Philosophical reflection often involves thinking through certain types of conditions. How might we understand, and possibly interrogate, texts and topics in the philosophy of religion with attention to the effects of contingent yet persistent social structures? How might such an engaged and critical question help us consider ways of relating philosophy of religion to the AAR’s 2025 presidential theme of “freedom”? The session will respond to these questions with a discussion about how philosophers of religion might identify unfreedoms, and then argue the merits of leaving these conditions intact. Leah Kalmanson considers how the self, itself, is a source of unfreedom. Zeyad el Nabolsy explains the consequences of God's image for African freedom. Yarran Hominh reformulates the problem of evil by theorizing unfreedom. And, Deborah Casewell evaluates 'strategic madness' as a philosophical response to power structures.
For many traditions whose aim is liberation, the self on behalf of whom we desire freedom is the very cage that confines us. To seek freedom for this self is to pursue a delusion. Various Vedic schools and Buddhist and Jain sects agree on this point yet diverge on what constitutes “liberation.” It has been described as the blissful absorption of consciousness disassociated from materiality, the enlightened insight that sees past the mirage of individuated existence, the loving relationship between a devotee and a deity, or (in the case of Buddhism in particular) an indescribable attainment subject to neither perception nor non-perception. Although none of these senses of liberation resemble “freedom” as we typically understand it, I want to resist the impression that such “spiritual” trajectories are thereby depoliticized. This presentation tracks how notions such as agency and autonomy shift within a liberational framework that views the self itself as the source of unfreedom.
This paper focuses on Edward W. Blyden’s most famous book, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887). Specifically, it focuses on the problem of the image of God and its relationship to African freedom as conceived by Blyden. I argue that Blyden contends that Christianity presents an image of God that limits African freedom. Blyden focuses on the literal visual images of God that are characteristic of European Christian art. Blyden argues that the representation of the figure of Christ as a white European has made it impossible for Africans to identify with the figure of Christ without undermining their sense of self-worth. By contrast, Islam appeals to Blyden precisely because its iconoclasm leaves the image of God and of his prophets indeterminate. This, according to Blyden, has important consequences for African freedom.
Reinhold Niebuhr once said that “[a]ll profound religion is an effort to answer the challenge of pessimism.” Unfreedom, understood as socially caused and systematic impoverishments of human agency (such as those embodied in the ongoing system of global and imperial racial capitalism), is a source of pessimism. Why does unfreedom persist, even though people try to change things? This question of the ongoing stability of unfreedom is a reformulation of the traditional problem of evil. In this paper, I sketch a framework for theorizing unfreedom, drawing on pragmatism and non-ideal theory. This framework motivates a search for a practical answer to this question that is neither theodicy nor overly simple appeal to human nature. While, I will argue, we cannot know whether unfreedom can be fully overcome, grappling with this pessimism might illuminate some possibilities for change.
Although now primarily known as a philosopher and a mystic, Simone Weil was more well known in her short lifetime as an engaged political actor. One of her many concerns was with how contingent and yet persistent social structures contributed to oppression, and led to political systems that perpetuated what she referred to as force. Indeed, her analysis of power and power structures reveals for her that normal action, and normal thinking, can never fully interrogate or overcome our own desire for power and the exercise of that power against others and ourselves. Weil's response to these concerns, in both her life and her writing, was to identify the madness of action and thought, and embody that as far as possible as an example that no one could follow. This paper will conceptualise for the first time what I call her 'strategic' madness: one which she realised politically and philosophically.