The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology. Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science. Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century. Added to PP index Total downloads 1 1,, of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 1 , of 2,, How can I increase my downloads? Monthly downloads Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart. Sign in to use this feature. This article has no associated abstract. No keywords specified fix it. Both argue that the Father God is an idealized projection of masculine identity and that the process of women's becoming divine is imperative.
Both Daly and Irigaray urge nothing less than an overturning of the symbolic order and of language itself. Both are first and foremost philosophers of the passions, seeking to encompass the elements of earth, air, fire, and water within their visions. Each in her own way has helped to forge a radical feminist consensus that spirituality is to be exalted above doctrine, and that patriarchal conceptions of God as any kind of objective reality must be deconstructed so that female subjectivity might become more expansive and free.
Both reject reformist moves in the philosophy of religion as remaining inscribed within a phallocentric economy that evokes a god whose self-giving love is only accessible through fathers and sons and their representatives. The early Daly carved out a philosophy of religion largely consonant with the position cited in 4. Towards a Philosophy of Women's Liberation []. In these terms, Daly provides an ontological analysis of the urge toward transcendence, or participation in be-ing. Here the urge to transcendence is raised to the cosmic scale, and the vision of peace, justice, and ecological harmony that Daly projects bears a close resemblance to prophetic biblical texts.
The quest for Quintessence is the most Desperate response I know to the call of the Wild. She analyzes Quintessence as the highest essence, above the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth; it is what permeates all nature, the Spirit that gives life and vitality to the whole universe. Although it can be blocked or partly destroyed by violence and pornography, poverty, racism, medical and scientific exploitation, and the threat of ecological and nuclear destruction, its apparent invincibility imparts an important measure of transcendence.
Here the dialectic shifts subtly from the earlier balance maintained between immanence and transcendence, and tips in favor of a divine that is purely immanent within the female Self. Rather than being the divine milieu within which the self lives, the divine is only alive within the self. The gynocentric emphasis of Daly's later writings will open her to the same critical questions posed about Irigaray's woman-centered writings.
Can they do justice to differences that figure in discussions of race, class, ethnic origins, and so forth? Do they reinstall sexual difference with old stereotypes left intact, trapping women once more within the parameters of their sexuality and physicality? Have they romanticized difference rather than theorizing it?
Daly's intent was to create a trans-cultural, i. Meister Eckhart could write: It is free from all names, and altogether unimpeded, untrammeled, and free from all modes, as God is free and untrammeled in Himself.
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Therefore, it need not be subjected to the judgment of an institutional church. So too Daly writes: It is a powerful theme in Hegel who was influenced by medieval mysticism and in Feuerbach, and it also pervades Daly's philosophy of religion. Daly's philosophy of religion was plugged into the Promethean myth, but she also added an original contribution. She explicitly expanded it to include women.
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Then she performed a reversal, and restricted it to women—although this reversal, too, has deep roots in the Western tradition, specifically, Iranian and biblical apocalypticism. At the same time, Daly could be rapturously optimistic about those women who do escape male power and begin to search and spin.
More than Daly, Luce Irigaray's writings have proved to be a provocative stimulus for a number of feminist philosophers of religion Anderson ; Deutscher , ; Hollywood , ; Jantzen Both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, Irigaray aims to recuperate the repressed feminine. Reversing traditional incarnational doctrine, she speaks of flesh made word instead of word made flesh.
Imagining both sexual difference and divine otherness, Irigaray coins the sensible transcendental to overcome the split between transcendence mind or spirit and sensibility body. Unlike Daly, however, Irigaray argues that a spiritual relationship between women and men, understood as progressive energy transmission, can enable a harmonization of the human and divine dimensions separated under patriarchal distortions. A love that welcomes difference will be capable of recognizing the other as transcendent to the self.
Each partner will be allowed access to her or his own divinization. Her reconstruction requires two dialectical movements. First, she must nullify the radical alterity of the Wholly Other God, arguing that this is a god produced by and for the masculine imaginary and therefore not suitable to women's becoming.
Shorn of his anthropocentrism, Irigaray's philosophy of religion recalls the twofold ambition of Feuerbach's philosophy of religion in Her relation to Feuerbach and Hegel is apparent in her account of the sensible transcendental as marking the fundamental materiality of spirit.
