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20 responses to “Any good suggestions for philosophy of religion syllabi?”

1. 

   Mark

   August 8, 2014

   This is probably exactly what you don’t want, but there might be some bits of it worthwhile to you. I teach a class that is about philosophical reflection on Christian doctrine, using almost nothing but very recent papers. I tell them up front that I believe the literal truth of these doctrines, but the class is not about the truth of these doctrines, but about whether we can get any illumination from philosophy about them. Unsurprisingly, it draws a lot of students who are Christians and want to think about this stuff more seriously. But it also draws a lot of students who are not Christians and who just want to think in a more sophisticated way about what Christianity is. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/murphym/S'14%20christian%20creeds.pdf

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2. 

   Adam Kotsko

   August 8, 2014

   This is a syllabus that I put together explicitly to be philosophy of religion rather than philosophical reflection about God as such. There’s still a Christian focus, since this is the Western tradition we’re dealing with, but I tried to add as much about Judaism as possible, as well as their relation. It was only a ten-week course — if I had more time, I would have done more on Islam, such as Talal Assad (referenced in the Barber piece, of which I can send you a PDF).

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3. 

   David

   August 8, 2014

   I’ve taught phil. religion a couple of times now. I spend a bit of time the first class talking about why philosophy of religion is a bit of an anomaly among the various “philosophy of x”s, using philosophy of science as a point of contrast: i.e., that philosophy of science asks about what kind of thing science is, what is its significance, what are scientists doing when they engage in scientific practice, etc., but not ‘which scientific theories or propositions are true.’ Yet most of philosophy of religion has been dedicated to asking after the truth/falsity of specific religious propositions. There is, however, interesting literature dealing with the meaning and significance of religion as a social practice which brackets, at least, some of the epistemic issues. So, that’s how I frame, for the students, the organization of the course, the first half of which deals with more traditional questions in the philosophy of religion — existence of God (Anselm, Plantinga), problem of evil (Plato, Leibniz, Hume, Dostoevsky — the “Rebellion” chapter from Brothers Karamazov), the nature/rationality/irrationality of faith (Pascal, James, Kierkegaard, and a chapter from Michael Martin’s Atheism) — while the second half considers the psychological and sociological significance of religious practice.
   It sounds like you are mostly looking for suggestions for the latter sort of topics. In the most recent version, I used:
   Feuerbach (first chapter from Essence of Christianity) and Marx (“Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Phil of Right”), for two versions of the religion-as-projection hypothesis;
   Part of Durkheim’s book on suicide, dealing with effect of religious integration on suicide rates;
   and a few papers on whether the existence/nonexistence of God makes any difference to the question of meaning in life (from Klemke and Cahn’s The Meaning of Life: A Reader — I used Tolstoy, Pojman, Nozick and Paul Edwards).
   I use a course pack for everything but the Meaning of Life text, which isn’t pricey, so it’s overall quite affordable for students. In an earlier version, I ended with a paper on fundamentalism; but the meaning of life material went pretty well and was far and away the most popular choice for students’ final papers.
   Hope some of that is useful.

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4. 

   James

   August 8, 2014

   I would suggest assigning parts of Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution for at least a section of a class. The first two chapters are a great introduction to the philosophical and empirical problems that give rise to religion in the first place. There’s also an insightful engagement with religion in Ancient Greece, which should be interesting for all philosophers-in-training. Bellah brings in sociologists, scientists, and philosophers old and new to look at the human experiences and ways of thinking that ground religion throughout cultures.
   This isn’t philosophy of religion in the sense of practicing arguments about religious belief X. It’s philosophy of religion in the way that Hegel’s philosophy of history is philosophy. The advantage of such a book is that it will be useful to students even if they don’t go on to do more philosophy of religion. They’ll have tools to critically approach not just traditional religions but also science, atheism, and other ideological systems that purport to know the really real.

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5. 

   Mike

   August 8, 2014

   It’s very surprising that you used Mackie’s Miracle of Theism in an undergrad course. That’s not an easy book, and definitely no intro to the subject. On the other hand, I’m sure Koons was very clear. The latest in the tradition of that sort of work would be J.H. Sobel’s, Logic and Theism. It’s a strange book, the resultant of lots of courses on philosophy of religion. I once asked Sobel how he turned his lecture notes into a pretty impressive book. He said “I don’t make the distinction”. Basically, he prepped for class in the same way he did research papers/chapters. Anyway, there is also Bryan Frances’s new Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil, which very nicely and readably sets out the problems in this area. If you’re looking for a broad anthology, almost all of them include problems in non-western religions.

