Two Types of Philosophy of Religion: Neutral Cognition versus Lived Experience
Joseph Rivera
Religions
School of Theology, Philosophy and Music
Abstract

Does philosophy of religion need to occupy only cognitive terrain? Can it develop resources to discuss and celebrate not the contradiction to, but the foundation of, the intellect? Perhaps the way of the heart, the way of lived experience, can serve the purpose of the reorientation of the discipline, without implying we must discard the faculty of reason. David Hume discussed divine revelation and its limits in his own Dialogues on Natural Religion indicating titularly perhaps yet another expression that reflects a family resemblance among a series of terms involved in the discipline we know as philosophy of religion (i.e., “natural religion”). Hume also wisely divides philosophy into one of two trajectories that can, I am inclined to suggest, with equal justice be mapped onto philosophy of religion. He writes that philosophy reduces to two “species”, in which one emphasizes a “feel” that evokes in us a disposition ready for action or the other a cognition that “makes us understand” and hence strengthens our intellectual grasp of the question before us (Hume 2007, p. 5). Some thinkers in the tradition of philosophy of religion emphasize, as a matter of degree, either feeling/action or cognitive structures of an intellectual tradition.