5th WORLD CONGRESS ON LOGIC AND RELIGION

WORKSHOP

Indigenous Knowledge Systems and World Religions

This workshop explores the relationships between Indigenous structures of thought and major world religions, with particular attention to how different traditions articulate meaning, truth, community, and the sacred.

Indigenous philosophies often emerge from deeply relational frameworks, where knowledge is not abstracted from life but embedded in land, language, ancestry, and lived practice. These structures frequently challenge dominant philosophical assumptions grounded in universality, formalization, and separation between subject and world.

Major world religions—such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others—have developed rich and diverse systems of belief, often combining metaphysical claims, ethical prescriptions, and symbolic narratives that seek to account for human existence, transcendence, and order.

Rather than treating these traditions as isolated or hierarchical, this workshop invites contributions that examine their points of contact, tension, and transformation. How do Indigenous structures of thought interact with, resist, reinterpret, or coexist alongside major religious traditions? What forms of reasoning, narrative, or symbolic logic emerge in these encounters?

We are particularly interested in contributions that engage with questions such as:

• Can Indigenous epistemologies be understood within the frameworks of formal or philosophical logic, or do they require alternative conceptions of rationality?
• How do concepts such as land, relationality, and community reshape theological or metaphysical claims?
• In what ways have major world religions adapted when encountering Indigenous traditions?
• Can apparent contradictions between belief systems be understood as different logical structures rather than errors?
• What role do language, ritual, and oral traditions play in shaping systems of thought?
• How might these encounters challenge dominant models of universality in philosophy and religion?

We welcome submissions from philosophy, religious studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, and related disciplines.

Return to the main CFP