In Westphal’s paper, ‘The emergence of modern philosophy of religion’, it is evident that he is focusing on the move from philosophy of theology to that of religion. Whilst the first is god talk, being famous for classical theistic arguments such as the Cosmological and the Ontological, the second is concerned with matters within a religion, such as religious language and religious experience. However, this isn’t merely a linguistic distinction, but as pointed out by Hegel, a historical shift from ‘philosophising about God to philosophising about religion’. Westphal puts this down to 2 key philosophers during the enlightenment period- David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume was an empiricist who believed that all cognitive knowledge must be empirically verifiable either analytically or synthetically and thus a transcendent God for him didn’t exist. Whereas Kant believed that morality didn’t necessarily require God, creating a shift from Divine Command Theory and Natural Moral Law to his own theory of Deontology, making pure reason and duty the foundations rather than God. This change was met unkindly by Hegel, who saw that we ‘talk less of God’ due to the ‘prevailing assumption’ that we cannot know him, a problem for his theistic philosophising. However, as Westphal clearly points out throughout his essay, there isn’t such a distinct separation of the 2 types of philosophy, but an overlap between what was before Kant and Hume and what was created thereafter.
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