Category: Participating Scholars

As a philosopher of religion with a base in a religious studies program, I have been able to do sustained work on figuring out how to address core conceptual questions for the study of religion–questions about the nature of religious intentions, expressions, meanings, and objects of reference–in cross-cultural perspective, which is a standard of adequate understanding of religious topics.

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Philosophy of Religion is a discourse that straddles a variety of professional communities, debates, and traditions. I take it that this is one of its strengths. Yet, this can often, perhaps ironically, lead to narrowness in ideas, isolationism in disciplinary perspectives, and traditionalism in vision. Global Critical Philosophy of Religion offers a way forward because it expands the conversation partners involved and becomes more inclusive of the variety of disciplinary resources available for questions attending the philosophical study of cultural traditions termed “religious.” Even though challenging, and humbling, I am excited to incorporate Global Critical approaches into my teaching, my research, and my public intellectual work. 

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My research has led me to question the division between religion and philosophy, asking about the criteria used to place various forms of thought, reflection and practice under one of these categories as opposed to the other (e.g. a volume edited with Ashwani Peetush). The question about the faith/reason binary affects my approach to the project of globalizing the philosophy of religion. The Asian traditions, in particular Indian ones, with which I am engaged can be taught as religion, but they are also philosophical, though they have been largely excluded from the Eurocentric canon of most philosophy departments. I aim to connect with other scholars concerned with decolonizing the curriculum of both philosophy of religion and philosophy more generally.

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I am interested in destabilizing the category of “religion” which is conventionally defined as a monotheistic belief/practice and at the same time paradoxically where an array of non-western intellectual traditions that are non-monotheistic, such as Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, are conventionally housed. Much of this sort of paradoxical categorization of non-western intellectual traditions as “religion” has to do with the formation of the philosophical canon during the late 18^th and early 19^th century where non-western philosophical traditions were systematic excluded and hence relegated to “Religion” instead of being recognized as “Philosophy.” As an Asian and Comparative philosopher, I strive to provide a countercurrent to this sort of approach to both religion and non-western philosophies.

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I am interested in developing a philosophy of religion that can explain religious phenomena and religious philosophy based on diverse religious traditions. Diversity in this case can be understood in terms of regions (inclusion of non-Western religious traditions), topics (including gender & social issues), and approaches (philosophical, narrative, experimental and so on). I have published several articles in which I discussed a philosophy of religion drawn from East Asian religious traditions and demonstrated that when we expand the scope of philosophy of religion beyond the West centered practice, we can see various possibilities to explain the meaning and values of religion in our life, and manifestations of such appear in different forms in different religious traditions and different life situations.

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I am a comparative philosopher interested in demonstrating that, among the Nguni people of Southern Africa, ‘religion’ is neither monotheistic nor a belief system. What may be called religion by Western philosophers is a way of life that fulfils the Isintu ethic of Ubuntu. Isintu is a term that envelopes traditions, cultures and worldviews of a Nguni–Ndebele community. Ubuntu is lived in community of the living, the living dead and those yet to be born. My research on Isintuism uses ethnophilosophy to expose and discuss the Nguni knowledge systems, ‘beliefs’ and normative human communal behaviors that are embedded in Isintu. I show that this African intellectual traditions are embedded in idioms, proverbs and folklore which are the philosophy and or sources of the philosophy of ‘religion’ of Isintuism.

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The past 60 years of scholarship among Anglophone philosophers of religion developed a highly-focused field of inquiry whose language structures are surprisingly uniform. I see there an opportunity to apply computational analyses (digital humanities) to ask critical questions about the composition of the field. Were theoretical debates elsewhere in the humanities completely ignored? What is the probability for topics of inquiry with different data?

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I research on Religion, Philosophy, and Politics, with much of my work being in the Philosophy of Religion, concerning God’s existence. I am interested in global-critical Philosophy of Religion, as my ongoing research finds that alternatives to the classical theism so dominant in the field, such as pantheism and panentheism, found globally, are more evidentially probable.

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My work at the intersection of religious studies, metaphysics, and analytic philosophy of language has made at least one thing very clear: words matter. I mean this quite literally; words are materializations of particular ways of being in the world and they materialize those ways of being in the future. Our categories and our judgments are mutually reinforcing. The fact that most philosophy of religion textbooks revolve around questions of doctrine and argument, for example, has everything to do with its Christian-European historical center of gravity. As a result, philosophers of religion have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the category of “belief” and have thereby imported the modernist metaphysical assumptions it carries with it about what it means to be human and to be a subject. Towards decentering this traditional vocabulary, my local goal in pursuing global-critical philosophy of religion is to expand the categories by which we ask and answer our discipline-defining questions. My broader goal is to render the development of critical consciousness inseparable from the vocation of humanization.

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I am committed to a global, diverse, equitable, and just philosophy and strive to engage more voices in the philosophical discourse. To this end, I have developed the Multi-Entry Approach to philosophy, which is based on a fourth-person philosophy. A philosophy for humanity has to be fashioned by humanity. It has to be inclusive and to emphasize an ethics of understanding over an ethics of judgment. This approach has to be two-pronged: First we need to expand the communities and traditions that are represented in our philosophical approach. The areas of, e.g., philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind cannot solely be driven by anglophone discourses. Second, we need to critically rethink our philosophical approach and acknowledge as well as retreat from methods and methodologies that are grounded in hegemonic thinking. Based on my reading of philosophies around the world, I have critically engaged the so-called first- and third-person approaches and developed a fourth-person approach. This approach moves away from the grand narrative traditionally advanced in philosophy departments and suggests a creative multilogue that includes and engages as many approaches, narratives, and ways of thinking as possible.

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