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6. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   August 8, 2014

   In whole or in part, each of the following books contain much that is invaluable for philosophy of religion outside of Christianity. Should you want to, by way of introductory background material, you are free to use my guides for Confucianism and Daoism (‘rational reconstruction of some key terms’), or my study guide for Islam, which has some terms relevant for philosophy of religion in Islam (all available at my academia.edu page).
   • Angle, Stephen C. Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
   • Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
   • Coutinho, Steve. An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
   • Dasti, Matthew R. and Edwin F. Bryant, eds. Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
   • Kupperman, Joel J. Learning from Asian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
   • Leaman, Oliver. Islamic Philosophy: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2nd ed., 2009.
   • Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
   • Sharma, Arvind. The Philosophy of Religion: A Buddhist Perspective. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
   • Siderits, Mark, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, eds. Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological and Indian Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
   • Smart, Ninian. Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-Christian. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.
   • Smart, Ninian. The Philosophy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
   Although it assumes a largely theistic perspective, there’s much to be learned about religious experience and knowledge outside of theism as well from James Kellenberger’s The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.

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7. 

   Alex Scott

   August 8, 2014

   I have a reading list of books that you might be interested in, concerning the philosophy of religious language, at http://philosophyreaders.blogspot.com/2012/11/religious-language-reading-list-of-books.html. Among these books is Kevin Vanhoozer’s “Is There a Meaning in this Text?” which discusses theology in relation to literary theory, and which engages critically with the work of Derrida, Rorty, Fish, and others. You might also be interested in Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” which discusses the development of theological concepts from ancient to modern times in a variety of religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and other religions.

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8. 

   Alan White

   August 8, 2014

   Ok, here’re my idols on all this. I’ve taught PR at the introductory level for 30 years (though of course that means nothing). But here goes.
   I’ve taught largely Judeo-Christian PR because that’s my training (including seminary and learning Greek; I am not a theist at all though) and overwhelmingly what my students are somewhat familiar with. I say “somewhat” because most undergrads have very little schooling in where their religion came from, or even what very basic doctrines like the Trinity are about.
   So–for the last 15 years or so (1 course per year) I devote up to two weeks of 16 to matters of history and the evolution of Western religion, concluding with more recent entries like LDS and Scientology (as a non-Christian contemporary representative available to pop-culture reference). I have found that students are eager to know the history and fascinated by the facts we know but are never emphasized in religious practice (such as that the 4 Gospels have only one miracle in common out of collective dozens).
   On the text side, I’m going to recommend Hick–both his Intro and his God and the Universe of Faiths. His Intro has many faults mostly due to being very dated. His section on the relevance of parapsychology to questions of immortality is an embarrassment; his old example of a verifiable-but-not-falsifiable hypothesis (replicated in other contemporary texts!) that three consecutive 7s may exist in the decimal sequence of pi was dated when he first concocted it in the early 60s (three such 7s occur in the first 1500 digits of pi; 8 consecutive 7s occur in the first 100 million, as you can verify on the Pi-search pages available). Still, his text stands out for doing two things very well: taking a wary theist stance but subjecting it to rational revision as reason and empirical data warrant. Plus, his last edition (80s!) does give a lot of space to Eastern concepts as well, integrating them as much as possible with his basic theistic position. His Universe of Faiths is a good read here as well.
   Maybe all this is too old-school, but then again I guess I am that way too. I have a nice timeline/overview of JD history that I’ve made for my course, and I could email that to you if you’re at all interested.

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9. 

   Lucia

   August 9, 2014

   If you plan to investigate religious pluralism and non-Western traditions, your students may get a kick out of this new article on the “elsewhere, elsewhen” objection to religious belief, a.k.a. “the problem of contingency.”
   It’s the old “your religious beliefs are a result of historical accident. If you’d been born in Pakistan, you would have been a Muslim, etc.” Chances are your students have thought about it, and it’s a nice entry point into philosophy of religion:
   https://www.academia.edu/4059750/The_Problem_of_Contingency_for_Religious_Belief

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10. 

    Katy Abramson

    August 9, 2014

    Hume, Freud, Nietzsche. (and not just the Dialogues, but also the Natural History of Religion). Oh, and there are a couple of nifty short little Bacon essays! And of course, Galileo: Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems. See? done. 😉 [though if that’s still not enough, there’s always La Mattrie, Diderot, De Beauvoir…]
    And, on a slightly more serious note (though the former remark wasn’t entirely not-serious), if you want to include in the course ethical and political questions, as well as questions about religion as sets of practices, it seems to me that at least some of these as-it-were- ‘outsiders’ perspectives deserve a hearing…

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11. 

