Hi Derek,

I don’t think that there are many people doing ‘philosophy of religion’ that are interested in philosophy of religion. They do not really seem to be asking, and so never answer, questions about religion. Imagine a philosophy of mind that never asked any fundamental questions about ‘mind’ or a philosophy of language that never asked any fundamental questions about ‘language’, or a philosophy of history than never asked any fundamental questions about ‘history’. What would the status of such endeavors be? Okay the disciplinary fracture here is very analytic, I don’t see that as necessarily an evil, philosophers can specialize. But philosophers of religion nearly all over-specialize. Theism is not necessarily uninteresting but if you assume it is the alpha and omega (so to speak) of philosophy of religion then either you are parochial or circular or both. I would suggest that many philosophers of religion are both, they presume that their own tradition is the only one worth enquiring about because it’s the only one that has rational merit. As such it all becomes religious apologetics and the justification of prior metaphysical commitments.

Religion is impacting and has impacted on all of our lives. But as philosophers we do a very poor job with it. If we are going to adequately deal with many of the issues we face in the contemporary world we need a better practice. This means that you cannot just ignore it and hope it goes away, it must be engaged, but it must be engaged (as far as possible) in a way that is ideology free, it cannot just be an attempt to kill or affirm religion.

Phil