200+ Living Philosophers of Religion and Their Best Work

(last updated 06/06/2010; current count is 248 philosophers)

To give you a brief sketch of contemporary philosophy of religion, here’s a list of 200+ living philosophers of religion who publish in English, along with a few of their most significant books/papers in philosophy of religion. (I’ve listed a few people who aren’t philosophers of religion but who have published at least one influential work in the field – e.g. Jaakko Hintikka, John Earman, Robert Kane, etc.)

The list is not interested in philosophers of religion who only publish work on what earlier philosophers have said. Finally, I must note this is technically a list of philosophers of religion who were alive as of the date this post was first published: 04/25/2009. As philosophers who were living at that time die off, I’m not going to remove them from this list.

In compiling this list, I noticed that the philosophy of religion appears to be dominated by theists (in the English world, anyway). I guess that is not surprising. After all, if there was such a thing as the “philosophy of werewolves,” one would not expect many of us werewolf disbelievers to bother gaining expertise in disproving werewolves. We’ve got better things to do with our time. In contrast, hundreds of academic theists believe it is their God-given cosmic purpose to clarify and defend theism from the world of professional philosophy.

Also see Prosblogion’s Most Important Philosophy of Religion Articles (many of them are linked to the PDF, below).

I will keep this list updated, so please comment with corrections and suggestions. My labels of each philosopher’s personal beliefs are mostly guesses, so please correct me if I’m wrong!

Please remember to comment with additions and corrections. If you can send me a PDF of any articles not linked above, send it to:

“lukeprog [at] gmail [dot] com”

Updates since January 2010