Adolph Gottlieb, Phoenix Burst, 1973
The other day I learned of a new and intriguing entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), “Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Mathematics.” Although mathematics is not my cup of tea, mainly because I’m not very good at it (I lost interest at some point during high school), I was still able to follow a fair amount of the discussion. In any case, I was delighted to simply see such an entry, having long thought that Arabic and Islamic philosophy is not sufficiently well-known let alone appreciated among professional philosophers in the West. I looked up the author of the entry, one Mohammad Saleh Zarepour, and discovered he has a broad background encompassing both philosophy and “Theology and Religious Studies,” hence his corresponding wide range of research interests, which include “medieval Islamic philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of logic.” Still exploring, I clicked on his Publications page and came across an open access article that immediately got my attention, “Islamic Problems and Perspectives in Philosophy of Religion.” For now I merely want to comment on two propositions: the first sentence of the article’s abstract, which is (i) in what follows, as well as a second proposition (ii) found on the page that contains the aforementioned article in conjunction with others as part of an effort to attract “the attention of contemporary philosophers of religion to Islam and the Islamic tradition as a rich source … worth considering [for] philosophical problems and approaches.” The papers selected are said to be “a collection of [the] best ever papers about Islam published in [the journal] Religious Studies.”
(i) “Contemporary philosophy of religion is excessively Christianity-oriented.” (from the abstract of one of the papers here)
(ii) “Islam and the Islamic tradition have been largely underrepresented in contemporary philosophy of religion.”
To the extent that (i) may be true, it is deeply troubling and inexcusable. However, there is in fact much philosophy of religion that is influenced by topics that arise in Indian and Chinese worldviews, and this goes back to my time in graduate school in the late 1980s (and teachers like Ninian Smart, Gerald J. Larson, Raimundo Panikkar, Herbert Fingarette, Nandini Iyer, among others). One can get an ample taste of this at two blogs: The Indian Philosophy Blog, and Warp, Weft, and Way, a Chinese (and comparative) philosophy blog. Nonetheless, I think (ii) is in fact generally true, thus “Islamic problems and perspectives” have indeed been comparatively neglected, apart from a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Oliver Leaman (and a few of our authors here). One still comes across introductory and other textbooks in the philosophy of religion that are either biased in favor of Christian themes and topics, or at least theistic in orientation (while excluding non-Abrahamic theistic traditions).
One antidote to this state of affairs exists with the emergence and consolidation of the field of “Comparative Philosophy,” which I view as a big tent capable of embracing philosophical material that is both religious and non-religious. Conceived in this way, I think it should subsume and thus eventually replace “Philosophy of Religion” as such. One reason to bring the religious and non-religious material together has to do with topics that are common to both domains, such as metaphysical, moral and ethical questions, as well as specific subjects, like personal identity, moral psychology, philosophy of mind and consciousness, human nature, values, truth, practical reasoning, art and aesthetics, and so forth and so on. Something like this was proposed over 25 years ago by Ninian Smart when he suggested in several books using the term “worldviews” to level the playing field as it were, in which case, Buddhism, scientific humanism, Existentialism, Personalism, Marxism, and Islam, for example, are all studied in the same department, in other words, it does not matter if a worldview is religious or not, or if a particular intellectual or philosopher is secular or religious, thus Mao and Ramakrishna, Marx and Tagore, Wittgenstein and the worldview of the Masai, all help us transcend the “false division between religion and philosophy” which has resulted in an “irrational [academic] division of the study of worldviews” (and, I would add, of ideologies and lifeworlds, the latter being the individual person’s body of values and beliefs as these are derived—accurately or not, from one or more of these).
We might be able to call upon a theory of truth and corresponding perspectival relativism (which does not mean ‘anything goes’) and thus pluralism by way of providing or at least attempting a plausible ontological or metaphysical and epistemic warrant for this field of Comparative Philosophy (or ‘Worldviews’). There might, one imagines, be different approaches to this endeavor, and I happen to favor one that relies in the main on works by such philosophers as Hector-Neri Castañeda, Michael P. Lynch, Nicholas Rescher, B.K. Matilal, and Hilary Putnam, as well as some ideas found in Jain and perhaps Buddhist doctrines. Of course we need not wait for such a warrant to be formulated or garner widespread support to embark on this particular pedagogical reform, but at the very least, as teachers or philosophers, we should assume that no one worldview can make a claim to absolute truth, that any worldview has, so to speak, a monopoly on truth, and thus all worldviews deserve a hearing, a forum, that their claims and views might be contested or debated or evaluated from positions outside that worldview. In brief, no one worldview or ideology is privileged over others, even if our descriptive, analytical and evaluative tasks are likely never to be completely impartial, wholly objective, free of all bias; and yet we should at least aspire to impartiality and objectivity, rely on reason and rationality and reasonableness, all the while remaining true to our ethical sensibilities and a moral compass.
