THE FLOURISHING OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

The past several decades have seen an extraordinary flourishing of philosophy of religion within the analytic tradition of philosophy. The essays that follow, written over a span of thirty-five years, are located within that development. In the essay that opens the collection, “Analytic philosophy of religion: retrospect and prospect,” I offer a general characterization of the development, along with an account of the changes within the analytic tradition of philosophy that made analytic philosophy of religion possible in the form it has taken.

Most discussions from the Western philosophical tradition that we would classify as philosophy of religion fall under one or the other of three headings. Some are philosophical reflections on some aspect of the human phenomenon of religion: reflections on religious experience, on the nature of religious language, on liturgy and ritual, on the interpretation of sacred texts, on prayer, on the essence of religion, and so forth. Some are philosophical reflections on the epistemology of religious belief: reflections on the nature of religious belief, on what is required of a religious belief for it to count as knowledge and whether some religious beliefs do in fact count as knowledge, on what is required of a religious belief to be entitled and whether some religious beliefs are in fact entitled, on the probability that one and another religious belief is true, and so forth.