Afterword: Religion and philosophy between the modern and postmodern

The essays in this volume are guided by a shared premise, namely, that philosophy of religion in the western tradition has thus far been vitiated by its failure to take into account the direct impact and the somewhat less visible implications of the 'colonial difference' that inflects the major intellectual traditions of the west. Any form of reflection that purports to be intellectually credible has thus to take this 'colonial difference' into consideration, and in so doing specify and analyze in its many and varied expressions 'the difference(s)' made by this 'colonial difference' for the contemporary philosophy of religion. By doing this, a philosophy of religion attuned to these postcolonial times will of course be following in the footsteps of other intellectual fields which have sought in their several and complex ways to be heedful of the phenomena associated with this 'colonial difference': cultural anthropology (Lila Abu-Lughod, Talal Asad, James Clifford, James Ferguson, Nicholas Dirks, Ann Stoler, inter alia), history (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Jack Goody, inter alia), literary theory (Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Walter Mignolo, inter alia), political theory (Achille Mbembe, Mahmood Mamdani, David Scott, Timothy Mitchell, inter alia), psychoanalytic theory (Frantz Fanon), philosophy (Enrique Dussel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Akeel Bilgrami, inter alia), and so on. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Duke Scholars

Author Kenneth J. Surin Literature