This does not preclude us from cleaving to or identifying with or demonstrating fidelity to one particular worldview, or our fashioning of an idiosyncratic worldview or lifeworld (the latter being uniquely yours), one that might be far from systematic like “official” worldviews propounded by authorities of one kind or another in a particular tradition or school of thought. I would argue that empirically speaking, all individual worldviews depart in all manner of ways and in varying degrees from such “official” or authoritative worldviews, a fact which is sustained in the first instance when we inquire into individual lifeworlds. And while the individual assemblage or construction of a personal worldview or lifeworld may (and typically does) trouble “communitarians” who stress the fidelity to those worldviews which are christened crucial if not indispensable to one’s upbringing, to one’s moral, intellectual and emotional development, such construction or fashioning or choosing should be considered a possible, and in some societies or cultures, a likely consequence of reaching what we can—loosely—term moral psychological autonomy or perhaps the simply the “age of reason.” In other words, one reaches that time in life in which one can and indeed should be critical of worldviews and ideologies, be it one’s own or those of others, as one is now prepared to think for oneself, which of course does not take place in a vacuum nor need be an exercise in narcissism or a solipsistic enterprise. Thinking for oneself in this regard does not, to be sure, necessarily mean forswearing the worldview of one’s birth. And it might very well be the case that a young person who abandons the worldviews and traditions of his or her parents or those responsible for their upbringing may, at some point, become dissatisfied or troubled by the choice(s) they have (prematurely, immaturely, hastily) made and return to the worldview which nurtured them and originally formed and influenced their outlook on life, having learned and earned a newfound appreciation and understanding of same, which entails a deeper or more discerning awareness of the meaning, beliefs and values it previously provided them. I mention this not only because it as a theoretical or real possibility, but because we know, or at least some of us know, intimately, of cases just like this, cases where people come back to the traditions and worldviews most familiar to them.
In a future post I want to speak more about the form or nature or structure of worldviews, which are often mistakenly viewed (it may be only an assumption or presumption) as having more consistency, systematicity, or coherence than they in fact possess, even if the passage of time and the nature of traditions is such that “official” or authoritative worldviews, be they religious or not, often strive for such qualities and properties (hence ‘orthodoxy,’ which in some well-known worldviews frequently comes at the expense of ‘orthopraxis’) in response not only to criticisms from the inside but, and perhaps more importantly, in response to interactions with other worldviews and ideologies, be it in the form of dialogue or cultural exchange of one kind or another, or conflict that can range from the emotionally volatile to violent; in all cases, there is invariably explicit and implicit borrowing (some would claim ‘stealing’) and forms of influence that, historically, has led to worldviews which are never wholly or absolutely discrete, let alone, “original.” Globalization and kinds of cosmopolitanism were with us long before the Peace of Westphalia and capitalism, and this resulted in worldviews that invariably became more human if not humane. In speaking about worldviews qua worldviews, I will attempt to explain why, all things considered, it remains the case that we need or strongly desire worldviews—perhaps merely as “pictures”—that help us navigate our way about in the world, that help one make it through the day, that keep one sane, that provide one with a sense of meaning and purpose, a cluster of values as guiding lights, or, in the words of John Lennon,
“Whatever gets you through the night
It’s all right, it’s all right …
Whatever gets you to the light
It’s all right, it’s all right …. ”
I have been thinking of such matters afresh while reading Raymond Geuss’ book, Who Needs a World View (Harvard University Press, 2020) (In deference to the German term Weltanschauung, I prefer ‘worldview’ to ‘world view’). In that post, or perhaps a different one, I want to address the role of “narrativity” in more than a few worldviews. Once again, a philosopher, Galen Strawson, has moved me to speak on a topic which I’ve not thought about for some time, and what is more, has prompted me to revise my views on story telling or narrativity with his discussion of the “Psychological Narrativity Thesis” and the “Ethical Narrativity Thesis” in two somewhat polemical but no less incisive and well-argued essays, “A Fallacy of Our Age,” and “The Unstoried Life” (I will not discuss what he terms the ‘endurant’ and ‘transient’ forms of life, what he earlier defined, as kinds of self-experience, as ‘diachronic’ and ‘episodic’) in his book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc. (New York Review Books, 2018). By way of a conclusion, I leave you with a quote from my late teacher and friend, Ninian Smart:
“Critical analysis will suggest that we tend to live in a certain amount of aporia. Do we, when it comes to the crunch, really have a systematic worldview? We have an amalgam of beliefs, which we may publicly [and misleadingly or even falsely or disingenuously] characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview corresponds to the more or less official views of the Episcopal Church? How much is in any case left out by an ‘official worldview’ which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, have a certain scepticism about nationalism, thinking that there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil [part of the theodicy question; in some societies, the problem of evil may translate into the problem of suffering] or other matters. Our values and belief are more like a collage [or perhaps bricolage] than a Canaletto. They do not even have consistency of perspective.”—From Smart’s (unfortunately titled) book, Religion and the Western Mind (State University of New York Press, 1987): 16-17.
Some Relevant Bibliographies
- Africana and African American Philosophy
- Alternative and Complementary Medicine
- North American Indians
- The Bedouin
- Buddhism
- Christianity
- Classical Chinese Worldviews
- Comparative Philosophy
- The Emotions
- The European Enlightenment
- Hinduism
- Human Nature and Personal Identity
- Indian/Indic Philosophies
- Indigenous Peoples: Culture, Law and Politics
- Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions
- Jainism
- Judaism and Jewish Philosophy
- Marxism
- Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
- Sufism
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