This is fascinating and bewildering book. Many will know Trakakis already either from his careful work on William Rowe and the problem of evil or from his impressive collaboration with Graham Oppy on the recently published five-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. Readers familiar with Trakakis only through these sources will find themselves puzzled, challenged, and perhaps frustrated by the Trakakis they meet in the pages of the present volume.

The End of Philosophy of Religion is a gauntlet thrown down in the face of a discipline that its author is ready to abandon. He signals this intention already in the first page of the volume where he rehearses the accusation that Anglo-American analytic philosophy is not only hampered by an excessively narrow rationalistic focus but also that the pursuit of this discipline leads one into dangerous political and personal waters. Such charges have been made before by those who declare analytic philosophy to be, if not dead, at least dying. Trakakis is unabashed: ‘The present study claims to drive one further nail into the coffin of philosophy as it is usually practiced within the analytic tradition, but with one particular twist: the focus will be on the philosophy of religion’ (1). If, as Hume had it, errors in philosophy are merely ridiculous, while those in religion are dangerous, Trakakis seems to think that philosophy of religion is both: it is dangerously ridiculous and it needs to be stopped.

The volume is itself the expression of the author's immense frustration and disappointment with philosophy of religion – the discipline within which Trakakis has himself begun to make a name – and it might be tempting to dismiss the book as a kind of Oedipal exercise, something that tells us more about Trakakis than philosophy. But even though the book becomes intensely personal at times (the entirety of chapter 4 reads like a series of intimate and anguished journal entries), we should not be too quick to pathologize the volume, for there is more to the book than just expression; there is also an argument and an exceedingly important one at that. Indeed, the bulk of the book (the first 84 pages) is one of the first comprehensive studies within the meta-philosophy of religion and it evidences all of the qualities of careful and perspicuous scholarship that have characterized Trakakis's earlier work.

The argument gets underway in chapter 2 where Trakakis considers what he calls ‘meta-theodical’ questions. These are questions about the very enterprise of theodicy. In the tradition of D. Z. Phillips and Kenneth Surin, Trakakis advances a moral argument against the creation of all theodicies. Standard theodicies within the philosophy of religion suggest that God has some morally sufficient reason for permitting the types and amounts of evil that disfigure our world. Traditionally, most theodicies have offered accounts of what such reasons could be – but more recent defences by sceptical theists have tended to remain agnostic about our ability to even guess at these divine morally sufficient reasons. Nevertheless, as theodicists, the partisans of both parties agree with the central claim that God must have such reasons. It is this notion common to theodicies of all stripes that Trakakis seeks to challenge. Trakakis notes that much of the literature in philosophy of religion is fuelled by a series of immanent critiques of the various theodicies on offer. Each theodicy is met with a series of challenges to the author's purported solution and these are met, in turn, by a series of refinements on the part of the theodicy's defenders. But Trakakis wants to mount a more global objection against theodicies as such, and he finds resources to do so within some of the arguments of his forebears.

First, following Phillips, Trakakis attempts to show that the permitting of evil, even when it is an intrinsic part of an obviously greater good, nevertheless morally implicates the agent who grants such permission. This is illustrated by reference not only to Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov but also to the famous dilemma presented in William Styron's 1979 novel, Sophie's Choice. When a sadistic Auschwitz doctor forces Sophie to choose which of her children will live and which die, she does not escape from this forced choice morally unscathed. Sophie has to suffer the consequences of her unavoidable involvement in such a morally repugnant situation and, so Trakakis and Phillips argue, it would seem that the theodicist's God should likewise be morally stained by His involvement in permitting far wider and even more repugnant evils, indeed, all evil that there has ever been or will yet be.

