On the Past and Future of Religion, Art and Philosophy

Abstract

Recent critics have argued that the concept of “religion” is an essentially modern development, claiming that no ancient language has terms that adequately correspond to our sense of the words “religion” and “religious.” But the short history claimed for “religion” as a concept is not an isolated phenomenon: the situation in religious studies may, for example, be interestingly compared to that within the study of the parallel humanities disciplines of art history and aesthetics, where critics have made a similar case about the lack of any corresponding ancient notion of “art.” If both religion and art have such brief conceptual histories, what should change about the way scholars in these traditional humanities disciplines approach phenomena that exist in the much longer pre-history relevant to both fields? And what changes for the “afterlife” of both conceptions with this new historical self-awareness? This chapter examines the shifts in these fields and the future role philosophy should play vis-a-vis art and religion if these reconstruals of the development of the concepts of art and religion are correct.