Abstract:
Some conceptual and methodological structures are presented in this article as the effective sources that prevent the realization of a creative philosophy of religion. The article demonstrates the invalidity of the opposition between the historiography of philosophy as merely exegesis or reproductive reconstruction and creative philosophy as the resolution or dissolution of problems. A supposed lack of creativity is not based on a specific outdated methodological or pedagogical model but on the absence of an investigation into a series of assumptions that simultaneously constitute what is thought to be philosophy and what is regarded as the history of philosophy. These assumptions will be elucidated through the outline of a theory of phantom tropes about religion. In the end, we will highlight that the few discussions about the theory of history, the history of philosophical historiography, and concrete interdisciplinary investigations are responsible for caricatures both of doing philosophy of religion and of doing the history of philosophy.
Keywords:
Philosophy of Religion; History of Philosophy; Methodology; Historiography; Theology