Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as
Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical,
because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression.
Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement (as
exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a
legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well
as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is
that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious
language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas
'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in
Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in
the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell,
then a place can be found in both his early work and his later
writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical
utterances--one which depends on exploiting an analogy between
religious language and riddles. And once this alignment between
Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see
various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension--in
that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that
it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology and
philosophy have traditionally called 'perfections' and
'transcendentals', particularly concepts such as Being, Truth, and
Unity or Oneness. This results in a radical reconception of the role
of analogous usage in language, and so in the relation between
philosophy and theology.
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Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191071621
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter