Dear all,

Thank you for all your contributions to this thread, which have been helpful to me in several ways, partly by responding to different dimensions of the issue: history of ideas vs. doing contemporary analytic philosophy, rhetorical as well as institutional dimensions of the issue, generational shifts in the academy, etc.


On Jun 7, 2012, at 8:01 PM, Deshpande, Madhav wrote:

Having taught the Introductory class for Indian Philosophy for a number of years at the University of Michigan, I find that most of the students in the class are second generation South Asian students, and they know neither Indian nor Western philosophy, and hence my class becomes a basic introduction to philosophical thinking.  I have to try to distinguish the Indian Philosophy class from my Introduction to Hinduism, and try to explain the distinction between religion and philosophy, which is also a difficult distinction for the students.  Would appreciate suggestions for introductory readings that would make this distinction between philosophy and religion.

Madhav

Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
202 South Thayer Street, Suite 6111
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104-1608, USA
____________________________________

My student demography is different from Madhav's in that there are not many South Asian heritage students where I teach. In any case, for most students, I imagine that Plato and Aristotle, even Descartes, are just as exotic and unfamiliar as Confucius, Shankara or the Buddha. There are also institutional differences between Linfield and Michigan, as we have both a Philosophy and a Religious Studies department here, and I would ideally like to keep it that way, so drawing a distinction between them seems useful at some level. Even though religion and its academic study are different, students do not come in perceiving that difference. I would like to highlight the distinction b/w religion and philosophy, not to reify these concepts, but if only because: (1) I am in a Religious Studies department with certain responsibilities for its integrity, trying to build up to a sequence of middle and upper level classes drawing on Asian traditions at a school with little history of such courses; (2) To that end, we recently gave "Philosophy East and West" -- a popular course here at Linfield for more than a decade -- a cross-listing with Religious Studies, and I am considering how I want to distinguish between these two "institutional bedfellows" in terms of methodology and focus, because I think that the two disciplines often do ask different types of questions, pursue answers in different ways, and focus on different things; (3) The inherited East/West problematic raises the distinction between philosophy and religion, and I feel that students ought to think critically about it to some degree, at least to the extent that they reflect on what they mean when/if they use terms like belief, science, religion, religious, spiritual, philosophy, way of life, common sense, etc. On the other hand, my sense is that most undergraduate students here (or anywhere, for that matter,) have little patience for many of the historical subtleties and seemingly academic nature of many of the issues involved in distinguishing philosophy from theology, east from west, and so forth, and so I need to be careful not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. I do not wish to try students' patience to such an extent that they lose interest and thus fail to engage as much as they can with real philosophical questions of personal interest to them using the global palette that such a course can provide. I'm curious to what extent others struggle with such pedagogical concerns.

Thanks for overlooking the several typos and missing words in my initial, rather hurried posting. Glad people still managed to get the gist of my query.

Dave Fiordalis
Linfield College