Philosophical religions from Plato to Spinoza
Subtitle: reason, religion, and autonomy
By: Carlos Fraenkel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 328
ISBN-13: 9780521194570
Subjects: Religions; PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / General; Philosophy; Philosophy and religion; History
Description: "For many thinkers from Antiquity until the Enlightenment, no meaningful distinction between philosophy and religion was possible. Instead, the concept of a philosophical religion was strongly influential on pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers alike. Carlos Fraenkel provides the first account of this concept and traces its history back to Plato, the Jewish Philo of Alexandria and the Christians Clement of Alexandria and Origen. He then follows it through the medieval period in both Islamic and Jewish forms; he closely analyses its appearance in the work of Spinoza in the early modern period; and he shows how it largely disappeared after the Enlightenment, when religion began to be increasingly regarded as a promoter of ignorance and superstition from which philosophy needed to be liberated. His rich and wide-ranging book will appeal to anyone interested in how philosophy has interacted with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions over the centuries"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction: what is a philosophical religion?; 1. Reason, divine law, and self-rule in Plato; 2. Moses, Christ and the universal rule of reason in antiquity; 3. Communities of reason in the Islamic world; 4. Christianity as a philosophical religion in Spinoza; Epilogue: did the history of philosophical religions come to an end?.