Max Charlesworth’s Sophia: The First Half-Century and the Next

Abstract

When Professor Max Charlesworth, OAM, founded Sophia in 1962 in Melbourne as a journal of philosophical theology, he certainly knew that he was cutting against the grain in Anglophone philosophy in one sense: he was advocating the explicit integration of philosophical and religious concerns and a dialogue between philosophy and religious studies. In doing so, he challenged the self-conception of the discipline of philosophy, a self-conception that has changed but little over the past half century. Philosophy saw and sees itself as constructed, since the Galileo affair, against religion. Religion is represented as its irrational opponent, philosophy as the voice of reason uncontaminated by revelation, spiritual practice or ritual. Now Charlesworth knew that that self-conception was built on a self-deception. For Anglophone philosophy was conceived in a religious tradition—albeit leavened by the critical tradition of the philosopher and his teacher. Thus, despite the resolute denial of this fact by many of its practitioners, philosophy derives much of its problematic and many of its analytical tools and intuitions from that tradition. How, for instance, can we discuss the freedom of the will outside of a tradition that invented the ‘will’ as a solution to a particular problem in theodicy—that of the responsibility of an Abrahamic deity for the Fall of Adam in the garden of Eden? How can we take seriously an ethics that presupposes freedom and a transcendental command outside of a tradition involving a transcendental deity who is the arbiter of good and evil? And why posit or worry about a permanent self if we aren’t worried about damnation or salvation? SOPHIA (2012) 51:419–421 DOI 10.1007/s11841-012-0352-y