A couple of years ago I heard a funny, and saddening, story about a conference that sought to bring together analytic philosophers of religion and theologians for a conference. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time, but from the report I got the event was an unmitigated disaster. Apparently someone hadn't taken into account that the philosophical background of most contemporary theologians is largely continental/French theory/postmodern. Pick your unmixable metaphor to imagine how well analytic philosophy and postmodernism go together--most certainly a recipe for disaster.
I've wondered about the influence of postmodern thought on seminaries and religious studies programs. I even posted on the subject last year after attending a regional AAR event. As I said then, there is no sign that postmodernisms influence on religious thought is on the way out. If anything postmodern thought is gaining serious ground, especially in emergent churches. This state of affairs is a little mystifying when one considers that analytic philosophy is the dominant style of philosophy in the English speaking world. So, why has analytic philosophy been spurned by so many theologians?
Thanks to Brandon I discovered R.R. Reno's recent First Things article Theology’s Continental Captivity. Reno is associate professor of theology at Creighton University, so he's probably in a better position to opine on his peers than I am. The article is lengthy, and well worth a read, but here are the points that most directly address my concerns.
"Are there currents of modern philosophy that affirm the power of reason, support the universality of truth, and defend the objectivity of knowledge? ...is there a form of contemporary philosophy that seeks foundations?... The answer is, I think, yes. It is called analytic philosophy, and it dominates the English-speaking world. Yet it seems invisible... Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, William Alston, and the rest of the Society of Christian Philosophers can meet for twenty years, but theology remains blind to ways in which analytic philosophy can contribute to the “evangelization of culture” and renewal of theology that John Paul II—and now Benedict XVI—identify as singular imperatives in the West."
"What explains the peculiar loyalty of contemporary theology to inauspicious postmodern trends? ...analytic philosophy is a scholasticism that has shifted loyalties from theology to science, most modern theologians have thought it a godless antagonist. Add the verbal aggressiveness characteristic of analytic philosophers, an intellectual arrogance that quickly dismisses as fools those uninitiated into the specialized vocabulary, and, let’s be honest, the natural human impatience with technical arguments (that old “empty formalism” complaint), and it is easy to see why modern theology would turn elsewhere"
Again "What explains the peculiar loyalty of contemporary theology to inauspicious postmodern trends? Like seeks like. Bertrand Russell repels contemporary theologians, not only in his atheism but also in his highly formal approach to intellectual problems. In contrast, those theologians gravitate to modern and postmodern continental philosophy, but not because it is particularly congenial or useful for expounding classical doctrine. … Rather, theology turns toward continental philosophy because it has become a form of theology. All too aware of the collapse of Christendom, contemporary Christian theologians are reassured by the familiarity of the idiom: “They are talking about the Big Questions, just like us.”"I'm curious as to what others think of Reno's analysis. Reno's positive claims as to why theologians gravitate towards postmodern thought seem plausible. However, I'm less certain that his negative claims about analytic philosophy could be serious barriers. I agree that there are few analytic philosophers addressing the Big Questions, though there has been some movement on the part of philosophers like Susan Wolf to address this issue. I'm more dubious about Reno's claims about verbal aggressiveness and intellectual arrogance, but I am also less likely to notice such issues.
I think the point that a lot of Continental philosophy has become theological is a good one. Perhaps the content is different, of course. It seems like most of the major continental philosophers are atheists, but end up adopting a lot of approaches found in scholastic philosophy. The problem they face is that this God is de-personalized. Closer to the Spinozist God than the Christian God. It's just that in the scholastic era there was a lot of focus on questions of God that were also de-personalized.
But as Levinas shows, even when we get into the personal questions the same issues pop up.
I suspect though that for traditional theology a lot of Continental theology will end up being a bit of a danger. It seems to me to lead naturally to some of the heresies that beset Christian mystics in the medieval era and perhaps too much de facto neo-Platonism.
The other issue, also touched upon in the First Things essay, is the issue of foundationalism. While clearly anti-foundationalism is alive and well in analytic thought I sometimes wonder how theologically this issue of foundations is to be taken. One can take it, like Marion does, as a kind of appeal to negative theology. That it is presumptious to suppose we can know foundationally. Yet it also seems, especially in the Protestant tradition, that foundationalism offers a lot of attraction.
I suspect finally that the metaphysics of the soul ends up being key as well. Many theologians will end up being attracted to a theology of the soul which demands Internalism. Yet most Continental philosophy (whether recognized or not) entails a kind of Externalism. Very common in the medieval era of course, but perhaps problematic to some thinkers.
Matthew, thanks for the link to your previous posting on this issue, and to Reno's article.
I suspect that the reason for the hegemony of continental philosophy within Catholicism at least are, in part, geographical. The Vatican is in Europe, Pope John Paul II had a previous career as Karol Wojtyla, Polish philosopher, and the largest Catholic population in the world is in Latin America.
