Cave Hill Philosophy Symposium (CHiPS) 2014
Conversations X: Philosophy of Religions
November 12 – 14, 2014
Hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados
The broad theme for the tenth Cave Hill Philosophy Symposium (CHiPS) will be issues related to philosophy of religions. Philosophy is often accused of being out of touch. Perhaps nowhere more so than in the philosophy of religion, where discussions in English are typically conducted by reference to Christianity. Human history has been marked by a plurality of religious beliefs, yet philosophical reflection on religion has hardly ever acknowledged this plurality, or attempted to address its consequences.
For our tenth Cave Hill Philosophy Symposium, we seek papers exploring the philosophical implications of giving consideration to the variety of religious beliefs that the world exhibits. We are especially interested in papers that will seek to examine issues such as:
Can religious beliefs in general provide a reasonable account for the values embraced by humans?
What is the value of religion and spirituality to our everyday lives?
Can reasonable positions be found within religious traditions that do not put them in conflict with a naturalistic worldview?
Is there any rational defence of the almost universal parochialism or ethnocentrism exhibited by reflection on religion?
Do any traditions of religious thought have the resources to avoid, in a rationally defensible manner, the general “plague upon all your houses” that such untrammelled diversity seems to suggest?
Does an atheistic or agnostic outlook provide more scope to humans to cooperate across cultures?
What are the philosophical implications of the relationships between religion and gender, religion and politics, religion and law, religion and social media, religion and culture, religion and economic inequality, and so on?
In keeping with the spirit of our conversations, we hope to bring together thinkers operating in and across different cultural and philosophical traditions as well as other disciplines that share a boundary with philosophy.
Keynote speaker: Professor John Cottingham (University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford) Professor Cottingham’s principal research interests are in early-modern philosophy (especially Descartes), moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, and has published extensively in all three areas. Author of over 100 articles, he has published ten books as sole author, some of the more recent being On the Meaning of Life, The Spiritual Dimension, Why Believe?, and Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (forthcoming).
Abstracts (300-500 words) are due by August 31, 2014 to uwichips@gmail.com. Feedback on abstracts will be provided within a week of submission. Participants whose abstracts are accepted by the vetting committee will then be required to submit their completed papers via email as an attachment in Open or LibreOffice, Word, or Wordperfect by the firm deadline of October 20, 2014. These papers will then be posted online for other participants to consult prior to the conference with the intention that time at the Symposium can be devoted more to discussion than to exposition of the written papers. We hope that revised papers will continue to be available on-line: those from the earlier symposia can be accessed from http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/histphil/chips.aspx.
Contact persons:
Prof. Frederick Ochieng’-Odhiambo
Prof. Ed Brandon
Ms. Roxanne Burton
uwichips@gmail.com