What Religious Studies Can Teach the Humanities: A Philosophical Perspective

Abstract

Developing Tyler Roberts’s recognition that humanistic inquiry ineliminably involves irreducibly “first-personal” questions, this essay situates that idea with respect to debates in philosophy of mind – debates, in particular, about the irreducibly normative character of intentionality. It is further argued, in Kantian terms, that freedom consists in our being attuned to such normative considerations, and that our being so cannot coherently be explained away. In this way, one of Roberts’s central ideas – that as scholars of religion, we should “commit ourselves to asking what practical difference it makes to study people as if they were free” – is bolstered. The essay then asks whether this line of argument recommends any conclusions particularly regarding religion, or whether instead it amounts only to a case for the distinctiveness of generally humanistic inquiry. After considering Franklin Gamwell’s argument that “religion” does indeed represent an essential dimension of human being, the essay concludes by exploring more limited ways of conceiving the distinctiveness of religious studies among the fields of humanistic inquiry. It is suggested that whether or not an argument like Gamwell’s works, scholars in the fields of religious studies are uniquely positioned to identify the normative considerations that inexorably distinguish human activity as such. This suggestion is developed by considering recent scholarship on religion and constitutional law, with regard to which it is argued that such scholarship is cogent only insofar as it is informed by perspectives from religious studies – perspectives, in particular, that acknowledge the norm-laden character of all discourse.