Many believe that philosophy of religion is in a state of crisis. Not only is there widespread disagreement about its aims, scope and method, there are also many who argue that the discipline has become irrelevant to all but the few actually working within the field. This last concern has taken on particular importance given the research impact agenda currently under discussion in universities across the world. This paper addresses the challenges currently faced by the discipline, and argues that it does have a valuable contribution to make to our understanding of issues of vital public importance. It provides an alternative account of the problems affecting philosophy of religion today and argues that the best response to these problems involves both recontextualizing the subject within the wider discipline of philosophy and reconfiguring it to be explicitly responsive to problems concerning religion generated outside the academy. It concludes that this response requires a dramatic expansion of the traditional scope of philosophy of religion to include a wider range of religious and philosophical traditions than was usually the case in the past.

Victoria Harrison, PhD (University of London), is Reader in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She is also Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Religion. Previously she taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States. She has also held positions at the University of London and the University of Notre Dame (London Center). Her research interests lie in the philosophy of religion, Indian and Chinese philosophies, ethics and metaphysics. In addition to a range of papers on philosophy of religion, she has published The Apologetic Value of Human Holiness (Kluwer 2000) and Religion and Modern Thought (SCM 2007). Her current work is concerned with theories of religious and ethical pluralism.

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