Mini-Seminor 5

Speaker: Chandana Deka
 
Title: Religion, Ethics, and Time
 

This talk focuses on the idea of fideism. What are the challenges to fideism? How fideism is trying to answer the questions of new atheism? What will be the new atheists take on religious practices? How religious practices impact human life’s moral, social, and cultural aspects? To what level we can accept faith in religion at the social level?
These questions and their possible answers will be the main subject matter of this talk. In the process I shall talk about fictionalism. For me one direction to see the level of acceptance of religion in public sphere will be fictionalism. Some of the philosophers of time also discuss about the idea of fictionalism. More specifically Robin Le Poidevin and Natalja Deng.  Fictionalism gives us the scope to see whether the non-realist schools of thought can practically accommodate religious practices in the social sphere.
In this talk I am not talking about the metaphysical aspect of time. Instead of time I am thinking of context. Context are essentially time bound. I shall very briefly talk about the cultural epoch, a particular situation about the humanness. For example: In Indian understanding of ethics there are two parts- one part of it is universal in nature, the other part is context bound. Indian Philosophers call it as Yuga dharma. Yuga dharma is essentially a time bound code of conduct. I don’t say they are using it as time. Yuga actually represents a period. Which essentially can be taken as time bound.