Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities

Beschreibung

This book examines the ways in which religious communities experimentally engage the world and function as fallible inquisitive agents, despite frequent protests to the contrary. Using the philosophy of inquiry and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, it develops unique naturalist conceptions of religious meaning and ultimate orientation while also arguing for a reappraisal of the ways in which the world’s venerable religious traditions enable novel forms of communal inquiry into what Peirce termed “vital matters.” Pragmatic inquiry, it argues, is a ubiquitous and continuous phenomenon. Thus, religious participation, though cautiously conservative in many ways, is best understood as a variety of inhabited experimentation. Religious communities embody historically mediated hypotheses about how best to engage the world and curate networks of semiotic resources for rendering those engagements meaningful. Religions best fulfill their inquisitive function when they both deploy andreform their sign systems as they learn better to engage reality.

This book examines the ways in which religious communities experimentally engage the world and function as fallible inquisitive agents, despite frequent protests to the contrary. Using the philosophy of inquiry and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, it develops unique naturalist conceptions of religious meaning and ultimate orientation while also arguing for a reappraisal of the ways in which the world’s venerable religious traditions enable novel forms of communal inquiry into what Peirce termed “vital matters.” Pragmatic inquiry, it argues, is a ubiquitous and continuous phenomenon. Thus, religious participation, though cautiously conservative in many ways, is best understood as a variety of inhabited experimentation. Religious communities embody historically mediated hypotheses about how best to engage the world and curate networks of semiotic resources for rendering those engagements meaningful. Religions best fulfill their inquisitive function when they both deploy and reform their sign systems as they learn better to engage reality.

Autor*in

Brandon Daniel-Hughes

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Peircean imagined communities religious sects church synagogue temple mosque religion and society

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“This is one of the most intellectually exciting attempts to adapt Peirce’s ideas for the purposes of the philosophy of religion in recent years. Scholars interested in pragmatism, in Peirce, or in the future of philosophical thinking about religion will discover much of value here. This book will place its author squarely at the center of an emerging community of scholarship dedicated to the goal of defending forms of religious naturalism. For many in that community, pragmatism has been a vital resource; but very few have had the courage or ability to engage Peirce’s pragmaticism as Daniel-Hughes does here. “ (Michael Raposa, Professor of Religion Studies, Lehigh University, USA)
“Brandon Daniel-Hughes has written by far the most profound and ground-breaking philosophy of religious communities since Josiah Royce’s The Problem of Christianity. From the continuity of serial and nested interpreters within a given individual to the continuity of persons within a community, to the continuity of many communities as interpretive agents within larger communities, to the continuity of human beings through religious communities to the ultimate conditions of the cosmos, he expands Peirce’s philosophy of inquiry into a philosophy of a well-oriented life. It takes its place among the very best works on Peirce. Among its startling conclusions is that venerable religious traditions, which look so rigid and conservative, are themselves vital and moving modes of inquiry aiming at orientation to ultimate realities that themselves are beyond literal signification; the very vagueness, incoherence, and often contradictory character of their signs are what allow religious traditions to continue inquiry.” (Robert Cummings Neville, Professor emeritus of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University, USA; past president of the Charles S. Peirce Society; past president of the American Academy of Religion)

“This is one of the most intellectuallyexciting attempts to adapt Peirce’s ideas for the purposes of the philosophy of religion in recent years. Scholars interested in pragmatism, in Peirce, or in the future of philosophical thinking about religion will discover much of value here. This book will place its author squarely at the center of an emerging community of scholarship dedicated to the goal of defending forms of religious naturalism. For many in that community, pragmatism has been a vital resource; but very few have had the courage or ability to engage Peirce’s pragmaticism as Daniel-Hughes does here.” (Michael Raposa, Professor of Religion Studies, Lehigh University, USA)

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