The Reconciliation of Religious and Secular Reasons as a Form of Epistemic Openness: Insights From Examples in the Philippines

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Addressing the debate inspired by John Rawls's restrictive idea of the political role of religion, Jürgen Habermas proposes the institutional translation proviso as an alternative that corrects an overly secularist notion of the state. Maeve Cooke has suggested that religious arguments can be allowed without translation in the institutional level as long as they are non‐authoritarian. However, her definition of non‐authoritarianism requires an acceptance of the fallibility of the truths acquired by faith, which I argue is unnecessary. Instead, I propose that non‐authoritarianism is realized in the recognition of the reconcilability of religious and secular reasons. I demonstrate the viability of this form of non‐authoritarianism using particular examples from the Philippine context. I conclude that these attempts constitute an alternative form of epistemic openness to the more stringent forms that Habermas and Cooke have proposed.