Latin American and Polish thinkers have made important contributions to the study of logic, the study of which is central to analytical philosophy. Still, I think it is fair to say that in both these regions of the world, the most urgent philosophical question in the latter part of the twentieth century was that of evaluating and responding to Marxism. As an analytical philosopher, I feel left out of that debate. For me, Marx is a political philosopher an economist. I'm not a political philosopher, and have little interest in economics, so why study Marx?
If one goes back to Vatican II, the single most influentail theologian at that council was probably Karl Rahner. (I don't think that Rahner, or indeed any single figure, dominated the council: in accounts written at the time by conservatives, it is clear that Rahner represented everything they feared, and contemporary writers viewed the council as a major defeat for the conservatives. However, Rahner's own letters at the time paint a different picture - but I digress). To understand and engage with Rahner, one naturally turns to Heidegger. I have made a real effort to understand Heidegger, but I just don't get him (my inability to appreciate Heidegger was one factor that made me become an analytical philosopher in the first place).
Of course, Fides Et Ratio is a Papal Encyclical written by John Paul II, not a philosophical treatise written by Karol Wojtyla, and in it the Pope clearly rejects the idea that the Church has a single approved philosophy, as Reno points out. Still, I've found that Catholic philosophers who have built up an expertise in the study of Karol Wojtyla consider that this gives them a special advantage in interpreting Fides Et Ratio.
I like what Reno has to say about why analytical philosophy is specially suited to carry out the tasks mandated by Fides Et Ratio, and there is a healthy tradition of Catholics making important contributions to analytical philosophy. But when I look at Catholic theology as it is, and at its recent past, the predominant philosophical influences have been from outside the analytical tradition. Once a year, I teach a class on Modern Roman Catholicism, and, although I hope that analytic philosophy will play a major role in the future of Catholic thinking, I refer barely, if at all, to analytical philosophy in this course.
Another set of factors that may have been in play in the continentalization of Catholic theology is that many of Husserl's circle either were or became Catholic -- Max Scheler (who was Catholic for a while), while never Husserl's student, did similar sort of phenomenological work, although with an emphasis on sentiments and emotions; and Edith Stein (who converted to Catholicism) was arguably Husserl's most important student, since she helped Husserl put together many of his later works, and was also heavily influenced by Scheler. Karol Wojtyla, of course, did his philosophical work under the influence of Scheler and Stein.
But I agree with Ben that Rahner probably has a lot to do with it; Rahner had taken Heidegger's seminar and interacted with him throughout his career. In the usual sort of fadism that sweeps across graduate departments when a major thinker in the field goes in a particular direction, a lot of Catholic graduate students in theology went running like lemmings to interact with Heidegger, because that was the hot thing to do.
And theology as a discipline, because it is so oriented on texts, tends to borrow quite a bit from English departments; and a good deal of postmodernism-lite came with it. In undergrad I double-majored in Theology and Philosophy at a Catholic university; and my Old Testament classes, taught by a Dominican nun, were more about deconstruction than about the Old Testament. (But in fairness, there was some mix in the department; my New Testament classes were all source criticism, my systematic theology classes were all Whitehead, and large chunks of my history of Christianity classes were liberation theology.)
To offer a different perspective, from a student/layman's view, it's been my impression that quite a lot of evangelical theological and philosophical thought finds root directly within the analytic tradition. Perhaps this is a consequence of living in Southern California with Biola being such a dominant evangelical presence (where Biola is undeniably analytic in orientation). Anecdotally I find that most folks in this area who think about the intersection of theology and philosophy haven't even felt the presence of 20th century continental thought except, perhaps, by way of Monty Python's "philosophy song" (something about drinking Heidegger under the table I guess).
One might still wonder about theologians proper of course, and I can't speak to that. In So Cal evangelicalism it seems to me difficult to separate the theologians from the philosophers. The role of thinking is a bit more confused in this tradition (in my opinion) and there isn't a clear place for the theologian like the kind you might have in Catholicism or Reformed/Lutheran traditions.
Finally, and no offense to McLaren, but I just can't bring myself to think of the emergent movement as being philosophically savvy at all and therefore I suspect that it's not quite correct to think of post-modernism as gaining ground via the emergent movement. No matter how many times these guys talk about post-modernity (or their dislike for that term), do they really read and preach Foucalt, Lacan and Baudrillard? There's a difference between inhabiting the space opened up by analytic philosophy's critique of anti-foundationalism and, say, being a Heideggerian. And then, of course, there's also just good old-fashioned new age sentiment with a Christian facade - which isn't analytic, continental or philosophical.
