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the interwining of western philosophy and religion is a very old, very complicated historical problem. western philosophy in general starts up with a theologization of plato and aristotle, once they "reappeared" thanks to the muslim conservation/transcription of the key texts.
whence aquinas.
"modern" philosophy usually traces its history to descartes.
this move requires isolating the cogito as the central element in what amounts to an ontological proof (rather, the substitution of an epitemological claim for an ontological claim). but the steps that follow (judgement, which opens onto an infinite regress, the argument concerning imperfection/perfection which resolves onto a claim for god, from which follows everything else) shows that descartes is nowhere near being out from under the religious assumptions that shape the tradition he worked in.
"modern" philosophy emerges via folk like spinoza--within the xtian tradition, it emerges from within nominalism--god is maybe operational, maybe exists, but human understanding cannot know so the structure of the world and knowledge about the world can be seen as an independent zone of being that no longer requires recourse to god as ground. like pascal. but even then god persists--in kant, in hegel (particularly obvious in hegel's case)
i dont think you get explicitly secular philo in the west until the middle nineteenth century. the mathematization of the world, the mathematization of knowledge about the world, etc...a kind of grounding of captialist rationality dressed in philosophical garb--its inversion in folk like marx, nietzsche, etc.
i think that the main residuum of this metaphysical tradition in the present is the affection for transcendent claims. i think that the main reasons for this are institutional--defnese of the genre of philosophy from history, for example, is about the preservation of spaces of professional competence, not about matters of principle: transcendent propositions are the lingua franca of a particualr professional cadre--they exist and function because the cadre exists and functions. nothing about philosophy gets resolved once and for all. it is not a history of isolated heroic individuals. but to develop this would take way way too much space.
in general, whether religious claims are admissable or not within a given argument is a social question, a genre question. at the level of the type of questions/responses philo tends to pose, the flirtation with religious matters is constant. and religion never really goes away--in recent "continental" philo, you see it coming in via particular readings of heidegger (who i take to be a theologian in the main)-- derrida, levinas, marion--the theologizing of phenomenology.
these could be understood in sociological terms (see above on the cadres) or in historical terms (a function of the collapsing back onto old transcendental discourses as a way of coping with the radical uncertainty being introduced in any nmber of dimensions by globalizing capitalism, say). within the history of philosophy, these folk could be seen as a demonstration of the nonlinear nature of that history, fodder for a rejection of the entire ideology of progress--but this claim would be a genre function, whether i could make the argument a function of the community i was part of. not a question of principle.
my apologies for rattling on like this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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