/lit/ - Literature

Self-bump

>>13599927
I've got a couple good philosophy of religion books I can try and find when I get back.

Probably Aquinas

>>13599927
Philosophy of Religion is an entirely different thing compared to Theology.
But if you liked St. Augustine's writings then you might like Theology after all.

>>13599927
Mircea Eliade my dude

>>13601119
Looking forward to it

>>13601351
Can you suggest a good starting point?

>>13602034
Well, as I said, I'm a complete beginner so no wonder I made that mistake. What would fall under philosophy of religion, regardless of one's opinion of St Augustine?

>>13602061
Looks amazing, thanks!

Last bump before I go to sleep if any of the previous anons has anything more to say

>>13602144
Analytic Christians like Plantinga are what you're looking for.

This and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion.

>>13601351
Absolutely this, he and Classical Theism in general helped to develop my faith in God

>>13599927
>I'm about to start with St Augustine's Confessions, what should be the follow up to it?
Honestly this one. It was surprisingly well done and it isn't a tome like some others.

Anselm - Proslogion (the ontological argument)
Aquinas - Summa Theologica (the five ways)
Paley - Natural Theology (paley's watch)
(a follow up of this is the fine-tuning/cosmological argument)
Hume - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (problem of evil, among other things)
Augustine - On Free Choice of the Will (early free will theodicy)
Liebniz - Theodicy (greater-goods theodicy)
Hick - Evil and the God of Love (Irenaean/soul-making theodicy)
Plantinga - God, Freedom, and Evil (modern free will defense/theodicy)
I'm not sure if this is in a bood, but: Craig - The meta-ethical origins of morals https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/the-existence-of-god/the-indispensability-of-theological-meta-ethical-foundations-for-morality/ (modern divine law-giver argument)
Plato - Euthyphro (classic argument against divine command theory)
Pascal - Pensées (pascal's wager)
Clifford - The Ethics of Belief (ethical argument against the belief in God)
James - The Will to Believe (Argument for the rationality of Faith)

And a bunch of other stuff too, but i think for many of these you'd be just as well served reading the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy articles, so i'll dump some links to them:
Perfect Being Theology: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perfect-goodness/
Ontological arguments: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/
Teleological/design arguments: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/
The Problem of Evil: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/
On divine omnipotence: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/
On divine omniscience: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omniscience/
Pascals wager: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
Ethics of belief: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/

This whole field has been dead since Kant completely demolished it 250 years ago, no serious philosopher would waste their time on these unknowable things

>>13603509
The philosophy of religion is not theology. Plenty of philosophers of religion are not believers in the religion they study. That being said, many are and your point is just meaningless provocation.

>>13603524
No, the only motivation for studying these things is entirely emotional and narcissistic, theology is the welfare queen of the liberal arts: contributes nothing and works away at the very foundations of our civilization

A very good majority of modern philosophy of religion (to clarify, philosophy of religion would be what constitutes religious practice, what is the meaning of religion in a society, what is the significance of religious symbolism, etc.) comes from Guenon. Guenon influenced Huston Smith, Mircea Eliade, Titus Burkhardt, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, S. H. Nasr, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, Charles Upton, Jean Hani, Jean Borella, and a whole slew of other religious thinkers. Mircea Eliade and the Chicago School alone defined much of 20th century academic religious study and a vast majority of this influence comes from Guenon's concepts (sacred history, meaning of symbols, sacred/profane, etc.).

>>13603454
This is a good post, but this is mainly theology, not the study of religion. This will also give you an intensely western perspective towards religion that is by no means universal.

>>13603549
Did you even read my response? I didn't talk anything about the motivations for studying it. I am saying that you are mixing up philosophy of religion and theology. Good attempt at bait though

bump

I shill this book a lot on here but it actually is foundational to contemporary philosophy of religion. If you need further encouragement, it was also a big influence on the American 1960s psychedelic movement, and Oliver Sacks considered his Musicophilia a response to it, and Borges put it in his top fifty.

