Cheng Kin Ku Building
54 Lincoln's Inn Fields
London
WC2A 3LJ
The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2024 London Lecture: Why do religions divide us? What can we do about it?
The things we call religions are so diverse that it sometimes seems there is little point in giving them that single label. Religions are sources of identity and bearers of creed, they are associated with practices of everyday life, including performances of gender; and they can bring belief and affect together in powerful ways. Clifford Geertz recognized in the religious traditions he studied a capacity to create “long-lasting moods and motivations” through their pictures of reality, uniting fact and feeling in significant ways. But in the contemporary world, claims about reality are especially important signals of identities–as Evangelical Christians in theUnited States, as Hindus in India, as Jews in Israel, as Christians and Moslems in Ghana–that have become central to politics: those labels are now associated, in their three very different democracies, with views about the nature and the role of the state. Disaggregating the elements of particular religions, with their particular epistemic, practical, and identitarian roles, can help us to understand some of the very many ways in which religion can generate conflicts in societies that are now inevitably multi-religious; but also offer us guides to thinking about the attitudes that will allow for their resolution.
-
Speaker
Kwame Anthony Appiah has worked in many areas of philosophy and literary and cultural studies, beginning with doctoral work in the theory of meaning, where he developed an account of the probabilistic semantics of conditionals. Since then, he has explored the intellectual history of modern African ideas about race, culture and identity, reflected on the role of experiments in ethics, thought about idealization and ideals, done work on the nature of social identities and their role in ethical life, and examined questions about global ethics, defending a “rooted cosmopolitanism.”
He has sought to bring philosophical ideas to a wider audience in books like Cosmopolitanism and The Honor Code (which discusses the role of honor in bringing about moral change). In his 2016 Reith lectures, he discussed misunderstandings about social identity, and he writes a weekly column, The Ethicist, for the New York Times.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, Laurance Rockefeller University Professor Emeritus at Princeton, an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is finishing a book on social scientific understandings of religion.