Some feminists rebut the utopian charge by finding in Irigaray's reflections on the element of air in the work of Heidegger a tangible example of materiality that transcends the limitations of embodiment without being any less material Armour Others read Irigaray's notion of a sensible transcendental as relying too heavily on western models of autonomy and self-determination Keller But how is such projection possible or meaningful for those, like Irigaray herself, who assume that the object of belief is unreal?
If Irigaray maintains a Feuerbachian human referent for her own projection of religious discourse in terms of female representations of the divine, the feminine divine, too, would seem to facilitate its own destruction. What possibilities does this leave for female transcendence? Can belief be simultaneously posited and deconstructed?
Can the strong female subjectivity created in and by a mystic such as Teresa of Avila become available to women without Teresa's acceptance of a transcendent Other who is the divine Hollywood , ? In comparison to traditional theological accounts of such a dialectic, however, the emphasis of Irigaray's philosophy of religion is oriented to affirming immanence, rather than to escaping finitude, embodiment, and materiality. The divine is to be found in the space between two human beings who encounter each other face to face in the recognition of sexual difference.
Transcendence for women hinges on the possibility of this radical, and relational, immanentizing of the meaning of divinity. As new waves of historicism and anti-essentialism register among the generation of post-analytic philosophers of religion, dissatisfaction has begun to develop with the traditional topics. This section samples several emerging directions that signal the new preoccupations of feminist philosophers of religion. Epistemological questions constitute an important part of the agenda for feminist philosophies of religion. What has the status of knowledge in various religious traditions?
What gets valorized as worth knowing? What are the criteria evoked? Who has the authority to establish religious meaning? Is religious meaning something distinct from or independent of ordinary linguistic meanings of words? Who is the presumed subject of religious belief? How does the social position of the subject affect the content of religious belief?
What is the impact upon religious life of the subject's sexed body? What do we learn by examining the relations between power, on the one hand, and what counts as evidence, foundations, modes of discourse, forms of apprehension and transmission, on the other? What particular processes constitute the normative cultural subject as masculine in its philosophical and religious dimensions? The work of feminist philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson offers a good example of the feminist standpoint theory approach to religion and gender, unadulterated by any loyalty to Christianity.
In the first book-length study to be entitled A Feminist Philosophy of Religion Anderson set out to revise and reform philosophy of religion by using feminist standpoint epistemology as developed by Sandra Harding in philosophy of science. A feminist standpoint is not the same as a woman's experiences, situation, or perspective but is rather an achievement of an epistemically informed perspective resulting from struggle by or on behalf of women and men who have been dominated, exploited, or oppressed.
Applied to philosophy of religion, feminist standpoint epistemology involves thinking from the perspective of women who have been oppressed by specific monotheistic religious beliefs. Anderson challenges both the privileged model of God as a disembodied person and the related model of reason as neutral, objective, and free of bias and desire. Spinning new myths or devising new conceptions of a divine reality are not part of this agenda. There is only the double imperative: However, adequate understanding of the religious beliefs of embodied persons, according to Anderson, requires a deeper analysis of the multiple intertwinings between reason and desire than philosophy of religion normally shows.
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But how are feminists to talk about the material content of female desire? At just this point feminist standpoint epistemology yields to poststructuralist insights and Anderson finds in the work of Irigaray, Kristeva, and bell hooks themes that are missing in mainstream epistemology and some feminist epistemology. As used by bell hooks , yearning is a positive act that motivates struggle in the search for personal and communal justice.
It shapes a spirituality. According to Anderson, yearning is the vital reality of human life which gives rise to religious belief. Therefore, philosophical analysis of and feminist concern with reason combined with desire, as found in expressions of yearning for truth whether epistemological, ethical justice , or aesthetic love or beauty , need to supplement standard approaches to philosophy of religion.
One must be careful, Anderson says, not to conflate yearning with only a disguised form of the philosophical aspiration to be infinite. In place of this Anderson calls for an approach that would allow instantiating the regulative ideals of truth, love, goodness, and justice as conditions for any incorrupt craving for infinitude. Humans can yearn for truth or crave infinitude while at the same time acknowledging self-consciously held and embodied locations Anderson Questions of the justifiability of religious belief have previously been center stage in philosophy of religion.
