Contemporary Philosophy Of Religion Research Articles

An interview with Richard Swinburne

Abstract This article is part of Religious Studies’ new initiative to publish a series of interviews with distinguished philosophers of religion. Each interview explores the personal and academic background of the interviewee and discusses their core philosophical views. The aim is to inspire students and scholars and to provide an overview of some of the most important works developed by contemporary philosophers of religion. In the first interview, Max Baker-Hytch interviews Richard Swinburne, covering such topics as his upbringing, his days as a student in Oxford in the 1950s, and his views on natural theology, the problem of evil, and the mind-body problem.

Idol Or Icon? Francisco Suárez And The Concept Of Being

Abstract: This essay addresses dominant critiques of Francisco Suárez’s metaphysical project raised by many contemporary philosophers of religion. Those critiques often center upon two main claims. (1) God and creature are both comprehended under the concept of being such that God amounts to just one more being among others. As such, a univocal community of being results wherein God’s divine transcendence and irreducibility to creation are destroyed. (2) Since Suárez employs a univocal concept of being when conducting his metaphysical speculations about God, he has (unwittingly) abandoned the God of Christian revelation in favor of a conceptual idol. The author argues that both critiques harbor a severe misunderstanding of Suárezian metaphysics, and that it is precisely in turning to the concept of being that Suárez defends both God’s irreducible transcendence and his incomprehensibility. Paradoxically, to think of God in terms of being is just to leave God unthought.

Kötülük Problemini Yeniden Konumlandırma: Güncel Bir Tartışmanın Analizi Ve Değerlendirilmesi

Çağdaş din felsefesinde kötülük problemini tartışmada hakim olan mantıksal veya delilsel kötülük problemi argümanları Tanrı’nın varlığı ile kötülüğün varlığının birbiriyle tutarsız olduğunu savunmaktadırlar. Plantinga’nın özgür irade savunusu mantıksal kötülük argümanının tezlerini çürüterek kötülük probleminin teizm açısından mantıksal bir tutarsızlığa sebep olmadığını göstermiştir. Kötülük probleminin bilinen bu tartışma seyri ateist filozof James Sterba’nın İyi Bir Tanrı Mantıksal Olarak Mümkün mü? (2019) başlıklı kitabında yeniden analiz edilir. Sterba bu eserinde Plantinga’nın özgür irade savunusunun kötülüğün varlığı ile Tanrı’nın varlığının mantıken uyumunu gösteremediğini iddia eder. Sterba’ya göre kötülüğün özellikle korkunç kötülüğün varlığı ile Tanrı’nın varlığı ahlaken gerekçelendirilemez. Sterba bunu göstermek için teizmin klasik kötülük problemi argümanlarını ele alır ve hiç birinin Tanrı’yı ahlaki açıdan temize çıkaramayacağını ileri sürer. Sterba söz konusu argümanlarını geniş bir felsefi tartışmanın konusu kılmak amacıyla Religions dergisinde özel bir sayı yaparak kendi argümanlarının teistlerce çürütülmesini ister. Bir grup çağdaş din felsefecisi söz konusu sayıda Sterba’ya cevap verir. Bu çalışmada Sterba’nın ahlaki kötülük argümanı ve teizme yönelik eleştirileri incelenecek ve bahsedilen dergide kendisine verilen cevaplar sınıflandırılıp analiz edilecektir. Son olarak da bu cevaplara yönelik genel bir değerlendirme yapılacaktır.

Toward an African Theory of the Atonement

Contemporary philosophy of religion and analytic theology has recently experienced a revival regarding the nature of the Christian Atonement. The Kaleidoscope theory of the atonement says that the major theories such as Christus Victor, Satisfaction, Penal Substitution, and Moral Exemplar each capture an important aspect of the significance of the atonement. When taken together, they offer a fuller picture of the atonement than they do as individual theories. My goal is to add to the Kaleidoscope theory by drawing on insights from the African philosophical tradition. I argue that there are ideas to be found in the African communitarian ethic of ubuntu that can be mined to help deepen our understanding of the atonement. I thus seek to widen the kaleidoscope theory of the atonement to include important African perspectives.

