25/1 – Spring 2020

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25/1 – Spring 2020
Philosophical Turn Towards Religion

In many ways this journal issue presents some remnant fruits of a conference entitled Engaging the Contemporary 2019: The Philosophical Turn Towards Religion, and convened by the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Malta, on the 7–8 November 2019. The conference featured almost seventy papers on topics which ranged very widely from metaphysics to epistemology, from ethics to politics, and from phenomenology to analytic philosophy. Indeed, the conference was a living witness to the immense fecundity of the philosophy of religion.

At first sight, these papers are a melange of topics and views; they constitute a kind of pastiche. And this shows vividly that, on the one hand, the philosophy of religion is unusual in that it touches on most, if not all, parts of philosophy and aspects of human life. Indeed, there seems to be no part of philosophy which is not informed by some connection with the philosophy of religion. And this is perhaps not surprising. After all, one’s views on the divine are bound to impact everything in one’s life. In particular, one’s views on the divine are bound to be intertwined with one’s views on oneself, on society, and on nature. The range of views, on the other hand, also bears testimony to the peculiar nature of the philosophy of religion: it is inextricably personal. That is, one’s views, expressed in the philosophy of religion, are not simply abstract views. They bear the hallmark of the personal. They say something about the author in a manner that one’s views on, say, logic do not.

Mark Sultana, Guest Editor