Anderson does not consider this question per se , but instead analyzes the prior question of the rational construction of belief and the production of knowledge. She considers the ways in which an exclusive focus on justification of dominant beliefs excluded women's beliefs and women's role in reasoning by assuming that only certain privileged beliefs should be assessed for their truth. At the same time she argues against any swift dismissal of justificatory questions, as well as against a strict focus on the justification of theistic beliefs.
The myths of Mirabai, the legendary Hindu poetess-saint, and Antigone, the mythical figure of insurgence in Greek tragedy, are useful in understanding the notion of yearning as a rational passion linked to bodily experiences , chap. Anderson finds the disruptive mimings of these myths helpful for challenging the narrow parameters of empirical realist forms of theism.
Grace Jantzen issues a radical challenge to other feminist philosophers who would make epistemology, rather than psychoanalytic theory, their point of departure in studying religion and its repressed underside. She argues that questions about truth and the justification of religious belief can be dismissed as categories of the masculine symbolic. Influenced by Hannah Arendt's work on natality and Adriana Cavarero's feminist reading of Plato, Jantzen believed that a preoccupation with death and violence subtends the masculinist imaginary. If feminist philosophy of religion is ever to transform the symbolic order which inscribes this imaginary, it is necessary to change the imaginary.
For this purpose, a model of transformative change drawn from psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy of religion is more useful than a model drawn from Anglo-American adversarial modes of argumentation Jantzen , To demonstrate the extent to which the Western symbolic is saturated with violence and death, epitomized in the crucified Christ, Jantzen situated her philosophy of religion in relation to the psychoanalytic theory of both Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Their account offers a theory of one of the most important features of any religion: Jantzen corrected the matricidal assertion of Kristevan theory; she argued against thinking that the child's need to separate from the mother in order to become an individual is what initiates a logic of sacrifice and violence in the western symbolic.
There is no imperative to sacrifice the mother in order to commence formation of the self in the cultural realm. However important separation and individuation are in subject formation, they are not proportional to death and violence. If we were to attend to natality instead, Jantzen wrote, we would be better able to create a new imaginary based on birth, life, and potentiality Jantzen Feminist philosophy of religion can attend better to the symbolic impact of birth rather than death as a strategy for creating a new imaginary construct that emphasizes flourishing of life rather than sacrifice of it.
The norms of moral or political adequacy replace those of epistemic adequacy Jantzen If one asks what the ontological status of the divine is for Jantzen, one could say that it is pantheistic see Jantzen , chap.
Feminist Philosophy of Religion
As the horizon of human becoming, the divine is transcendent in the sense of the other of the world, non-reducible to statements about the world's physical characteristics. As immanent, the divine is this world; there is no other. What previously had been seen as a set of polarities now opens out into a play of diversities, bringing the divine to life through us. Foundations of Violence , Jantzen's final publication, synthesizes her analysis of the psychoanalytic, religious, and philosophical dimensions of death and violence in Western culture, culminating in a constructive alternative a feminine symbolic that celebrates beauty, desire, and the creative impulse.
Thanatos , a death drive, far from being a universal of human nature, as Freud believed, is a gendered construction of Western modernity, according to Jantzen, with precursors in Christendom and classical antiquity. Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle provide the genealogy of violence in Western thought that Jantzen critiques here, while Plotinus stands in for all those other-worldly seekers who gesture toward release in another world.
What was to be a six-volumed study on Death and the Displacement of Beauty in the western tradition can be comprehended in incipient form in Jantzen These feminist readings rely on critical appropriations of psychoanalysis and Derridean reading practices to re-assess a topic that stands at the center of much modern philosophy of religion.
Belief and its formation, they show, is implicated in the formation of the subject and sexual difference, as well as related issues of embodiment and presence and absence. The argument is not only the familiar feminist one that the object of belief is male-defined, but the more radical claim that the structure and discourse of belief itself is masculinist and in need of deconstruction. That is to say that the constitution of the normative Western, bourgeois subject of religion and philosophy depends on the association of the body with the mother and femininity and an always incomplete and ambivalent mastering, concealment, or denial of the mother's body.
The progressive strand, by contrast, was convinced that modern philosophy contained valuable insights that, once freed from their admixture of error and by dint of being creatively joined to Thomistic principles, would result in a revitalized Catholic philosophy. These two very different reactionsto modernity demonstrate howtwentiethcentury Thomism was anything but a monolithic doctrine.
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The Thomist Tradition by Brian J. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.