This book explores the constitutive role alterity plays in identity formation in Western and Eastern traditions. It examines the significance of difference in conceptions of identity across major philosophical and religious traditions in a global and comparative context, considering Ancient Greek and Egyptian, Chinese, Islamic, European and Japanese philosophies. In addition, the book opens up discussion of less dominant trends in philosophical thinking, particularly the spaces between self-same existence and otherness in the histories of philosophical and religious thought. Chapters critique both essentialist and postmodern understandings of self-constitution by questioning the ordinary narrative of identity construction across Western and non-Western traditions. The book also explores the construction of selfhood from a wide range of perspectives, drawing upon individual philosophers (including Plotinus, Descartes, Geulincx, Hume, de Beauvoir and Ueda) as well as religious and philosophical movements, including Confucian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Protestantism and Post-Phenomenology. Differences in Identity in Philosophy and Religion represents a landmark study, drawing together a range of approaches, perspectives and traditions to explore how identity is constructed across the world.

This title was first published in 2003. Can difference be subordinated to identity, simplicity or diversity? Or does it make a difference to the entire way in which we think? This book challenges the dominant agenda in the discipline of philosophy of religion by exploring issues of difference that have hitherto been obscured. It draws together some of the most innovative work in philosophical thinking about religion by some of the most creative and radical new thinkers in the field. Moving beyond debates between believers and skeptics, the contributors draw on critical theory to address differences in rationality, gender, tradition, culture and politics, showing how it is possible to think differently. Assumptions about rational neutrality, belief, tradition, experience and identity that undergird the rational exploration of classical theism are deconstructed. Instead it becomes important to explore a critical ethical reasoning, religious performance, internal religious tensions, location in culture, and a relation to exteriority as the groundwork for a future philosophy of religion. The challenging new directions for inquiry presented in this volume offer philosophers of religion, theologians, and critical and cultural theorists fresh insights into ways of addressing problems of religious difference.

This title was first published in 2003. Can difference be subordinated to identity, simplicity or diversity? Or does it make a difference to the entire way in which we think? This book challenges the dominant agenda in the discipline of philosophy of religion by exploring issues of difference that have hitherto been obscured. It draws together some of the most innovative work in philosophical thinking about religion by some of the most creative and radical new thinkers in the field. Moving beyond debates between believers and skeptics, the contributors draw on critical theory to address differences in rationality, gender, tradition, culture and politics, showing how it is possible to think differently. Assumptions about rational neutrality, belief, tradition, experience and identity that undergird the rational exploration of classical theism are deconstructed. Instead it becomes important to explore a critical ethical reasoning, religious performance, internal religious tensions, location in culture, and a relation to exteriority as the groundwork for a future philosophy of religion.

A bold vision of liberal humanism for navigating today’s complex world of growing identity politics and rising nationalism Collective identities such as race, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. To what extent do they constrain our freedom, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? Is diversity of value in itself? Has the rhetoric of human rights been overstretched? Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions, developing an account of ethics that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances and that takes aim at clichés and received ideas about identity. This classic book takes seriously both the claims of individuality—the task of making a life—and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as "Hinduism" is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality. Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts—like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy—have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.

A fresh and unusual perspective on the literary, Catherine Pickstock argues that the mystery of things can only be unravelled through the repetitions of fiction, history, inhabited subjectivity, and revealed event.