Toward a Global Discourse on Religion in a Secular Age: Essays on Philosophical Pragmatism by Ludwig Nagl

Reviewed by: Toward a Global Discourse on Religion in a Secular Age: Essays on Philosophical Pragmatism by Ludwig Nagl Gary Slater By Ludwig Nagl Toward a Global Discourse on Religion in a Secular Age: Essays on Philosophical Pragmatism Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2021. 281 pp., incl. index This book is not much of a forest, but its trees are quite lovely. The book comprises fifteen essays across two overall parts. The two parts are asymmetrical in length, with part one comprising three essays and part two twelve essays; section two is itself divided into two respective sections of five and seven essays. Aside from some very brief prefatory remarks before each section, everything in the book has been selected or adapted from a disparate set of previous publications and conference presentations drawn from across several decades of Nagl's career. As with the book's sections, its essays also vary widely in length, ranging from five pages (for chapter 2.1.2, "A Brief Glance at Deconstruction: Derrida's Philosophy of Religion") to thirty-six pages (for chapter 2.2.4, for "Josiah Royce's Kant- and- Hegel-Inspired Interpretation of Religion and his Interest in Asian Thought"). If this description suggests a certain disjointed quality to the book, this is not to say that the book is inconsistent. Nagl does present us with an overarching question, which is: Is it accurate to describe ours as a secular age? Even if there are questions as to how well the book coherently explores this question, or even how interesting the question itself is, there is no doubt that Nagl is interested in the question and has a clear view on how it can be discussed. The reader also gets an impression of Nagl's intellectual allies and opponents. Opponents include reductionists of all stripes, with particular ire trained at proponents of a "dogmatically anti-religious secularism/scientism" (p. 8) that seek to exclude religious insights as legitimate participants in either academic or public discourses. Allies comprise a constellation of international [End Page 534] scholars past and present—mostly past—who resist reductionism; these include Nagl's interlocutors in China, select figures from the continental philosophical tradition, and the bulk of the pragmatic tradition. A grand narrative is at work across the book's essays. According to this narrative, modern, Western thought made a consequential mistake in pushing secularism too dogmatically and reductively. The harm here has not just been done to theology, in which Nagl shows relatively little interest, but rather to academic commentaries on human life. Nagl laments the dominance of analytic approaches within the philosophical guild, as well as impoverished conceptions of the human within culture more broadly conceived. Thankfully, the reductionist wave is cresting, and "non-reductive discourses on the concept of human practice and its (religious/spiritual) horizon of hope" have begun to "reoccur in various ways" (p. 9). With Karl Jaspers's notion of the Axial Age as a reference point, Nagl construes the task at present as that of identifying and nourishing constructive alternatives to reductionism. Exploring and promoting connections among such options might be said to be the animating aim of the book. Nagl identifies three areas as particularly promising. These are "American pragmatism, contemporary philosophy of religion, and the globalized exploration of (non-reductive modes of) humanism" (p. 15). The last of these involves particular engagement with Chinese thought, particularly the Neo-Confucianism of Tu Weiming; for its part, contemporary philosophy of religion is mostly represented by select figures from the continental philosophical tradition. Each of these areas receives its own section within the structure of the book, at least ostensibly. The reality as executed is a bit murkier, although the book's arrangement is clearer than it first appears. The three essays of Part 1, "The (Re)Emerging Philosophical Discourse on Religion. An Encounter Between Western and Chinese Thought," comprise material presented in China during a period between 2014 and 2019. These chapters form a microcosm of the arguments Nagl is making across the book, so it is not necessarily a problem that this section is shorter. Part 2, "Philosophy of Religion After the Criticism of Religion: Pragmatism and 'The...

