Between the Visible and the Invisible

Between the Visible and the Invisible:  

How Can A Hodological Discussion on the Religious Avoid Turning Itself Into A Perrenis Philosophia?

This conference calls upon specialists from all academic fields (including philosophy, religious studies, social and natural sciences, etc.) who can respond to the fundamental human questions of “what it means to be human” and “what it means to be religious” in the East Asian cultural contexts. Our aim is to explore an important relationship between philosophy and religion while tracing back their harmony and dissonance in the very origin(s) of the former in reference to the East Asian history. We will attempt to examine their dissonance through inquiring how the faculty of philosophy seems to deploy a discourse on various religious doctrines based on reason, while focusing on how a variety of religions are not always able to critically examine philosophy based on faith.

Realizing that one is offering a totalizing discourse that justifies its own claims while the other takes itself to represent a certain totality that does not require any extrinsic justifications, we will search for the unifying relations they exercise in relation to the questions of the visible and the invisible. These concepts, laying claims aiming to grasp the real or the absolute, are essential in any of our meaningful approach to the discipline of philosophy and religion.

The theme of this conference encompasses various facets of human experience: therefore, we will adopt a hodological method that remains sensitive to all form of academic disciplines. This sort of “open attentiveness” (or agapeic mindfulness) to various disciplines is what allows us to respond to the fundamental questions of human existence without falling victim to the erroneous either/or: either a perennial philosophy based solely on reason or dogmatic theology stays aloof to human struggles stemming from our thinking being. Interdisciplinary contributions touching on the theme of the “visible and invisible” in reference to the question of “what it means to be human and religion” are most welcomed.