Followed by the GCPR unit business meeting, the session participants propose new conceptions of "nature" as a key category for philosophy of religion. Classic philosophy of religion often uncritically assumes a bifurcation between nature and humans while proving God's existence or establishing God's attributes (e.g., natural theology). The session deploys "nature" as a category inclusive of humans, non-human beings, and divine entities. Geoff Ashton and Karen O'Brien-Kop both explore how Sāṃkhya thought reframes nature. Agnieszka Rostalska develops a holistic approach using methods of critical inquiry (ānvīkṣikī), where Matthew Robertson draws from the Ayurvedic Carakasaṃhitā to undermine binary arrangements of nature and humanity. Finally, Nural Sophia Liepsner draws upon Sufi sources to theorize space in terms of rahim (the womb) as a space of cosmic unity. There will be time for the audience to engage these participants to draw out consequences for doing philosophy of religion. The final 30 minutes will be reserved for the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion program unit business meeting. Please attend if you wish to directly contribute to the 2026 sessions.
The classic philosophy of religion is grounded in binary thinking that maintains a hierarchy of “culture” over “nature.” It reconstructs and highlights the relationship between human beings or persons to four elements: earth, air, fire, and/or water (collectively, hierarchically, or by emphasizing one) and nature. This tendency resonates with the culture vs. nature dualism, a by-product of 16th- and 17th-century European thought supported by the reflections of Hobbes and Rousseau during the Enlightenment period. Anglo-European thinkers still conceptualize “nature” as something to be observed, analyzed, and studied—an “other” distinct from us.
In my paper, I emphasize the Indian counter-perspective, which also appeals to the elements yet provides a holistic understanding of the world. A variety of beings - persons, animals, plants, etc. are considered part of a bigger whole and consist of diverse components. For naturalistic orientations, even the selves are constituents of the world inseparable from it.
This paper draws from the Carakasaṃhitā, an early work of Ayurvedic medicine, to explore a vision of the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine that resists conceptualizations of “nature” as fundamentally set apart from humanity. Through an analysis of Ayurveda’s “person-based world,” I argue that a key aim of early Ayurvedic medicine was to rectify presumptions and practices that treat nature and the divine as “other” than the human. Building on scholarship that illustrates the fluidity of Indic approaches to the categories of “person” and “self,” I also show how Ayurveda understands the conditions of nature and humanity—their health or illness—as direct expressions of divinity. As a totalistic program for understanding interconnections that sustain living systems, Ayurveda compels us to think beyond the anthropocentric logics of “othering” and exploitation, and to embrace philosophical, legal, religious, and ethical frameworks that extend personhood to nonhuman entities.
The philosophy of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā has puzzled scholars largely due to Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions that inform their views of nature, consciousness, and the relation between the two. This paper explores a new reading of Sāṃkhya as a phenomenology of life, where life gets construed in terms of a phenomenology of living nature and a phenomenology of human existence. And yet, while this represents a step forward in our understanding of Sāṃkhya doctrine, it nevertheless reveals deep-rooted biases that Sāṃkhya scholars have toward nature, the first-person perspective, and the relation between the two. Notably, these biases persist in the Natural Sciences, the Humanities, and Indology, but they are not to be found in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā.
Hindu philosophy of religion provides distinct thinking tools for our human, non-human and natural worlds. The Samkhya school has unique and detailed theories of nature, materiality, and evolution and can contribute to pluriversal ways (Mbembe 2016) to think about culture as a product of nature, rather than a point of contrast. Using Samkhya’s ontology of nature as a meta-category, this paper provides a philosophical reflection on classical texts, lived religion, and scientific theories to consider the significance of Samkhya’s dualist ontology of nature and consciousness in the Anthropocene.
What would it mean to reorient the study of Islam around a conceptualization of the womb as microcosm? In contemporary Muslim theology, women’s growing prominence as religious leaders appears to be related to an increased conceptual awareness around rahma (divine mercy), rahim (the womb), and al-Rahman (the God of Mercy). To explore this development, I discuss how the womb functioned as a cosmological site in traditional Sufi discourse and then trace this connection in the thought of contemporary Muslim theologians and activists. Throughout, I ask how and when this reorientation is leveraged to support feminist modes of religious epistemology and praxis and how it shapes bodies and their ways of inhabiting spaces. I argue that, within the Islamic tradition, seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of the womb work together rather than in opposition—a paradox that holds the potential of disrupting colonial and patriarchal assumptions about Islam.