Like Rodney Dangerfield, we philosophers of religion get no respect. As Nelson Pike puts it,
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If you are in a company of people of mixed occupations, and somebody asks what you do, and you say you are a college professor, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are in a company of professors from various departments, and somebody asks what is your field, and you say philosophy, a glazed look comes into the eye. If you are at a conference of philosophers, and somebody asks what you are working on, and you say philosophy of religion . . . [Quoted in D. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 2006, p. 33)
I'll go Pike one better. I am an academically unaffiliated philosopher of religion. Could there be anything more contemptible?
First of all, I take religion seriously, and not merely as an object of scholarly investigation: I take it seriously as one of several (possible) routes to the truth. Thus I don't study it as a load of dead lore and strange doctrines and practices. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Religious documents, practices, and beliefs are facts in the world and like any facts they can be studied. Pure theory need beg no one's indulgence, and social utility be damned. Whenever I hear someone ask what social good such-and-such is, I think of Stalin and the Commies and my Italianate blood begins to boil.
But my interest in religion is not merely historical, or doxographical, or sociological any more than my interest in science is merely historical, or doxographical, or sociological. Science is more than a lot of opinions and practices. It is a route to truth. To put it bluntly, science gets at reality. I think of religion in the same way. (It is worth noting that my claim about science is a philosophical, not a scientific, claim; as such, it requires philsophical, not scientific, defense.)
Second, I am a philosopher of religion. It is bad enough that I concern myself with religion, and worse still that I take it seriously as a possible route to truth; what takes the cake is that I approach it with the tools of philosophy of all things.
Third, I do all this without making a penny from it. Although philosophy is said to bake no bread, some philosophers earn their bread and fill their bellies from it. I once did myself. But I will have none of that now: I deplete my belly from philosophy. In plain English, I am not paid to do philosophy, I pay to do it.
And in a society which attaches value to an activity in the measure that it turns a buck, that makes one odd man out.
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I have enjoyed the good fortune to know a philosopher, who was my teacher. In the prime of life he had the happy cheerfulness of a youth, which, so I believe, accompanied him even in grey old age. His forehead, formed for thinking, was the seat of indestructible serenity and peace, the most thought-filled speech flowed from his lips, merriment and wit and humor were at his command, and his lecturing was discourse at its most entertaining. In precisely the spirit with which he examined Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and Hume and purused the natural laws of the physicists Kepler and Newton, he took up those works of Rousseau which were then appearing, Émile and Héloïse, just as he did every natural discovery known to him, evaluated them and always came back to unprejudiced knowledge of Nature and the moral worth of mankind. The history of nations and peoples, natural science, mathematics, and experience, were the sources from which he enlivened his lecture and converse; nothing worth knowing was indifferent to him; no cabal, no sect, no prejudice, no ambition for fame had the least seductiveness for him in comparison with furthering and elucidating truth. He encouraged and engagingly fostered thinking for oneself; despotism was foreign to his mind. This man, whom I name with the utmost thankfulness, and respect, was Immanuel Kant; his image stands before me to my delight.
-Johan Gottfried Herder
Thanks for reproducing that famous and moving passage. I hope 'Ockham' reads it.
Were you a 'gypsy scholar' or 'academic nomad' occupying a folding chair here, getting a one-year appointment there, then another two thousand miles down the road, then a miserably paying adjunct position . . .?
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4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.