{"id":887,"date":"2014-02-14T08:41:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T08:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/02\/what-is-philosophy-of-religion.html"},"modified":"2014-02-14T08:41:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T08:41:00","slug":"what-is-philosophy-of-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/02\/what-is-philosophy-of-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"What is Philosophy of Religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><div style=\"background-color: white;border: 0px;line-height: 24.375px;margin-bottom: 1.625em;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">There are so many \u201cphilosophies-of-disciplines\u201d that my wife, who does not share my love of philosophy, sarcastically asks if \u201cthere is a philosophy of toenail clipping.\u201d However, philosophy of religion has been a stalwart and respectable sub-discipline of philosophy. There are philosophers who disagree\u2014A. J. Ayer once replied to a philosopher who mentioned philosophy of religion, \u201cOh. . .I didn\u2019t know there was any such thing.\u201d Other than positivists such as Ayer, philosophers of all stripes, including atheists, agree that philosophy of religion is a legitimate field.<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: 0px;line-height: 24.375px;margin-bottom: 1.625em;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">To answer the question of \u201cWhat is philosophy of religion?\u201d a person must have some definition of \u201cphilosophy\u201d and \u201creligion.\u201d\u00a0<span id=\"more-16832\" style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><\/span>Now the definition of philosophy is itself a philosophical issue. Over the course of the history of philosophy some philosophers have focused on:<\/span><\/div>\n<ul style=\"background-color: white;border: 0px;line-height: 24.375px;margin: 0px 0px 1.625em 2.5em;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\">\n<li style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Philosophy as a way of life (Socrates, most of the ancient Greek philosophers)<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Philosophy as developing a systematic view of reality as a whole (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Whitehead)<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Philosophy as developing an ideal language (the early Russell, the logical positivists)<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Philosophy as focusing on ordinary language (the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Strawson)<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Philosophy as a description of experience as a whole while \u201cbracketing\u201d issues of the reality behind that experience (Husserl)<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"border: 0px;font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Philosophy that focuses on the existing individual searching for meaning (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Marcel)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: 0px;line-height: 24.375px;margin-bottom: 1.625em;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">And I am sure the wise readers of this blog can think of many more. My own bias is toward the second view, that philosophy is the attempt, using reason and experience, to develop a metaphysics, a model of reality as a whole, of \u201cbeing qua being.\u201d It is interesting how philosophy, including analytic philosophy, returns to this view of philosophy as philosophers tire of debates over \u201cWhat is a sentence?\u201d \u201cIs there a God?\u201d is far more interesting.<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: 0px;line-height: 24.375px;margin-bottom: 1.625em;padding: 0px;vertical-align: baseline\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Read the rest <a href=\"http:\/\/philosophyofreligion.org\/?p=16832\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are so many \u201cphilosophies-of-disciplines\u201d that my wife, who does not share my love of philosophy, sarcastically asks if \u201cthere is a philosophy of toenail clipping.\u201d However, philosophy of religion has been a stalwart and respectable sub-discipline of philosophy. There are philosophers who disagree\u2014A. J. Ayer once replied to a philosopher who mentioned philosophy of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What is Philosophy of Religion?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There are so many \u201cphilosophies-of-disciplines\u201d that my wife, who does not share my love of philosophy, sarcastically asks if \u201cthere is a philosophy of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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