Religion is a human universal. Looking across space, we find that pretty much any society or culture contains some form or another of religious beliefs and practices. Looking back in time, evidence for religiousness goes as far as the archeological record goes. In fact, after the discovery of Göbekli Tepe—a neolithic example of monumental architecture in Mesopotamia—some people have argued that organized religion might even precede the emergence of agriculture. Moreover, even if nowadays there is a tendency to see modern societies as in the process of growing out of religion, a variety of empirical data suggest that this narrative is simply mistaken, such as the emergence and spread of the so-called “spiritual but not religious”, the negative correlation between affiliation with traditional religion and belief in other supernatural phenomena, and the constant proliferation of new religious movements.

Given the prominence of religion in human life, society, and history, I think that philosophers should dedicate a lot of attention to it. Yet, philosophical research on religion in the past century or so has been distorted in two important respects. First, there has been a strong focus on a small sample of the thousands of religions that exist in the world, which tended to favor Abrahamic religions and Christianity in particular. The second distortion is even much less often discussed: philosophers of religion have been overwhelmingly more interested in working on evaluating the truth value of claims that are made within certain religious traditions, as opposed to studying religion as a human phenomenon alongside language, art, and the like.

I make two claims. First, I claim that the philosophical debate would be greatly enriched by correcting these two distortions. On the one hand, working on religious traditions outside the Abrahamic world can bring us new concepts, arguments, theories, and insights. On the other hand, work on religion as a human phenomenon could enrich ongoing debates in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and other fields, insofar as all these domains of human life manifestly overlap with religion and have co-evolved with it. Second, I claim that this expansion of the field would create fruitful avenues of dialogue with the cognitive science of religion, thereby contributing to both the advancement of this field and also enhancing the impact of philosophy itself. My research aims at expanding the field in both these directions.

Within this broad research program, one strand of my research addresses the following puzzle. The domain of world religions is one characterized by massive internal diversity. Yet, if religion is a human universal, then we should expect different religions to share important similarities. How do we square these two together? Compare: this is exactly the puzzle that the research program of universal grammar aims to solve in the case of language. I think that this puzzle can be addressed by using philosophical tools to uncover similarities between religious traditions. This is what the following three papers do:

“Towards a Buddhist Theism” (published in Religious Studies). This paper argues that the notion of maximal greatness, which is normally associated with theism, can also be found in Buddhism by interpreting an influential text of East-Asian Buddhism: the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana (da sheng qixin lun 大乘起信論).

“Unlimited Nature: a Śaivist Model of Divine Greatness” (published in Sophia). This paper makes a case that there are alternative and competing ways of understanding the notion of maximal greatness by extracting one model from the Pratyabhijñā school of Śaivism and contrasting it with one discussed in the analytic philosophy of religion.

“The Metaphysics of Creation in the Daodejing” (forthcoming in Ergo). This paper argues that the Daodejing 道德經 contains a doctrine of creation and reconstructs the metaphysical details of this doctrine. The paper also makes a case that this doctrine differs from models of creation such as creatio ex nihilo and emanation.

A second strand of my research consists of interpreting the content of religious or religious-philosophical texts in East-Asian and especially early Chinese thought. In particular, I am interested in proposing interpretations that allow us to connect these texts with debates in analytic philosophy and also with empirical research in the cognitive sciences. This is what I did in the following papers:

“A Daoist Theory of Creativity” (under review). This paper extracts from the Zhuangzi 莊子 a model of the creative process. The theory proposes that creativity consists of processes by which we spontaneously access a perspective on a circumstance, where perspectives are in turn understood as ways of representationally construing a circumstance. In doing so, the paper interprets the Zhuangzi through some notions used in the philosophy of mind. Moreover, it uses empirical evidence to argue that one of the cultivation practices contained in the text—the fasting of the mind (xinzhai 心齋)—can be taken to have the effect of enhancing our creative capacities.

“The Logic of Ideal Agency in the Zhuangzi” (under review). This paper advances research on agency in the Zhuangzi by providing a reconstruction of the argumentative logic that underlies the text’s view of ideal agency. To do so, I extract from the text three valid arguments that respectively answer the questions of (1) what are the conditions the satisfaction of which makes one an ideal agent; (2) what are the capacities that make one incapable of being an ideal agent; (3) what are capacities that make one capable of being an ideal agent.

“Pluralism about Aesthetic Value and Agency in the Zhuangzi” (under review, co-authored with Dominic McIver Lopes). While the paper above identifies in the Zhuangzi an ideal of agency across the board, this paper interprets the text as containing an ideal of aesthetic agency in particular. According to the proposed reading, the Zhuangzi (1) embraces a variety of pluralism about aesthetic value, and (2) portrays ideal aesthetic agents as those with the competence to access the plurality of aesthetic values.

I am now in the process of beginning to work on several papers that directly develop the ideas contained in the six papers listed above. Once I have completed those papers, I am looking forward to embarking on a variety of new projects. Those will be both projects aimed at addressing questions of general interest in the study of religion and interpretative projects that deal with early Chinese texts as well as Japanese ones.