Trakakis's second argument, one found as well in both Phillips and Surin, is that theodical projects necessarily imagine a kind of calculus whereby God measures evils against goods and uses the former for the sake of the latter. The problem is that such a teleological and quasi-utilitarian approach ends up treating victims as either stepping stones or opportunities – collateral damage along the way to a brighter tomorrow. Such instrumentalism is, Trakakis maintains, entirely at odds with the very character of morality, which insists (as Kant held) that persons are always to be treated as ends in themselves and never as means. Moreover, to participate in such a practice of weighing and judging so many evils against so many goods is itself destructive. By assuming a putatively detached and objective gaze in the face of the world's immense suffering, the theodicist privileges the observer's comfortable stance to the expense of the viewpoint of those wracked by suffering and pain. This, Trakakis claims, is itself immoral. He presses his case even further, claiming with Lévinas that the justification of the pain of another – the justification that is at the heart of traditional theodicies – is in fact the source of all immorality. ‘Theodicy’, Trakakis writes, ‘may set out with the noble aim of vindicating the justice of God, but only ends up effacing our humanity and God's divinity’ (30).

This, however, is not a book on the problem of evil but on the state of contemporary philosophy of religion. How does the critique of theodicy relate to Trakakis's larger project? Trakakis argues that the failures of the theodical project are indicative of wider problems that beset the entire enterprise of analytic philosophy of religion. There is something persuasive about this claim for the problem of evil and its attendant theodicies and defences have certainly been near the centre of the renaissance within philosophy of religion during the last fifty years. If we have consistently got this issue so wrong, and if we have thus failed not for want of argument but rather for methodological and meta-philosophical reasons, as Trakakis maintains, then the rot may go deep indeed. But how would one go about showing this?

Meta-philosophical questions are almost always best addressed through an encounter between philosophy and its other, and in this case Trakakis chooses to set analytic philosophy in relief against its persistent other, the continental philosophical tradition. Trakakis knows that defining the parameters of these two philosophical camps is difficult but he suggests that we can nevertheless recognize a difference between the kind of philosophy that takes Frege, Russell, and Moore as its founding fathers, and the kind of philosophy that looks instead for inspiration in Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger alongside the masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Trakakis compares these two traditions through a careful and fascinating analysis of differences in style within two paradigmatic authors and, since his interest is not just in the analytic-continental divide but in the way this divide shapes philosophy of religion, Trakakis chooses Alvin Plantinga and John Caputo as his representatives.

Setting passages from Caputo and Plantinga side by side, Trakakis highlights the way that analytic philosophy is marked by an effort to identify individual propositions and inferential relationships through schematization and formalization, a demand for cogency and rigour, a persistent emphasis upon clarity and simplicity of expression, and a pervasive general mood of disinterested and detached investigation. How different this is from the way of writing Trakakis identifies in the continental tradition with its elusive and often bizarre tropes, its technical terms and neologisms introduced suddenly and without clear definition, its experimental use of language and grammar, and the flood of multiple literary genres often within the same text or even page. Long before one recognizes the substantive differences that divide Blanchot, Bataille, and Derrida from Searle, Quine, and Davidson, one knows simply by the way they write who belongs to which camp.

Trakakis argues that stylistic differences are tokens of deeper meta-philosophical differences and concludes that the two traditions of analytic philosophy, on the one hand, and its continental counterpart, on the other, can be seen as following two different pathways within modernity: analytic philosophy largely emulates and attaches itself to modern science, while continental philosophy largely emulates and attaches itself to modernism within the arts (along with attendant socio-political concerns). Building upon this distinction, Trakakis introduces us more fully in chapter 4 to continental philosophy of religion. He draws our attention to a gem of an essay by Merold Westphal from the 1970s (‘Prolegomena to any future philosophy of religion which will be able to come forth as prophecy’), and suggests that Caputo, Marion, Vattimo, et al. have brought Westphal's programmatic vision into reality and so birthed the field of continental philosophy of religion. In stark contrast to the more widespread analytic approach, the continental philosophy of religion tends to treat God as not as one existent being among other beings but as wholly other; it assumes that God-talk is not fact-stating or propositional but rather performative; belief in God is not a matter of scientific or probabilistic evidence but is concrete, existential, and resistant to the sort of argument that occupies so much analytic philosophy of religion.

