Philosophy 385: Philosophy on the Front Page
Topics course focuses on toleration across religions and systems of thought

-- Katie Kraemer

Conflict over religious difference has shaped experience and caused intense human suffering in Europe and the Middle East for millenniums. For example, beginning around 1100, religious intolerance and a drive toward uniformity of belief took expression in a prolonged persecution known as the Inquisition.

A Christian movement, the Inquisition, punished not only non-Christians, but also Christians themselves if they deviated from dominant church teachings. Not until the sixteenth-century did religious violence in the West finally wane as the idea of toleration took hold in social thought.

The sixteenth-century British philosopher John Locke, a follower of the Christian faith, receives a good share of credit for advancing the idea of religious toleration in sixteenth-century Europe.

Obliged for a time to flee the political instability of his own country, Locke immigrated in 1580 to Amsterdam. Amsterdam had become a haven for many thousands of others, especially Jewish political and religious refugees from Spain and Portugal. Its openness and toleration gave sixteenth-century Amsterdam a rare political and economic stability, and as a result, scholars still look to the city as a model of the power of an idea—toleration—to improve the social climate and people’s lives.

Today, anyone contemplating an end to political and religious violence can look to the ideas of Locke and to the history of sixteenth-century Amsterdam for an example of practicing religious tolerance.

This fall semester, Professor Ronald Salzberger of the Department of Practical Philosophy and Ethics will offer the second "topics" course in a series titled "Philosophy on the Front Page." The first of the series in 2002 was titled, "The Case for Reparations," and looked closely at the colossal human cost of American slavery and colonial expansionism.

"Toleration: The History of an Idea," will examine the historical and contemporary world in terms of religious intolerance, fear and violence, as well as in terms of underlying questions of human rights and justice. The course will also ask how and whether human rights objectives can always balance with the idea of toleration.

Philosophy 385 satisfies upper-division and liberal studies requirements, and is a one-time only offering.