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Reply to Timothy Hinton on Gareth Moore's Philosophy of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Howard Robinson Open the ORCID record for Howard Robinson [Opens in a new window]
Howard Robinson*
Affiliation:
Central European University, Vienna: Blackfriars Hall, Oxford: Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion, New Brunswick
*
robinson@ceu.edu
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Abstract

Hinton's defence of Gareth's philosophy is welcome - but I don't think it works. This is because he does not show how, on Gareth's theory, ‘God’ can be referential, and, if it is not referential, then ‘belief in God’ cannot be taken in any literal sense. Sadly, I stand by my original claim that the radical, Phillipsian Wittgensteinianism that Gareth adopts is a form of informal positivism that only allows an expressivist sense to religious, and, indeed, all metaphysical language.

Keywords

WittgensteinGodReferencePhillipsexpressivismtruth
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 102 , Issue 1097 , January 2021 , pp. 22 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Flew, Antony, Hare, R. M. & Mitchell, Basil, “Theology and falsification: the University discussion” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York, Macmillan (1964)Google Scholar John Wisdom, “Gods”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1944–5, reprinted as Chap. X of Antony Flew, ed., Essays in Logic and Language, First Series (Blackwell, 1951), and in Wisdom's own Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Blackwell, 1953).

2 Russell, Bertrand, “Logical Atomism”, 1924, in Essays on Language Mind and Matter 1919-1926, Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 9, Slater, John G., ed. (London: Unwin Hyman) 1988, 160-179.Google Scholar This ref., 162.

3 Analysis, Jun., 1949, Vol. 9, No. 6, pp. 83-97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This ref., 94.

4 It also seems to me that there is an arrogance in this claim. It is plain that 99% of humanity think they can make sense of this idea, and Phillips claims that ‘we’ – the enlightened – realize it is, not merely wrong, but nonsense. Gareth shows that he does not have such conceit by the way that he disagrees with Phillips on whether the proponents of traditional theology are talking about religion at all. Phillips thinks they are not, Gareth, that they are, but are getting it wrong. Gareth also agrees that this is minor disagreement! This discussion comes up in Phillips’ article in the memorial volume of New Blackfriars.