Post-Secular Cosmopolitanism? Rethinking Religion and Liberal Philosophy and Policy Beyond Kant

Abstract

Kantian thinking is most prominent in current cosmopolitan approaches. Usually this strand of thinking is completely secular and ignores religion or keeps it at bay as a force from a dangerous past. Nevertheless, there are approaches from Seyla Benhabib to Jürgen Habermas’ turn to post-secular thinking that estimate the role religious citizens, groups, and organizations, and their arguments can play in Kantian deliberation or indeed may even be necessary to support Kantian deliberation (e.g. the dialogs between Habermas, Johann Baptist Metz, and Benedict XVI). This panel takes a step further. Can religious discourses make a cosmopolitan argument that works on foundations beyond Kant? Can cosmopolitan thinking work on a religious basis that combines faith and reason and still leaves room for the individual freedoms so essential to Liberal philosophy and policy? Beyond the Kantian horizon, what do religious traditions unbound offer to the aim of imagining world community? For example, does social capital rest on religious foundations? Can human rights rooted in religious traditions (like the Christian natural law tradition or in Islamic Shari’ah) establish a tenable basis for human rights beyond the liberal conception of the rights of the autonomous individual, such as attempted in the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam? Can religious freedom bridge the gap between religious and secular discourses? What role does religious freedom play in liberal policy?

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