This panel examines unconventional and underutilized sources for philosophy of religion. It also draws from non-philosophical methodologies (history and social theory, for example) in order to see how they might inform philosophical inquiry. Some of the papers look at major figures in the humanities and social sciences, like Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon, who are well known but not necessarily for the bearing that their work has on religion. One paper examines the status of idealism in an important Indian Buddhist text. Another paper explores the ways in which spirituality and spiritual practices might inform philosophy of religion, specifically in relation to the topic of hope.
Examining Frantz Fanon’s references to religion and fetishism in Black Skins, White Masks, this paper argues that religion is central to his conception of the human in Western colonial discourse, and to his conception of the Black as what the human excludes. Drawing on his analysis of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, it shows how the role of religion in articulating Blackness is negotiated through comparison to Jewishness as another fetishized object of European modernity.
In this paper I make a case for and explore the underappreciated relation between spirituality and hope. In the first part of the paper I propose a broad account of spirituality that makes room for secular and non-doxastic forms, and argue that hope is a necessary constituent of spirituality so understood. In the second part of the paper I dig into this observation, and argue that understanding this relation sheds new light on the character of spirituality as embodying techniques for developing and improving the ways that we hope and the ways that we envision the future.
Saidiyah Hartman describes her method as one that excavates the invisible and unspoken elements of the archive and brings their possibilities to the fore through the speculative. Such a method has much to inform the philosophical field of Religious Studies. Given the nebulous nature of the notion of religion, there is irony in the disciplinary field being bound to a more rational philosophical approach. The speculative nature of Hartman’s method in many ways resonates with the speculative nature of religion itself. It is my desire and intention in this paper to focus on the method of “critical fabulation” that Hartman both coined and constructed in her article, “Venus in Two Acts” and employs in her latest book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In Wayward Lives, Hartman engages themes of freedom, beauty, self-fashioning, morality, and desire, all of which are serious intellectual pursuits in the philosophical study of religion.
It is commonly thought that verses 11-15 in Vasubandhu’s Viṃśikā encapsulate by his lights a sound argument for idealism. This paper argues that the ostensibly uninteresting concluding verse and his comment thereon suggests otherwise. There, Vasubandhu maintains that a demonstration of the position that there is only representation (vijñapti-mātratā) is beyond the reach of reason (tarka-aviṣaya). If this paper’s interpretation of Vasubandhu’s project is sound, a logical demonstration of vijñapti-mātratā was not in the first place meant to ground the truth thereof. What Vasubandhu offers in verses 11-15 is a putatively valid argument—an argument whose conclusion follows from its premises. But what he self-avowedly does not offer is a necessarily sound argument—or so I shall argue.