Philosophy of Religion Unit

In order to foster rich, innovative, and challenging intellectual conversations, the Philosophy of Religion Unit is committed to inclusion. Our Unit expects pre-arranged sessions or panel proposals to incorporate diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, and rank.

The steering committee invites proposals on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Theorizing beyond Discourse–Music as Method: How is music related to philosophical thought and expression in ways that are non-discursive? We especially invite proposals on pre-modern contexts and on religious traditions beyond Christianity, though all proposals are welcomed and will be given full consideration.
• Philosophical projects about nonhuman animals
• New work in Analytic Philosophy of Religion
• New interpretations of Kant, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of his birth
• Ancestors—including reverence for ancestors, communication with ancestors, and conceptions of ancestral afterlives—are central to peoples' lived experiences of religions worldwide. And yet this topic receives little to no attention within the philosophy of religion. The Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion Unit and Philosophy of Religion Unit invite submissions to a co-sponsored session on this important area of inquiry.
• Violence as a Category for Philosophical Analysis: We invite papers that explore the category of violence in new ways, especially those that do not revolve around or relate to questions of non-violence. Papers might analyze the category of violence in the work of philosophical thinkers, or in theological systems, or in ethical theories of justice, or might explore the role or presence of violence in religious movements or social settings. Co-sponsored with the Political Theology Unit.
• "Author Meets Critic" session on An Yountae’s book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making (Duke, 2024), for a possible co-sponsor with the Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit.
• Translation Panel: Akalaṅka's Aṣṭaśatī and its Non-Jain Interlocutors, for a possible co-sponsor with the Jain studies unit, the Buddhist Philosophy Unit, the Hindu Philosophy Unit, the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion Unit, and the Yogācāra Unit. This panel will be partially pre-arranged and will involve breakout sessions after the presentations. For more information, contact Anil Mundra at anil.mundra@rutgers.edu

In addition to individual papers, we welcome proposals for prearranged sessions (i.e., an entire session with a designated group of presenters) on these and other topics not listed here that will be of interest to philosophers of religion. Proposals have a much greater chance of acceptance if they are written so as to be accessible to philosophers with no expertise on the particular topics or figures dealt with in the proposed paper, and they make very clear the central thesis and main line(s) of argument of the proposed paper.