Love and Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

This chapter proposes that contemporary philosophers of religion can learn from the first group of thinkers who engaged in philosophy of religion in the English language: the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists. Working under the dire conditions of the English Civil Wars, they nonetheless advanced a robust defense of tolerance, a moral and theological realism that saw goodness in terms of a love for nature rather than arbitrary volition, and a philosophical methodology that took religious practice and cultivating virtue (justice, integrity, and especially charity or love) seriously in the practice of philosophy of religion. Cudworth, More, Smith, and others exercised an admirable spirit and principle of charity that were instrumental in challenging the racism and exploitation of their times. The chapter defends the contemporary importance of such charity and identifies cases when philosophers today at least seem to take anti-charitable, derogatory, condemnatory views of their colleagues in philosophy of religion.