    Jon Cogburn

    August 9, 2014

    Just wanted to thank everyone above for the great suggestions. It’s great to see all of the cool things people are doing, and its enough material for me (and anyone else reading this) to keep the course interesting for at least the next decade.

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12. 

    Zach

    August 9, 2014

    Another fun one, though it requires some serious unpacking, is Leszek Kolazkowski’s “Metaphysical Horror.” He reads the western tradition as terminating in either God as Nothing or the Self as Nothing. Paired with Pseudo-Dionysius and Descartes, it makes for a really interesting set of reflections.

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13. 

    M. Silcox

    August 10, 2014

    If you really want to get them talking about “ethical/socio-political questions,” Deliver Us From Evil is an astonishingly well-made documentary film about an abusive Catholic priest. Not for the faint of heart, though.

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14. 

    Eric Steinhart

    August 10, 2014

    I regularly teach PoR, and I avoid Christian apologetics. Since we have courses on Eastern Philosophy & Religion, my course focuses on the West. My course has three parts: ancient Greek and Roman religion (mainly Stoic and Neoplatonic theology); Christianity; and post-Christian religion (including neopaganisms and recent nontheism).

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15. 

    Jordan

    August 10, 2014

    I don’t have anything of substance to add here, but I just want to say that this thread has been incredibly useful for a graduate student just getting started teaching classes. It would be wonderful if there were others along this line for different topics.

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16. 

    Nick

    August 11, 2014

    The best I ever was able to do in a Phil.religion course involved using Aquinas primary source texts to accompany Brian Davies’ -Thomas Aquinas on Good and Evil- for the first half of the semester, followed in the second half with Nagarjuna primary texts to accompany Jan Westerhoff’s text -Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka- (not sure I have the titles exactly correct). There is plenty of interesting overlap — e.g., substantial its vs. non-substantialist metaphysics and impacts of such on soteriologies. And the students felt like they were in deep waters and so had less dismissive attitudes than I find when I teach more recent Generic-Christianity-Phil-religion.

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17. 

    Thomas D. Carroll

    August 11, 2014

    I strongly recommend Kevin Schilbrack’s recent Philosophy and the Study of Religions (Blackwell, 2014). In particular, I think his appraisal of the state of affairs in the field, such as it is, in the first chapter and his analysis in the fourth chapter of the debates over the concept of religion are particularly strong. The book is aimed mostly at sustaining/establishing a role for PR in the field of religious studies, but I think there’s a lot in his approach that is relevant to PR in philosophy departments. A PR aimed at a more critical approach to understanding the concept of religion and aimed at being more diverse in its approach towards religions would do well to take the arguments of this book into account.

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18. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    August 12, 2014

    Perhaps, after the late Ninian Smart, we should not practice “philosophy of religion(s)” so much as “philosophy of worldviews,” in other words, worldview analysis and evaluation. See for instance, Ninian’s essay, “The Philosophy of Worldviews—that is, the Philosophy of Religion Transformed,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, Vol. 23 (1981): 212-224, reprinted in Ninian Smart (Donald Wiebe, ed.), Concept and Empathy: Essays in the Study of Religion (New York: New York University Press, 1986): 72-85.

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19. 

    Kenny Pearce

    August 12, 2014

    Sobel’s book is fantastic, but only if you can assume your students have had a full semester (at least) of symbolic logic, which you probably can’t. Leibniz’s little essay “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” ( included in the Ariew and Garber collection from Hackett) is a very good text for students, though of course it’s mostly in the “for and against the existence of God” vein. In a more skeptical direction, Rowe’s little book Can God Be Free is excellent. In the end it’s primarily an argument against the existence of God, but it is very historically informed and contains deep and respectful discussion of many different ways of thinking about God (in the Western tradition).
    As far as broader treatment of religion as a cultural phenomenon, religious language might be a good topic. Here several of the essays in William Alston’s book Divine Nature and Human Language will be relevant. Most of these essays were originally published in journals and will be available to your students through JSTOR. Finally, it might be interesting to cover Wittgensteinian approaches (e.g. D. Z. Phillips).

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20. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    August 13, 2014

    Kenny, religious language is a central focus of Smart’s Reasons and Faiths cited in my list above (a book far ahead of its time in the field) and prominent “Wittgenstein approaches” (including ‘neo-Wittgensteinian philosophers) are thoroughly covered in the book listed by Kellenberger.

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