Oops, the above should read "analytic philosophy's critique of foundationalism" - not "anti-foundationalism". :)
It's a pretty obvious point (that Reno is aware of), but I think a lot of this must have something to do with the fact that the beginning proponents of analytic philosophy, ie logical empiricism/positivism was so opposed to metaphysics/theology as something that would only be discussed from the point of view of British or German Idealism. Our tradition was born out of an antagonism to all things metaphysical and therefore kept itself from addressing issues relevant to or even thought to be worth considering for the religiously minded. Surely this led to those who would have an interest in philosophy of religion/theology to flee towards the continent. It was just assumed that these weren't the kinds of questions you could address from the point of view of an analytic philosopher. As a result there was a dearth of work being done on these subjects within the analytic tradition. At the same time continental philosophy welcomed the metaphysically -minded along with the rest of the refugees (the aesthetician, etc) and provided a method and set of assumptions that proved applicable to questions of God.
While philosophy of religion and metaphysics have become less despised forms of philosophy within the analytic tradition, we have still found ourselves at the margins of the discipline and the remnants of logical positivism's criticisms of metaphysical questions has left at least a distaste in the mouths of many people currently educated in the analytic tradition. Things are improving but the continental tradition still dominates theology, providing more research and educating more students.
However, analytic philosophy certainly provides a good deal of worthwhile tools and methods that can fruitfully be applied to theology. It takes a willingness to appreciate both theological questions and the tools of analytic philosophy in order for one to decide to do this work. The trend seems to be towards tolerance of religious questions, but it seems unlikely that philosophy of religion/theology will gain the prominence of philosophy of language/mind in the analytic tradition. That this is the case is unfortunate, since philosophy should be willing to address any ideas of great importance without lapsing into the dogmatism of judging them nonsensical ab initio.
Sam, it may be that philosophy of religion as a discipline is at the margins of analytic philosophy, but if "we" refers to philosophers of religon then I think you're just wrong. If you intended to include metaphysics in that, then you're hopelessly wrong, but I don't know if your inclusion of metaphysics at the beginning of that sentence was supposed to be including it in the "we".
There's no question that Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman, Trenton Merricks, Paul Moser, John Hawthorne, William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, William Lycan, Keith DeRose, Jon Kvanvig, and a host of other theists who have published important work in philosophy of religion are at the center of core work in analytic philosophy. Some of the most prominent core analytic types who are not theists have done work in analytic philosophy of religion as well, including David Lewis, Michael Tooley, John Perry, Ernest Sosa, Ted Sider, Graham Oppy.
I'm sure Jeremy's right, here. The view Sam's expressing is pretty dated. A great deal of analytic metaphysics (having taken off in the late 60's and getting a huge impetus shortly thereafter from Lewis' work) abandoned positivist reservations long ago. Recently Sider's 'Four-Dimensionalism', Merricks', 'Objects and Persons', van Inwagen's 'Material Beings', Hudson's 'Materialist Metaphysics of the Person', are all examples of excellent analytic metaphysics. And all unabashedly speculative.
There remain some reservations concerning philosophy of religion. Partly this is because you can't do good philosophy of religion unless you have a good idea of what is going on in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, etc. And there is no doubt some philosophy of religion getting into print that is just underinformed in these areas. But I'm certain that this is not for long. Things are changing quickly. A great example is J. Howard Sobel's 'Logic and Theism'. It is a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy in the philosophy of religion. But, to be frank, Plantinga's (much earlier) 'Nature of Necessity' is just as much a tour de force in philosophy of religion (and much else).
But even the best philosophy of religion, I think, will rarely be center-screen in the same way that philosophy of law and philosophy of biology are rarely the center of philosophical discussion. But I'm not sure there's much to worry about there.
Let me clarify something here:
I wasn't saying that the same hostility towards metaphysics/philosophy of religion remains from the postivists, or that metaphysics isn't a hot field right now, but that the analytic tradition as a whole (1) kept itself out of the realm of philosophy of religion/theology for long enough that continental philosophy was able to attain a monopoly and take over the discourse, and that (2) there remains at least some residue of disinterest in doing philosophy of religion/theology, which must have its roots in the origins of the analytic tradition
The palmy days of positivism culminated in the 50's. Occasional sympathizers aside not much from that crowd since. So I'm guessing you mean the thirty years of analytic philosophy from influence of the Tractatus, around the late 20's till the 50's. What was happening in continental philosophy at the time? Being and Time wasn't published until (what?) the 30's and could not have had much influence until the 40's. Nothing from Sartre until mid-40's or something. I don't see how this span of 10 yrs could have had such an impact in favor of continental philosophy.
It seems more likely to me that first the personal focus of (much of) continental philosophy was more inviting theologically as it has been in literature and literary theory. But also that, unlike analytic philosophy, continental philosophy has seemed a last bastion against scientism. Analytic philosophy has rather emulated the sciences. All-too-simple, I concede, but it seems that something in the vicinity this is the explanation.
