Travis Dumsday recently published ‘Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual: Polytheism, Animism, and More in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion‘ with Bloomsbury Academic. This is a much needed, and much appreciated work that seeks to bring to the fore and engage with various substantive but neglected philosophical alternatives to prevailing paradigms like Christian theism or Naturalism. He clarifies that the views he will be engaging with are minority views among Anglo-European societies that still garner a substantial following, but that go largely undiscussed in contemporary philosophy despite being of genuine philosophical interest.

Dumsday’s work serves as a textbook that introduces representative thinkers and arguments from the selected alternatives. He says his primary aim in the book “is to showcase some of those ideas and arguments, bringing them before a wider audience of scholars and students and encouraging further work on them.” ¹

The first of these views he considers is Polytheism. I like how Dumsday notes right away the potential oddity of including Polytheism as an alternative when it has been the historical norm. But, it does satisfy the criteria given above–viz. a minority view among Anglo-European societies, etc.–and so is rightly included.

I found Dumsday’s introduction and presentation of Polytheism well-rounded and easy to follow. It can seem rather amorphous a movement, and as he notes, its academic currents are going unnoticed in mainstream scholarly venues. But he casts his net wide and captures the major distinctions. For example, he distinguishes Hard Polytheism from Soft Polytheism, and Polycentric Polytheism from Monocentric Polytheism.

Although there are many so-called soft polytheists, he elects to focus his attention on Hard Polytheism. And while he does engage with Monocentric Polytheism, he finds Polycentric Polytheism to be more philosophically interesting, as it represents such a radical break from existing paradigms.

Dumsday devotes substantial portions of his section on Polytheism to engaging with my works, and I would like to use this space to give some initial reflections on his points. These reflections might end up becoming fine-tuned enough at some point to be published, and thus carry on Dumsday’s own project, but for now I just wanted to think out loud. In particular, there are four points of his that I want to consider here, and they can serve to organize the following installments into sections: (i) appropriating basic theist arguments, (ii) distinguishing henads from bare particulars, (iii) inferring plurality from transcendence, and (iv) mapping the abstract to what’s on the ground.

However, in the remainder of this Introduction, I just wanted to express my gratitude to Dumsday. First, for the quality of his discourse. Dumsday is charitable, fair, and friendly. Moreover, it is honestly just refreshing to see others feeling free to be intrigued by these ideas as well. I have seen other published engagements with Polytheism that seemed to feel the need to almost save face in doing so by first acknowledging how unserious Polytheism is, but that respectable models or articulations could be constructed. ² Dumsday does nothing of the sort, and comes with the same philosophical spirit we do.

Second, I am grateful for the opportunity. It is challenging to get pro-polytheist pieces out there into mainline scholarly venues, but I am hopeful this represents the beginning of a new chapter. Back in 2016, we saw “Alternative Concepts of God” published with Oxford UP, and in its introduction, Nagasawa and Buckareff discussed the imbalance in contemporary analytic philosophy as well as the need to consider alternatives to reigning paradigms. I remember reading their discussion of the PhilPapers survey on how many philosophers are atheists, theists, and so forth, and the number of polytheists struck me. While admittedly low, where were they? The only polytheist pieces I found in the analytic literature were published by non-polytheists, and never as expressions of personal commitment: Polytheism was more like a foil–like in Raphael Lataster and Herman Philipse’s 2017 ‘The problem of polytheisms: a serious challenge to theism’. ³

Lastly, I just wanted to say that I enjoyed getting to see the trajectory of my works over the years as unfolding toward polycentricity: it is not something I ‘saw’ prior to seeing them chronicled like this. In fact, it helped me to see even more growth in that direction since my 2022 book. Polycentricity feels like an idea I have only scratched the surface of, and continuously return to in new ways. On that note, part of what I hope to do in these reflections is to shed light on things that I have written, certainly, but I also want to bring new vocabulary, angles, and considerations to bear as we wrestle with these matters.

With all this said, readers can expect two installments in this series. In Part I (releasing later this week), we will dig into the first two of his points: (i) appropriation of basic theist arguments, and (ii) distinguishing henads from bare particulars. In Part II (releasing next week), we will dig into the last two and conclude: (iii) inferring plurality from transcendence, and (iv) mapping the abstract to what’s on the ground.

My goal will be to truly wrestle with his points in the same spirit of collaboration and intrigue to hopefully advance closer to the truth of the matter.

Enjoy!

1. Dumsday, Travis (2024). Alternative conceptions of the spiritual: polytheism, animism, and more in contemporary philosophy of religion. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 3. ↩︎
2. Palmqvist, Carl-Johan. “The Old Gods as a Live Possibility: On the Rational Feasibility of Non-Doxastic Paganism.” Religious Studies 59, no. 4 (2023): 651–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003441252200049X. ↩︎
3. Lataster, Raphael & Philipse, Herman (2017). The problem of polytheisms: a serious challenge to theism. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (3):233-246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9554-x ↩︎