PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION FOR A NEW CENTURY

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION FOR A NEW CENTURY

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION Volume25 The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION FORA NEW CENTURY Essays in Honor of Eugene Thomas Long Edited by JEREMIAH HACKETT University of South Carolina, Columbia, U.S.A. and JERALD WALLULIS University of South Carolina, Columbia, U.S.A. SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-90-481-6587-2 ISBN 978-1-4020-2074-2 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-2074-2 Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2004 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004

Table of Contents List of Authors... vii Preface... ix Jeremiah Hackett and Jerald Wallulis Philosophy of Religion for a New Century: Introduction... 1 William Power The Future of Religion in the West: Prospects at the Beginning of a Millennium... 15 Louis Dupre The Grammar of Transcendence... 25 Calvin 0. Schrag Does Philosophy Tolerate Christening? Thomas Aquinas and the Notion of Christian Philosophy... 3 7 Jorge J. E. Gracia God in the Summa Theologiae: Entity or Event?... 63 Fergus Kerr Morality and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts... 81 David Ray Griffin Value Judgments, God, and Ecological Ecumenism... 105 Frederick Ferre An Audience for Philosophy of Religion?... 133 D. Z. Phillips What's a Philosopher of Religion to Do?... 147 Ronald L. Hall Nietzsche and Christians with Beautiful Feet..... 157 Alistair Kee The Religious (Re)Turn in Recent French Philosophy... 173 Thomas R. Flynn v

VI CONTENTS Instances: Levinas on Art and Truth... 187 Hent de Vries Appropriating Beginnings: Creation and Natality... 211 Patricia Altenbemd Johnson 'Moralizing' Love In Philosophy of Religion... 227 Pamela Sue Anderson The Role of Concepts of God in Cross Cultural Comparative Theology... 243 Robert Cummings Neville God and Nothingness: Two Sides of the Same Coin?... 261 Robert E. Carter Universal Religion and Comparative Philosophy... 279 Keith E. Yandell Religion and Politics, Fear and Duty... 307 Philip L. Quinn On the Proper Roles of Secular Reason and Religious Reason in a Liberal Democracy... 329 James F. Harris Eugene Thomas Long: A Brief Biography... 349 The Works of Eugene Thomas Long... 353 Index... 361

List of Authors Pamela Sue Anderson is Dean, and Fellow in Philosophy, Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. Robert E. Carter is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Trent University. Hent De Vries is Chair of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). He is also Professor at the Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Louis Dupre is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor Emeritus at Yale University. Fredrick Ferre is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Georgia. Thomas R. Flynn is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. David Ray Griffin is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University and Director of the Center for Process Studies. Jorge J. E. Gracia is Samuel P. Capen Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Jeremiah M. Hackett is Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. Ronald L. Hall is Professor of Philosophy at Stetson University, DeLand, Florida. James F. Harris is Haserot Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Department of Philosophy, College of William and Mary. Vll

viii LIST OF AUTHORS Patricia Altenbernd Johnson is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Dayton. Alistair Kee is Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at University of Edinburgh. Fergus Kerr is Regent of Studies, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Robert Cummings Neville is Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Theology and Dean of the School of Theology at Boston University. D.Z. Phillips is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Rush Rhees Professor Emeritus at the University of Wales, Swansea. William L. Power is Professor of Religion at the University of Georgia. Philip L. Quinn is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Calvin 0. Schrag is the George Ade Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. Jerald T. Wallulis is Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. Keith E. Yandell is the Julius R. Weinberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin.

PREFACE An anthology of essays titled Philosophy of Religion for a New Century could appear to claim a privileged vantage point towards the future of a highly significant field of philosophy. Such privilege would be a peculiarly bold thing to claim on the part of two editors whose primary specializations lie outside the field and whose aim is to compile a Festschrift in honor of Eugene Thomas Long. However, the contributions of the honoree to the field of the philosophy of religion not only assisted in the compilation of this set of essays. His newly appeared history of the recent past century in the philosophy of religion stimulated, we believe in a quite proper fashion, the future orientation of this volume's title and contents. Twentieth-Century Western Philosophy of Religion: 1900-2000, is the culminating achievement of a publishing career of Eugene Thomas Long which includes nine other books or edited volumes, more than fifty essays, and numerous book reviews in the philosophy of religion (Please see the brief biography and list of works at the end of this volume for more details). This major publication is also the first volume of the "Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion" under his editorship for Kluwer Academic Press (which also publishes The International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, under his editorship since 1990). The history possesses its greatest significance for this volume in terms of the "narrative map" (a felicitous phrase from the Introduction to this volume by William Power) that it offers for a century of thinking in the philosophy of religion. This narrative map has given the editors a way of uniting the past and present of the field and in this way, as Hans-Georg Gadamer explains, an accompanying ability to look towards the future, "There is... no prophesying into the future which is not able to unite the past, what has been, with what is present and with what we must be aware of." 1 Long's history persuaded us that traditional boundaries between the secular and the religious and between the religious and anti-religious were breaking down. Furthermore, a developing global awareness has challenged the field to recast the traditional problematic of western philosophy of religion and rethink many of its fundamental concepts. Whereas 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, tr. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (SUNY Press: Albany, 1992), p.222. ix

