3. Write a summary of the text (130-150 words).

* Appendix 2 p. 148

4. Choose one topic and make a report: “Latent conflict’, “Contemporary views on Religion and conflict”, “Research of religious conflicts in Russia”, Triple interaction in religion-politics- conflict relations”. Use extra sources to find information about the topic.

Remember to:

• make a plan before you start to write

• organise your report logically

• use the key vocabulary of the unit

• look at Appendix 2 p.148 for proper linkers

• support your opinion with examples

• check your report for errors when it is ready

• apply audio and visual aids if necessary

Unit 7. Philosophy of religion

1. Work with a partner to discuss the following questions.

* Appendix 3 p. 153

1. What is the philosophy of religion divided into?

2. What are the differences between the types?

3. What are the goals of philosophy of religion as a discipline?

4. What were the late 17th and 18th centuries marked by?

5. What are the common features in the works of Heidegger and Sartre?

6. What is phenomenology according to Husserl?

2. Read the text quickly and find the answers to the questions from exercise 1.

Philosophy of religion is philosophical reflection on religion. It is as old as philosophy itself and has been a standard part of Western philosophy in every period. In the last half of the twentieth century, there has been a great growth of interest in it, and the range of topics philosophers of religion have expanded considerably.

Philosophy of religion is sometimes divided into philosophy of religion proper and philosophical theology. This distinction reflects the uncase of an earlier period in analytic philosophy, during which philosophers felt that reflection on religion was philosophically respectable only if it confined itself to mere theism and abstracted from all particular religions; anything else was taken to be theology, not philosophy. But most philosophers now feel free to examine philosophically any aspect of religion, including doctrines or practices peculiar to individual religions. Not only are these doctrines and practices generally philosophically interesting in their own right, but often they also raise questions that are helpful for issues in other areas of philosophy. Reflection on the Christian notion of sanctification, for example, sheds light on certain contemporary debates over the nature of freedom of the will.

Philosophy of religion is an academic discipline which attempts to (1) analyse and describe the nature of religion in the framework of a general view of the world; (2) defend or attack various religious positions in terms of philosophy; and (3) analyse religious language. Thus, much of hilosophy of religion is concerned with questions not so much of the description of religion (historically and otherwise) as with the truth of religious claims. For this reason philosophy can easily become an adjunct of theology or of antireligious positions; thus, it is often difficult to disentangle descriptive problems from those bearing on the truth of the content of what is being described.

Studies of religion in the late 17th and 18th centuries reflected the growing rationalism of the epoch. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711 - 1776) argued that there can be no true knowledge of anything beyond direct experience. These considerations dispose of all the classical arguments for the existence of God, as such arguments are not based on the requisite empirical evidence.

The culmination of 18th-century rationalism was found in the works of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), but it was a rationalism modified to leave room for religion, which he based essentially on ethics. Kant's system depended on drawing certain distinctions, such as that between pure and practical reason, which were open to challenge. One reaction that attempted to place religion as neither primarily to do with pure nor with practical reason was that of the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 - 1834), who attempted to carve out a territory for religious experience distinct from both science and morality. For him the central attitude in religion is "the feeling of absolute dependence.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) argued that religion arises as the relation between man and the Absolute (the spiritual reality that undergirds and includes the whole universe), in which the truth is expressed symbolically, and so conveyed personally and emotionally to the individual. As the same truth is known at a higher - that is, more abstract -level in philosophy, religion is ultimately inferior to philosophy. The Hegelian account of religion was worked out in the context of the dialectical view of history, according to which opposites united in a synthesis, which in turn produced its opposite, and so on. In the 19th century the Hegelian school was very influential, particularly in the study of early Christianity, but it attracted some radical criticism. Hegelianism entered a period of rapid decline in the early part of the 20th century.

The common sense and scientifically oriented philosophy of G.E. Moore (1873 - 1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) introduced a period of empiricism in Britain, while William James's pragmatism had a similar effect in the United States. British empiricism was expressed very strongly in logical positivism (maintaining the exclusive value of scientific knowledge and the denial of traditional metaphysical doctrines). This stimulated the analysis of religious language, and the movement was complicated by the transformation in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who in his later work was very far removed from his early, rather formalistic treatment of language. The analytic attempt to exhibit the nature of religious language has generally occurred in the context of questions of truth - thus some scholars have been concerned with exhibiting how it is possible to hold religious beliefs in an empiricist framework, and others with showing the meaninglessness or incoherence of belief.

The most influential modern existentialists have been Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980); the former was especially important in the development of modern European theology. The structure of the world as analysed by Heidegger is revealed, in a sense, affectively - i.e., through care, anxiety, and other existential attitudes and feelings.

Sartre's thought has had less direct impact on the study of religion, partly because his account of human existence represents an explicit alternative to traditional religious belief. Sartre's analysis begins, however, from the human desire to be God: but God is, on Sartre's analysis, a self-contradictory notion, for nothing can contain the ground of its own being. In searching for an essence humans fail to see the nature of their freedom, which is to go beyond definitions, whether laid down by God or by other human beings.

Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) has been the main exponent of phenomenology, and his program of describing experience and "bracketing" the objects of experience, in the pursuit of essences of types of experience, was in part taken up in the phenomenology or religion. Husserl distinguished phenomenology from psychology, in that the latter concerns facts in a spatiotemporal setting, whereas phenomenology intends to uncover timeless essences.