"What was happening in continental philosophy at the time?"
Bergson, Scheler, Husserl, Jaspers... all important continental philosophers who would be much more appealing to someone (for example, Karol Wojtyła... future John Paul II) interested in theology and religion than, say, Schlick, Ayer, and Russell.
I think I agreed that such philosophers would be more appealing. But Jaspers' philosophical work didn't come out until the mid-30's somewhere. Husserl's Logical Investigations was published earlier, but that isn't the stuff that interests phenomenologists, I take it. Work from students like Scheler and von Hilderbrand even later.
Your view, as far as I can tell, was that the influence of continental philosophy in the philosophy of religion and theology was due to a lapse of interest in these areas among analytic philosophers. Wasn't that it?
I claimed that that lapse seems too brief for it to matter much. I think I said the influence of continental philosophy seemed to be due, rather, to the anti-scientism and the focus on the personal found in continental philosophy. The personal stuff is certainly abundantly found in Stein, von Hilderbrand and Wojtyla. On the other hand, I am not an historian of ideas. So my speculations on the question don't matter much.
I read the influence of positivism a little differently. From my (sparse) reading of and interaction with theologians, it appears to me that two generations ago, theology was so fundamentally and radically attacked by positivism and OL philosophy that they got scared off, so to speak. (Maybe more charitably, they declined to continue fruitless intellectual encounters.) Since then, it's just been a matter of textual tradition: theologians don't read analytic philosophy because their teachers didn't read it, etc. I have run across theologians using arguments that haven't been around in analytic philosophy for thirty years--e.g. arguments from necessity to analyticity.
On another note, here is a project that I wish some knowledgeable analytic philosopher would undertake: in Aquinas and elsewhere in the Xn tradition, "being" is a big deal. In the analytic tradition, "being" is about the least interesting thing an entity can do (as it were). It's a mere existential quantifier. At least some of the attraction of Heidegger is that he takes "Being" so seriously. Is there some aspect of "being" that analytics have missed?
"In the analytic tradition, "being" is about the least interesting thing an entity can do (as it were). It's a mere existential quantifier"
Can't see why you say that. There are all sorts of interesting positions on existence and being in the analytic tradition. There are Meinongians that hold that there are objects that have being but not existence. There are Eternalists that think that there exist some objects that are not present. There are Presentists that maintain that the only objects that exist are present. There are Possiblists that maintain that there exist non-actual objects. And there are of course combinations of these. So, lots of interesting views on existence and being among analytic metaphysicians.
There are Meinongians that hold that there are objects that have being but not existence. There are Eternalists that think that there exist some objects that are not present. There are Presentists that maintain that the only objects that exist are present. There are Possiblists that maintain that there exist non-actual objects. And there are of course combinations of these. So, lots of interesting views on existence and being among analytic metaphysicians.
With the exception of the first example, these are all queries into what exists. The real issue isn't just what exists but just what is existence and of close importance, just what is being?
Analytic philosophers dealings with this topic have been too little, too late. And I would also add... too bizarre.
Yes, some of it is bizarre. But to be fair, it's at least as bizarre (not to say, creepy) to be (gulp!) disintering Thomistic corpses. Wouldn't you say?
Oh I have no disagreement whatsoever that there are some prima facie bizarre ideas within Thomistic philosophy. The issue of being aside, I would say that a Thomistic understanding of divine cognition is even more bizare, taken in isolation from the rest of the corpus.
Where I take issue with the a lot of analytic philosophers though, is where they address the issue of being in their ontology. It is often times the last thing dealt with, when it ought to be the first thing addressed. Working out your theory of being last leads to all sorts of stretches, such as Morelands attempt in his book on universals. Existence and being seems to be a minor issue on the peripherie. To a Thomist, it is the first thing that needs to be dealt with, and the rest of the Thomistic ontology makes sense from there.
Of course, I am definitely not saying that the continental philosophers have got it right. Analytic philosophers definitely have the better set of conceptual tools to address it. I just wish they would put more effort into it.
I need to stick up for Moreland a bit. Now, he may not hit you where it counts when we make distinctions between being and existence, but I know too well that he does emphasize emphatically a first philosophy approach to this issue. Although, he deals with the issue of existence at the posterior of his work on universals, that does not entail that he does not consider the issue of fundamental importance, ala he and Craig's work, Philosophical Foundations..., and his work with Rae, Body and Soul. Both stress the importance of answering the issue of existence or being prior to further metaphysical work, albeit, not completely sympathetic with all Thomists. Also, having taken him for a metaphysics class, it was the first issue discussed and emphasized as being completely crucial and fundamental.
Sorry for the tangent of sorts, but I just thought he is not a good example to support your position.