X J. HACKETT AND J. WALLULIS dogmatically opposed frames of mind which saw only goodness or selfdeception and harm in religion appeared to be fading, a new openness to diverse experiences of otherness and transcendence is recognized and affirmed at the end of Long's volume. It is from this newly acquired sense of "what we must be aware of' in the field of the philosophy of religion that we were able to plan and host a conference on "Philosophy of Religion at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" at the University of South Carolina on April 5-6, 2002. With this narrative orientation toward diversity and with the larger map provided by Long's history of the numerous traditions in the field, we invited a diverse group of philosophers of religion representing European, Anglo-American, Thomist, Comparative, Feminist and Process ways of thinking. We asked them to address topics that they considered to be of the greatest present import to their field and also to contribute to this volume of essays. Almost all of the original invitees agreed to attend, and those that were unable to attend also agreed to contribute. The invitees were joined in the conference by respondents who were invited to respond to the invited papers and also to develop papers of their own. In this case, all of the respondents accepted the invitation to participate in the conference and nearly all have added contributions to the anthology. The remaining contributions came from further invitees who both wanted to participate in the Festschrift and, equally important, wanted to address the future of their field from their own distinct perspectives. Thus by both historical reflection on the philosophy of religion and by the organizational design of the conference, we have compiled a multitraditional, multi-perspectival, multi-positional collection of essays. Summaries of their contents, as well as of Long's historical narrative map, have been provided by William Power in the Introduction that follows this Preface. Our belief, which we leave open to the reader's judgment, is that the assembled collection of perspectives and traditions not only honors Eugene Thomas Long but also offers a representative sampling of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of religion. As for the reference in the title of the volume to "the new century," our judgment as editors is that the contributors do give us a look into the future, but precisely insofar as they also have a keen sense of the past and of what must be thought in the present from the context of their own traditions of thought. Moreover, perhaps their most important indication of the future lies in the pluralism of their approaches and the diversity of the prescriptions that they make. However, it is probably also safe to say that the unforeseen developments of the field of the philosophy of religion remain unprophesied in this volume. Nevertheless, this may not be a defect but rather a consequence of being in a field with a greater historical awareness of itself at the beginning of a new century than at the beginning of the past century. And in this way it may also attest to and be a further tribute to the continuity

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi which Eugene Long has provided the philosophy of religion through his scholarship, editorships, and historical vision. We have many people to acknowledge and thank for their crucial contributions to both the conference and this anthology: First of all, we acknowledge all of the contributors to this volume and thank them for responding to the invitation to participate in a Festschrift for Eugene Long. We thank in particular William Power for not only contributing his own ideas but providing a summary of others' contributions in this volume's Introduction. We wish to thank the Matchette Foundation and The South Carolina Humanities Council for their support of the conference, "Philosophy of Religion at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century," held on April 5-6, 2002. The production of this volume is made possible through their generosity. We thank Davis Baird and the Department of Philosophy and Carl Evans and the Department of Religious Studies for their financial assistance. We are indebted to Margaret Week, Joan Amado, Jennifer Emmert, Sara Shady, and David Przekupowski for their invaluable assistance at the conference. Finally, we wish to thank Lyn Long, Kathy Long Mahoney, Scott Long, and other members of the Long family for their cheerfulness and help with the conference. We also thank Lyn in particular for her help with the brief biography and list of works. We also wish and need to thank those who played such an important role in the preparation and completion of the manuscript of this volume, in particular, Margaret Week, secretary for the journal, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion; Elna Corwin, College of Liberal Arts Computing Lab; and Floor Oosting, editor for Kluwer Academic Press. Finally we wish to honor Eugene Long ourselves and thank him (1) for his scholarship in the philosophy of religion, (2) his valued assistance to this volume, and, above all, (3) for his collegiality and friendship during his thirty-two year career at the University of South Carolina. Jeremiah Hackett Jerald Wallulis

Eugene Thomas Long