Religious Dialogue and Dissertation Topics

I've been thinking over a couple of dissertation topics which my advisor has been throwing my way. The first one would give me a solid grounding in history of philosophy and experience in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. If you don't want the details, skip down to the next paragraph. It would be a study of secondary causation of God's knowledge through Proclus (5th century Neoplatonist, held that the One emanates out the world in a dizzying array of steps to account for multiplicity) and Dionysius (likely 5th-6th century Syrian monk heavily influenced by Neoplatonism; made God the direct cause of all the things Proclus split up), al-Kindi (9th century Arabian philosopher, instrumental in having works translated from Greek and Syriac, including a paraphrase of Plotinus which became known as "The Theology of Aristotle", and who held that God is the only literal agent), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (10th-11th century Persian philosopher, held that God only knows universals and that the world emanates from God in a set of stages), Ibn Rushd/Averroes (12th century Andalusian philosopher, held that God knows things as their cause), and finally the 13th century Christian philosopher and theologian Aquinas, who held that God knows everything directly as their act of being, and who seems to develop this view while working through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. A possible conclusion would go on through to the 14th century with Scotus and Ockham, and where this focus on the individual might end up.

But I'm not sure that I'm going in that direction; it'll be a good stuff for papers, but the second idea grabbed my interest more: the epistemology of religious dialogue. It exciting me to think that I might be able to go back to doing some contemporary stuff. I can do the historical stuff well, and I always want to keep one foot in it since I still think that that is where some of the best philosophy has been done, but I want to create, to be active, to do more than sitting over texts. I don't have the attention span to be a full-time scholar, if nothing else.

So, what would be the basic problematic? On the one extreme, we have groups who engage in some sort of dialogue, but who refuse to budge. The lines have been drawn, the communities have been fixed, and now the task is to refine their own views and to figure out how to live with the either group in the political arena. For this reason, I consider this to be merely political dialogue; the religious issues would only be brought up insofar as they are relevant to how we live together without changing too much. There is a place for this too, but I do not think that it is genuine religious dialogue. I think that Plantinga' basic belief arguments would end up here, if there were to work at all.

The other extreme is pluralism. Religious pluralism might try to circumvent the issue, by saying (to put it simplistically) that we're already agreeing on the important aspects. But this is one view among others, not one view encapsulating others, and so must join the dialogue as an alternative religious vision. Pluralism still would make sense: it would still be a rejection of any overly particular claims to special revelation while an acknowledgment of a spiritual reality which has bee explored by thinkers across traditions. But that doesn't solve the problem of dialogue.

So, where does that leave us? Religious dialogue, it seems to me, must leave one open to the dialogue partner. One must be able to come to the partner expecting to hear something one does not yet understand. And this seems to me to mean that, in any genuine religious dialogue, the possibility for self-conversion must be present. This is not the necessity of conversion, or even the probability, but I must always leave it the possibility open that I may hear something new which could convince me. Otherwise, to have closed the possibility, is to have predetermined what I can hear from the partner.

But now we get to what is really tricky. Religious beliefs depend a great deal upon testimony, whether from divine revelations, the primordial sounds of the universe, or from enlightened humans who realized something we are not likely to catch on our own. If any of these form of revelation are true, it is likely that there are true things about the world for which I must really upon testimony. And so, in religious dialogue, there will be a tension: one the one hand, I must leave myself open to the possibility of self-conversion, or else it is not dialogue; one the other hand, both of us hold to a possible truth that transcends us and our ways of knowing, and for which we rely on the testimony and experience of others, which we do not give up simply because we here one thing that contradicts it. Given this tension, how does the epistemology of religious dialogue work?

If I were to go this route, I would like to spend most of my time in concrete studies. One direction I could take it would be an analysis of historical Muslim inter-religious contexts, in line with my interest in Arabic thought. There's Andalusia, with its mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims; there's the Mughal empire in India and the different ways in which Muslims and Hindus interacted; then there's Muslim appropriations of Confucianism over in China. It's just a thought, right now, but it would be nice to get back into my interest in world religions through my graduate studies.