Unseen Care: Experience, Natality, and Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

The topic of experience in the philosophy of religion has been a well-contested one, especially along epistemological lines. Many discussions in the wake of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience have revolved around epistemology and what evidence forms of experience can furnish for knowing the divine. This dissertation examines the work of Grace Jantzen and Stanley Cavell to unsettle and reorient how philosophy of religion faces up to experience and what it can constitute within people’s lives. By examining Jantzen’s proposal of natality along with Cavell’s work on ordinary language and skepticism, I argue that philosophy of religion must reckon with ethical dimensions of pain, birth, and uncertainty upon which the making of knowledge rests. Care ethics, I propose, is the best framework by which philosophy of religion can draw upon Cavell and Jantzen’s insights for approaching experience while opening up critical discussions that go beyond them. As a concluding application of care philosophy of religion toward experience, I discuss how care more effectively addresses reductions of experiential understanding through artificial intelligence and robotics than prior framings of experience in the context of religion.