Redefining Religious Truth as a Challenge for Philosophy of Religion

One of the most important features of contemporary Western societies is the rise of pluralism. Whereas theism used to serve as a common ground to discuss the truth-claims of religion, this approach seems to have lost much of its plausibility. What I want to argue in this article is that philosophy of religion as a critical intellectual activity still cannot do without the notion of religious truth, but also that it needs to redefine this truth in an existential way, i.e. by interpreting religions as concrete ways of life. In this paper I develop this idea of religious truth by interpreting religions as traditions of wisdom, being a kind of truth that is able to orientate humans’ lives without being swayed by the issues of the day. In order to substantiate my interpretation I discuss three fundamental aspects of wisdom, viz. the fact that it rests on a broadened idea of reason, the way in which it discovers the universal in the particular, and the insight that all life-orientations are based on a principle that is subjectively adequate, but objectively inadequate

Living as if God exists: Looking for Common Ground in Times of Radical Pluralism

This paper offers some comments on some metaphysical and epistemological claims of theological realism from the perspective of continental philosophy of religion, thereby taking the work of Soskice and Hick as paradigmatic for this kind of philosophical theology. The first comment regards the fact that theological realism considers religious and theological propositions as ways to depict or represent reality, and hence aims to bring them as much as possible in line with scientific ones. Some contemporary French philosophers criticize such a representing, depicting knowledge of God, because it encapsulates the divine reality in mundane, specifically scientific categories. eventually, theological realism runs the risk of annihilating God’s radical transcendence and reducing religion to an alternative scientific theory. The second comment tries to explore whether one can affirm God’s reality from a practical perspective, as a postulate of reason, and whether such an approach could serve as a common ground for religious and secular ways of life in times of radical pluralism. This comment begins by investigating the regulative character of Kant’s idea of God as the highest idea of reason, which not only orientates our theoretical enquiries, but also our moral actions. Although this idea is only a heuristic fiction for theoretical reason, God’s existence has to be affirmed on practical grounds, as a symbolic reality that gives orientation to people’s lives

Editorial

Editorial The articles of this issue of Tattva – Journal of Philosophy discuss several important philosophical problems, which are closely linked to ongoing debates about ethics, technology, and religion. Abey Koshy’s paper “Deconstructive Turn of Ethics: Subversion of Self-Identity in Derrida and Levinas” argues that French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas gives an ethical turn to deconstructive philosophy, which was introduced by Jacques Derrida and offered an alternative way of reading texts. By applying the praxis of deconstruction to the ethical field Levinas subverts the traditional view of the human being as having a stable self-identity and serving as the unique reference point for its relation to the world, including the other person. The fundamental problem of this idea is that it negates the alterity of the other in a concrete ethical situation, thus reducing him or her to a variant of the self. By showing that the autonomous ‘I’ is a construction that needs to be deconstructed Levinas makes room for an alternative view of ethical responsibility, which guarantees a passage from the reals of the self to the that of otherness. The second article, “Moore on Scepticism & Certainty”, by Anandasagar analyses George Edward Moore’s proof of the external world and his discussion with Descartes’ famous dream argument. Moore has weakened this argument by showing that it is inconsistent. The author then highlights Moore’s claim that empirical propositions are certain and offers a logical explanation of this claim. The central systematic focus of this paper is the confrontation between scepticism and common sense, and the author argues that Moore succeeds to refute scepticism on the basis of common sense. In Moore’s view, the task of philosophy is confined to analysing the propositions supplied by common sense, which does not include establishing the truth or falsity of these propositions. The next article by Kopal, entitled “The Art in Artificial: Locating the Artist in Machines”, discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on art production, a question that has gained a lot of traction due to the rapid spread of ChatGPT and other AI systems. The author explores the ways and means by which AI is able to make art and sometimes even fares better in this than human-made art. This is because AI is better at deconceptualisation and dissimilar juxtaposition, resulting in more creative works of art, although the drawback of these characteristics is that AI may produce nonsensical and absurd outcomes. The author concludes that works of art, produced by AI, deserve appraisal and encouragement. The fourth paper of this issue is written by James Sundar Aaron John Samuel, and is entitled “St. Paul’s discourse and dialogue with King Agrippa and Governor Festus as a model for contemporary inter-religious understanding and communication”. It starts with a detailed textual analysis of Saint Paul’s dialogues with two rulers of different religious backgrounds about the central truth claims of Christian faith (the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus). In these dialogues, Paul uses rhetoric to argue the reasonability of his claims, thereby applying three ingredients for persuasive communication: ethos, referring to his credibility as a speaker, pathos, appealing to the emotion of his dialogue partners, and logos, referring to the content and the logic of his argument. The author argues that Paul’s threefold rhetorical method to discuss the truth of Christian faith offers a model for peaceful inter-religious communication in our times. The final article is by Kamalpreet Kaur, and is entitled “Indian Ethics: Essence, Theory and Practice”. The author uses the difference between ethics, which is intuitive and comes close to innate and inclusive values, and morals, which is rational and law-bound, to point out the specificity of the ethical tradition in India. The fact that this tradition relies more on folktales than on rational argument and thus is more pragmatic than principled shows its uniqueness. Dharma, which summarizes the Indian ethical tradition, constitutes the ethical laws of the universe, harmonizing moral life in a way similar to how the laws of nature regulate the physical world. This means that this kind of ethics, embedding the idea of universal justice, involves responsibility in its widest sense, responsibility for the whole cosmos, yet not in the form of any external compulsion. Therefore, the author argues, Indian ethics serves as a complement to Western rational morals. On behalf of the editorial board, I wish you a lot of intellectual pleasure in reading the articles of this issue and hope that they may stimulate your philosophical thinking and discussions about vital questions concerning our relationship with the other, the importance of common sense for our knowledge of the outside world, the impact of new technical developments upon the arts, the relevance of rhetoric for interreligious dialogue, and the contribution of Indian ethical traditions to the development of a global ethics.   Peter Jonkers Editor-in-chie

How to Respond to Conflicts over Value Pluralism?

This paper starts with arguing that the main reason why value pluralism has become conflictual is that it challenges people’s socio-cultural identity. The next section gives a summary of recent sociological research on socio-cultural tensions and conflicts in the Netherlands and Europe. They are closely linked to “globalization issues,” such as cosmopolitism, immigration, and cultural integration. This shows that the prediction of the modernization theory, according to which substantial socio-cultural values would be replaced by a universalist, procedural ethics, has not come true. The third section discusses the philosophical reasons of the potentially conflictual character of today’s value conflicts: the fragility of socio-cultural identity, the spread of the culture of expressive individualism and the ethics of authenticity, and the influence of the (politics of) recognition of socio-cultural differences. The fourth section discusses two philosophical responses to the conflictual character of value pluralism. First, there is Taylor’s plea for a broadening of our socio-cultural horizon and a transformation of our common standards of (value-)judgments, based on his idea of a fusion of cultural horizons. In spite of its obvious merits, Taylor underestimates the degree of cultural distance that characterizes many instances of value pluralism. Second, there is an idea of cultural hospitality, which is an application of Ricoeur’s idea of linguistic hospitality to the cultural sphere. It is more modest than Taylor’s proposal, since it recognizes the unbridgeable gap that separates different cultures and their values. Another even more modest suggestion to diminish the conflictual character of value pluralism is the virtue of tolerance, which combines the idea that I have good reasons for my value attachments with the recognition that my values are not the completion of the ideal of human existence