Philosophy of Religion
Analytical "philosophy of religion," still in its infancy in the 1960s, has developed markedly since then. Other approaches have certainly continued to play a part in philosophy of religion written in English, even more so in other languages. Process philosophy, for example, inspired by the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and exemplified in the ongoing work of Charles Hartshorne and others, has retained influence in philosophy of religion and in theology, probably more than in other areas of philosophy. Phenomenology, postmodernism, and other approaches characteristic of the European continent inspire important contributions to the subject. Indeed, there is often not a sharp line between different approaches. Continental writers such as Søren Kierkegaard figure extensively in undoubtedly analytical writing about religion, and analytical philosophy of religion makes such extensive use of medieval material as to be more or less continuous with neoscholastic treatments of the subject.
Although there had been a few earlier analytical essays about various religious issues, the main development of analytical philosophy of religion may be said to have begun in the 1950s with discussion of the "logical positivist" challenge to the cognitive significance of religious language. Most analytical philosophers then held, or were strongly tempted to hold, as an empiricist principle, that every (logically contingent) assertion, in order to have any cognitive meaning, must be verifiable or, more broadly, testable, in principle, by experience.
This page contains 201 words.
Philosophy of Religion article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 4,173 words
(approx. 14 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Philosophy of religion Article