Depends what you mean by philosophy of religion. There's theology, or I guess you could say metaphysical/mystical philosophy with a religious perspective, and then there's the modern academic sense of studying the philosophy/history of religions. The latter is more secular, both in the sense that most of the people studying it are mainstream secular neoliberal types, and in the sense that to study anything "academically" these days means taking up a self-consciously objective, neutral, scientific stance toward it.

So, there is a slight difference between a Catholic in a Religious Studies department studying Catholic philosophy, on the one hand, and a Catholic down the hall in the seminary, studying theology outright. They may do practically the same things, or they may not. But even when they do, there's a slight difference of context. The former is expected to write such that even non-Catholics and atheists are included in the discussion, if that makes sense. The same goes for someone in a History department studying medieval philosophy while being a sincere Catholic, or studying 18th century Protestantism while being a sincere Protestant.

The point of all this is just to delineate what each type of scholar is likely to read. Obviously the historian is likely to be an expert in his period and not much else. The theologian might study existentialist Catholic philosophers like Marcel, or he might squirrel into living and contemporary neo-Thomist thinkers so obscure that more mainstream philosophers have never heard of them, since theology is its own world with its own concerns. But the "Philosopher of Religions," even if he's personally Catholic or Protestant or whatever, will usually take a more ecumenical approach just by the nature of his discipline. He will probably be familiar with some major school of philosophy dominant in the academy first and foremost, like Pragmatism or Heidegger's thought or a vague mix of French poststructuralism or some anthropologist's soup combining all of the above, and then he'll apply this shit to the religious materials he studies. He'll have taken courses in the History of Religions style that emphasize ecumenism and relativism, full of anthropologists studying Polynesian religions, patchouli hippie Buddhists, contintental philosophy types who want to study Buddhism/Taoism as a form of "non-Cartesianism," totally secular sociologists of religion who just see religion as a cultural formation, edgelord crypto-perennialists studying Sanskrit, etc. Those classrooms are explicitly and implicitly relativist, and most people in them are secular (in one form or another). Even the avowed Catholics in them will likely have been LGBT-friendly Foucauldians who want to "update" Catholicism for modernity.

>>13604127
Assuming you want the latter, academic History/Philosophy of Religions approach, you should probably just study History of Religions methods courses syllabi. These usually combine a history of the study of religion with an implicit history of the relativistic study of cultural formations or "lifeworlds," which is what studying religion more or less is these days. Tbh if I were teaching the class you might end up reading:
>some kind of primer on Renaissance philosophy, emphasizing the crisis of certainty in medieval Christianity as new sources became available and ancient thought become more accessible (basically, people started to flirt with less and less specifically "Christian" ideas)
>some kind of intro material on how the Reformation accelerated these tendencies by turning Biblical criticism and hermeneutics into a battleground between Catholics and Protestants who made different claims on scriptural authority, again undermining the simple authority of a unified "Christianity" and turning "religiosity as such" into a matter for philosophical speculation
>some kind of intro material on rising contacts with non-Christian peoples
>some kind of intro material on Herder's relativism
>some kind of intro material on the first translations of Indian philosophy in the West (best book on this is Schwab's Oriental Renaissance), plus the German idealists' fascination with nondualism, mysticism, religious symbolism, etc.
>Schleiermacher
>some kind of (brief) intro material on Protestant theology's brief flirtation with right-Hegelianism (F.C. Baur), then its breakdown under left-Hegelianism (Bruno Bauer and David Strauss)
>some kind of (brief) intro material on the beginnings of German comparative Religionswissenschaft after the 1860s, epitomized by Rudolf Otto's philosophized mysticism and interest in oriental religions
>William James, Varieties
>some kind of (brief) intro to the early panbabylonist comparativists (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panbabylonismus)), from whom Eliade drew very heavily
>Weber, Protestant Ethic at least, probably also Sociology of Religion
>an overview of Tylor as an example of stadialism
>some kind of (brief) intro to Boasian anthro as an example of anti-stadial relativism
>some kind of (brief) intro to the "ritual vs. myth" debate, which can be confusing
>the major anthros everyone reads: Levi-Strauss, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard
>Eliade, Cosmos and History (for Eliade's general metahistorical outlook + philosophical anthropology); Patterns in Comparative Religion (for example of how he does actual comparativist work); Shamanism (phil anthro again)
>Jonathan Z. Smith's critiques of Eliade (some essays in Map Is Not Territory, and Imagining Religion, forget which)
>Bruce Lincoln's too maybe, Theorizing Myth
>some particularly unpleasant examples of contemporary religious studies fare, to show that its lack of metaphysics and that nothing has changed since the introduction of methodological relativism

>>13604127
>Foucauldians who want to "update" Catholicism for modernity.
Earth older than 6000 years when? It's one thing to change interpretation of "lay down with another man" (just design a third gender; problem solved), but undoing the whole book of genesis is entire matter altogether. Are they really gonna do that?

>>13604129
Beyond those intro materials, which will give you the secular/pluralist stance that the modern scholar takes for granted even if he is personally religious and believes in the ultimate truth of one religion, to get a taste for what "Philosophy of Religion" looks like, read something like Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, or I don't know, some shit by Stanley Cavell. From a review of a book about Cavell:
>The American philosopher Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) is a secular Jew who by his own admission is obsessed with Christ, yet his outlook on religion in general is ambiguous. Probing the secular and the sacred in Cavell’s thought, Espen Dahl explains that Cavell, while often parting ways with Christianity, cannot dismiss it either. Focusing on Cavell's work as a whole, but especially on his recent engagement with Continental philosophy, Dahl brings out important themes in Cavell’s philosophy and his conversation with theology.

This is very typical these days. This is the kind of thing you read in a Religious Studies department. Another thinker who is a good example of Marion.

>>13603567
These are OK but they're all perennialists. If you're going to read the perennialists, it might help to read Sedgwick's book on them (Against the Modern World) and Hakl's book on Eranos first. It will help you sort them and deflate their mystique before setting down to read 250 books that all (to be honest) say the same fucking thing over and over again after the first generation of them. I don't see the point in reading someone like Nasr, an epigone of an epigone, unless you're the truest of true believers.

Schmitt's the exception obviously, not a perennialist. If you get into the "so where do we go from there?" side of things at the ass end of studying contemporary religion, Schmitt is a good starting point.

>>13604129
Fuck, that should be Levy-Bruhl in the standard anthropologists category, not Levi-Strauss. Though I guess if you want to read Levi-Strauss too go nuts.

>>13604139
Ironically I think it's much easier to "change" the interpretation of Genesis than it is to reinterpret specific prescriptions against certain behaviors. Genesis has been read allegorically since Origen, the gnostics, etc. There are direct problems in the text of Genesis that require hermeneutic sensitivity so obviously people are going to find clever workarounds, and where people are engaging in hermeneutics and being clever, there's room for all kinds of strange things, most notably reconciling Genesis with neo-Platonic accounts of emanation, a common practice for thousands of years.

But when a legal book outright says "don't do this," it's harder to work around. You either need legalistic casuistry, which has a bad smell to it because it was the traditional method for centuries and it just seems dishonest these days, or you need some kind of higher philosophical perspective on the infallibility or divine inspiration or binding nature of God's commands, which again, no matter how narrowly you slice it, creates a gap where philosophical speculation can enter. Case in point: someone comes along and says "sola scriptura, simple as," Europe proceeds to implode into 200 years of religious warfare.

;)

>>13599927
*blocks you're entire discipline*

>>13603549
>theology is the welfare queen of the liberal arts
Not him but what about the high writing skills acquired on this field?
Since I know pretty much any other non-STEM liberal arts can always do so and even the Liberal Arts major itself too, but there is something special in them that is different from the others that I can not describe well nor I can't understand it. They surely have something given there is a reason why they always get into a PhD program if they failed miserably being a pastor.

Also: all non-STEM liberal arts subjects are the welfare queens of academia and civilization; lol even the "useful" Jurisprudence field given the modern rhetoric we see today.

>>13604059
I love William James. Seconding this recc

>>13604275
>jew
no thanks

>>13604733
why