A picture begins to emerge of analytic philosophy of religion as uniquely unsuited to its object (whether this be God or the religious life in general), and Trakakis presses his case hard for the superiority of the continental approach in such matters. At issue is the question of whether philosophy might still be conceived as a way of life, for Trakakis argues that only such a self-implicating approach to philosophy can do justice to the religious question. In the same way that the problem of evil demands not an objective evaluation or a rational calculus of goods and evils but engagement, so too, Trakakis argues, religious questions demand that the philosopher risk himself or herself in the process of inquiry. But to risk ourselves in this way we must learn a different way of writing and a different approach to our enquiries, an approach that is far more literary and much less rationalistic.

Suddenly, in chapter 5, Trakakis attempts to perform this proposal within his own text through a series of aphoristic, poetic, and personal commentaries on a variety of texts loosely connected by the figures of Nikos Kazantzakis and St Francis of Assisi. It is hard to comment well on this fascinating chapter, for it is so different in genre from the chapters that precede it that one feels it belongs entirely to a different book. Trakakis knows as much. He states, ‘To write a systematic and coherently argued book against analytic philosophy while doing so using the very apparatus of such a philosophy (e.g., its vocabulary, style and methods) is clearly a performative contradiction’ (84). He suggests, to the contrary, that what he has done is rather more Wittgensteinian: having taken analytic philosophy of religion to its perceived limits, Trakakis now kicks the ladder away and embraces a form of ‘philosophy without philosophy’. And here is, perhaps, the place for me to register a few of my reservations. Trakakis intends this alternative way of writing to replace the project of philosophy of religion. There is both heartache and a raw honesty in Trakakis's chapter on Kazantzakis – one hopes philosophers have the good sense not to sniff at it for being experimental or passionate. But can it really replace philosophy and has Trakakis shown us that it should?

Trakakis's case rests upon his picture of the stark differences between the analytic and continental approaches but in order to draw this picture he reifies boundaries that are much more fluid than Trakakis allows. Thus, for example, after rightly identifying a broad substantive difference between analytic and continental philosophers in the rejection of the scientific ideal of objectivity on the part of the latter, Trakakis adds that the rejection of scientific objectivity entails perspectivalism and non-realism. But need these latter two go together? Mightn't there be a realism – as argued, for example, by Paul Moser – irreducible to the scientific iterations of objectivity?

Moreover, it seems that at times Trakakis forces the evidence in order to render his protagonists (the continental philosophers) more attractive than their analytic colleagues. To stick with his treatment of realism and non-realism, Trakakis argues that the non-realist account of religious language does not imply that such language refers to things that are ‘not real’, but only that such language refers to ‘a reality of a radically different sort to that examined by the sciences’ (74). Suddenly every humanist is a non-realist! This account of non-realism may be what many mean by the term, but if so, it is hardly the bogey that so many analytic philosophers have been at pains to reject. What analytic philosophy of religion has rejected is more akin to the radical non-realism one finds in a Don Cupitt or a Mark C. Taylor rather than the common-sense recognition that there are more things in heaven and earth than the sciences can measure. By insisting that the realism/non-realism distinction cleanly separates analytic and continental philosophers of religion, while at the same time rendering non-realism in its most irenic guise, Trakakis simultaneously exaggerates the distance between the two traditions and stacks the deck in favour of one party over the other.

Trakakis concludes that rapprochement is impossible. Philosophers must choose between one tradition or the other and this choice is pictured as the choice between either sophia (wisdom) or philosophia (understood as knowledge). Where before Trakakis wrote in service of the latter, in this volume Trakakis enjoins the choice of the former. But is this call to choose one side or the other itself wise? Much of the best within the philosophical tradition has always sought both wisdom and knowledge. It was because figures such as Plato and Aristotle, or Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa, thought that philosophy was a way of life that they also thought it yielded real scientia, knowledge important enough to be subject to the most rigorous argument and debate. Much of this fascinating book engages in precisely that kind of clear and often forceful argument, but the author seems to believe that the future of philosophy lies elsewhere. I suspect that it is rather the reverse: to abandon any effort at clarity and precision, or systematic and coherent argumentation would be to end far more than just philosophy of religion; it would be to lose the philosophical tradition itself.

Trakakis is right to be concerned over the state of our discipline, but philosophy – in both its analytic and continental shapes – needs to be renewed not buried.