The Epistemic Benefits of Diversifying the Philosophy of Religion

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.2022.3396

Keywords:

Cognitive Diversity, Peer Disagreement, Philosophical Progress

Abstract

There have been recent calls to expand contemporary analytic philosophy of religion beyond the oft implicitly assumed Christian tradition. Instead of exploring moral reasons to expand the discipline, I argue that there are strong epistemic reasons to favour diversifying the philosophy of religion. Increasing diversity is likely to increase disagreement, and there are epistemic benefits to be gained from the existence of disagreement. I argue that such considerations quite clearly apply to the philosophy of religion, and as such that there are epistemic reasons to diversify the field. I conclude by offering a number of practical steps we can take towards achieving this end which are relatively easy to implement.

References

Bourget, David, and David J. Chalmers. 2014. “What do philosophers believe?”. Philosophical Studies 170, no. 3: 465–500. doi:10.1007/s11098–013–0259–7.

Christensen, D. 2007. “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News”. Philosophical Review 116, no. 2: 187–217. doi:10.1215/00318108–2006–035.

Cohen, L. J. 1992. An Essay on Belief and Acceptance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Draper, Paul, Ryan Nichols, The Hegeler Institute, and Sherwood J. B. Sugden. 2013. “Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion”. Monist 96, no. 3: 420–46. https://academic.oup.com/monist/article-lookup/doi/10.5840/monist201396319. doi:10.5840/monist201396319.

Draper, Paul, and J. L. Schellenberg. 2017. Renewing Philosopy of Religion: Exploratory Essays. Oxford Univ. Press.

Elgin, Catherine. 2010. “Persistent Disagreement”. In Disagreement, edited by Richard Feldman and Ted S. Warfield, 53–68. Oxford Univ. Press.

Feldman, Richard. 2011. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, edited by Alvin Goldman and Dennis Whitcomb, 137–57. Oxford Univ. Press.

Friedman, Jane. 2019. “Inquiry and Belief”. Noûs 53, no. 2: 296–315. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12222. doi:10.1111/nous.12222.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Kraay, Klaas J. 2021. “Elgin’s community-oriented steadfastness”. Synthese 198, no. 6: 4985–5008. https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11229–019–02384–6. doi:10.1007/s11229–019–02384–6.

Lackey, Jennifer. 2010. “A Justificationist View of Disagreement’s Epistemic Significance”. In Social epistemology, edited by Adrian Haddock et al., 298–325. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577477.003.0015.

Lougheed, Kirk. 2020. The Epistemic Benefits of Disagreement. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

—. 2021. “The Epistemic Benefits of Worldview Disagreement”. Social Epistemology 35, no. 1: 85–98. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2020.1794079. doi:10.1080/02691728.2020.1794079.

Matheson, J. 2015. The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement. https://nls.ldls.org.uk/welcome.html?ark:/81055/vdc_100059903624.0x000001.

Mercier, Pascal, and Dan Sperber. 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Harvard Univ. Press.

Mill, John, Stuart. 2003. On Liberty. Yale Univ. Press.

Page, Scott E. 2007. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Singer, Daniel J. 2019. “Diversity, Not Randomness, Trumps Ability”. Philosophy of Science 86, no. 1: 178–91. doi:10.1086/701074.

Thomson, Abigail. 2014. “Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics in the Social Sciences”. Journal of the AMS 61, no. 9: 1024–30.

Published

2022-03-31

How to Cite

Lougheed, Kirk. 2022. “The Epistemic Benefits of Diversifying the Philosophy of Religion”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (1):77-94. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.2022.3396.

Issue

Section

Special Issue - The Future of Philosophy of Religion