Kwame Anthony Appiah

Modern sociology and anthropology proposed from their very beginnings a scientific study of religion. This paper discusses attempts to understand religion in this ‘scientific’ way. I start with a classical canon of anthropology and sociology of religion, in the works of E. B. Tylor, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. Science aims to be a discourse that transcends local identities; it is deeply cosmopolitan. To offer a local metaphysics as its basis would produce a discourse that was not recognizable as a contribution to the cosmopolitan conversation of the sciences. So, a science of religion cannot appeal to the entities invoked in any particular religion; hence the methodological atheism of these three founding fathers. This cosmopolitan ideal, the calling of the scientist, on the one hand, and the concern to understand the ideas of other cultures, on the other, can pull in different directions. Understanding requires us to appeal to our own concepts but not to our own truths. In the explanations, though, truth – the universal shared reality – has to matter, because the scientific story of religion has to work for people of all faiths and none, precisely because it is cosmopolitan. Not everything we call a religion will have historical Christianity's laser-like focus on ontological truth-claims. But as long as there are people making truth-claims in the name of religion, there will be the possibility of a tension between the very idea of a science of religion and some of the multifarious collections of beliefs, practices and institutions that make up what we now call ‘religions’.

This article argues against the view that affirmative action is wrong because it involves assigning group rights. First, affirmative action does not have to proceed by assigning rights at all. Second, there are, in fact, legitimate “group rights” both legal and moral; there are collective rights—which are exercised by groups—and membership rights—which are rights people have in virtue of group membership. Third, there are continuing harms that people suffer as blacks and claims to remediation for these harms can fairly treat the (social) property of being black as tracking the victims of those harms. Affirmative action motivated in this way aims to respond to individual wrongs; wrongs that individuals suffer, as it happens, in virtue of their membership in groups. Finally, the main right we have when we are being considered for jobs and places at colleges is that we be treated according to procedures that are morally defensible. Morally acceptable procedures sometimes take account of the fact that a person is a member of a certain social group.

Idealization is a central feature of human thought. We build ideal models in the sciences, our politics is guided by pictures of impossible utopias, and our thinking about the arts and moral life is guided by images of how things might have been. In all these cases we sometimes proceed with a representation of the world that we know is not true or aim at a world we accept we cannot realize. This is the world of the "as if," which the philosopher Hans Vaihinger delineated at the turn of the century, in ways he traced back to Kant. In this book, I aim to explore idealization in aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as in the philosophy of mind, of language, of religion, and of the social and natural sciences. No one could be an expert on all of these things, but sometimes in philosophy it helps to stand back and take a broader view. On the way I hope to illuminate many issues, large and small, but there is one over-arching lesson: our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it. This book is about why we need a multitude of pictures of the world. It is a gentle jeremiad against theoretical monism.