Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Philosophy of Religion gathers twenty two concepts that reason about religious claims from outside any single tradition's own vocabulary, a mix of standing metaphysical positions, arguments for and against theism, and named schools.

Metaphysics supplies the shared toolkit: idealism, materialism and naturalism state rival views of what is fundamental, mind, matter or nature; monism, dualism and nondualism state rival counts of how many kinds of ultimate thing there are; and eternalism and presentism dispute whether past and future are as real as the present. Belief and disbelief in God, divine command theory, natural theology and the Watchmaker Analogy work the theism question directly, from Paley's design argument to the finer positions, agnostic theism among them, that sit beside plain theism and atheism. Determinism, fatalism and free will supplies the companion dispute over whether choice is ever genuinely open.

Vedanta and its named schools form a second cluster: Dvaita holds God, souls and matter eternally distinct; Vishishtadvaita holds them really differentiated within one Brahman; and Pratyabhijna, Kashmir Shaivism's recognition doctrine, holds liberation to be recognising a self already identical with Shiva, three rival readings of the same Upanishadic material Vedanta itself surveys as a family. Religious pluralism, exclusivism and inclusivism name the modern discipline's own sorting of how one tradition should regard the others, and perennial philosophy and Traditionalism both hold, more strongly, that one truth underlies them all. Stoicism, Number as the Principle of All Things, Transcendentalism, Thealogy and the Humanist Manifestos close the group as named schools spanning antiquity to the twentieth century.