. Like I enjoyed William James, Jung and Freud. I’m not very good at keeping my focus.
October 28, 2009 at 9:25 am
Light relief is good! I too have difficulty with focus—I tend to read deeply into something for a year and then abandon it for something else. I just finished with my Pierre Bourdieu phase.
October 28, 2009 at 10:48 am
Not exactly philosophy, but if you’re looking for free thinking I’d recommend George Dyson’s Darwin Among the Machines (Perseus, 1997). This is a wonderful book, but it has to be approached with an open mind! For the anthropologically inclined, Stewart Guthrie’s Faces in the Clouds (Oxford, 1993) is good.
October 28, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Oooh, I remembered another one: Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul is a very good and accessible introduction to why we don’t need Christian concepts like soul or free will to have ethics.
October 28, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Hmm. About the cartoon. Didn’t Hume basically say there would never be enough evidence or spectacular enough evidence to make the thesis of God believable? So if the stars did rearrange, wouldn’t the skeptic find some reason for it not to be proof because the alternate is still more plausible than God?
I confess, all I know about Hume I learned from theists.
October 28, 2009 at 3:39 pm
You probably know Hume better that I. Its been ages since I read it. I suppose that if the stars did rearrange some skeptics would just say that that was too obvious, and a real god would be more subtle…
October 28, 2009 at 3:47 pm
My humorous take on it was the poor skeptic forced to choose between God actually existing or the entire world being nuts seeing the heavenly message. Like the old Jack Benny “Your money or your life” routine, only this time the question is “God or an insane populace” Same answer: “I’m thinking about it.”
We all have commitments we really don’t want to let go.
October 28, 2009 at 9:47 pm
You could try JW Gericke’s ‘Appendix A’ to his University of Pretoria PhD dissertation:
http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-03192004-135203/unrestricted/11appendices.pdf
It is entitled, ‘Autobiography of a “Died-Again” Christian’. And it is remarkable.
November 1, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Lots of good stuff above. I agree about Otto and Eliade. They’re theologians in disguise, I think.
I’m reading Zimmerman‘s Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment in a class next semester. I really enjoyed its content but also its style (lots of interviews with real people).
November 1, 2009 at 7:20 pm
I’ve always been kind of partial to Eliade, despite his crypto-theology. I never bought the whole Religion as sui generis thing, but darn if one can’t find the “Myth of the Eternal Return” at least partially working in myths&rituals around the world. Never works perfectly and often doesn’t work at all, but there was something to it.
Otto I never could stand. I don’t see why people keep putting him on required reading lists. There was some guy named Park from Claremont who did his PhD on Amos, and used Otto to claim that real prophetic experiences were beyond judgment by outsiders so academics have to take Amos’s claims in his book at face value. Ok, he was badly misreading Otto, but I don’t think Otto would have minded in that case…
November 1, 2009 at 8:22 pm
coz Jung liked him and with no Otto there might be no numinous
November 1, 2009 at 8:28 pm
no numinous is good numinous
November 1, 2009 at 8:43 pm
no, numinous is good, nya di ya ha!
November 4, 2009 at 1:04 pm
A History of God
by Karen Armstrong
The Great Code
by Northrop Fry
November 4, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Russell McCutcheon wrote a brilliant review of Armstrong’s book in Critics Not Caretakers—the essay is called “Writing a History of God: ‘Just the Same Wherever You Go.’”