The Openness of God: Hasker on Eternity and Free Will

The understanding of God’s mode of existence as eternal makes a significant difference to a variety of issues in contemporary philosophy of religion, including, for instance, the apparent incompatibility of divine omniscience with human freedom. But the concept has come under attack in current philosophical discussion as inefficacious to solve the philosophical puzzles for which it seems so promising. Although Boethius in the early 6th century thought that the concept could resolve the apparent incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and human free will, some contemporary philosophers, such as William Hasker, have argued that whatever help the concept of eternity may give with that puzzle is more than vitiated by the religiously pernicious implications of the concept for notions of God’s providence and action in time. In this paper, I will examine and respond to Hasker’s arguments against the doctrine of God’s eternity.

Can a Metaphysically Perfect God Have Moral Virtues and Duties? Re-reading Aquinas

Contemporary philosophers of religion usually depict God as a responsible moral agent with virtues and obligations. This picture seems to be incompatible with the metaphysically perfect being of classical theism. In this paper I will defend the claim, based on a reading of Thomas Aquinas’s thought, that there is no such incompatibility. I will present Aquinas’s arguments that show that we can attribute to God not only moral goodness in general, but also some moral virtues in a strict sense, such as justice and mercy. I will show why for Aquinas we can say that God has moral duties toward Himself and toward creatures. I will explain how for Aquinas God’s moral duties are not absolute, but conditionally necessitated. Finally, I will show how on Aquinas’s view there is no contradiction in saying that every act of God is, simultaneously, an act of justice and a supererogatory act of mercy.

Ibn Taymiyya on theistic signs and knowledge of God

AbstractThis article aims to draw on the ‘Qur'anic Rationalism’ of Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) in elucidating an Islamic epistemology of theistic natural signs, in the lens of contemporary philosophy of religion. In articulating what Ibn Taymiyya coins ‘God's method of proof through signs (istidlāluhu taʿālā bi'l-āyāt)’, it seeks aid in particular from the work of C. Stephen Evans and other contemporary philosophers of religion, in an attempt to understand the relevance and force of this alternative to natural theology within the Islamic tradition. In doing so, it aims to respond to existing criticisms of Ibn Taymiyya's perspective in the literature, and to consider the implications of a Taymiyyan reading of theistic natural signs, on the epistemic function of Qur'anic āyāt as theistic evidence.

Militant Liturgies: Practicing Christianity with Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Weil

Traditional philosophy of religion has tended to focus on the doxastic dimension of religious life, which although a vitally important area of research, has often come at the cost of philosophical engagements with religious practice. Focusing particularly on Christian traditions, this essay offers a sustained reflection on one particular model of embodied Christian practice as presented in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. After a discussion of different notions of practice and perfection, the paper turns to Kierkegaard’s conception of the two churches: the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant. Then, in light of Kierkegaard’s defense of the latter and critique of the former, it is shown that Kierkegaard’s specific account gets appropriated and expanded in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s account of “costly grace” and “religionless Christianity,” and Simone Weil’s conception of “afflicted love.” Ultimately, it is suggested that these three thinkers jointly present a notion of “militant liturgies” that offers critical and constructive resources for contemporary philosophy of religion.

The Sphinx and the Veil of Isis

Jon Stewart’s recent book offers an opportunity to re-explore one of the richest areas of Hegel’s cultural research during the Berlin period, the wide-ranging study of world religions developed in the second part of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. While this treatment of world religious traditions has often been taken as out-of-date and narrowly Eurocentric, there are, as Stewart suggests, important contributions within Hegel’s developing work on pre-classical and Asian religions that remain of interest to contemporary philosophers of religion, art and history. This paper (1) compares the changes Hegel makes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion to those in the Aesthetics lectures belonging to the same period; and (2) examines in particular how Hegel’s view of the relation between Athens and Jerusalem changed with developing knowledge of Egyptian and other near Eastern cultures.

Evil and Free Will: Contemporary Free-Will Defense and Classical Theism

The article considers contemporary free will defences, proposed by A. Plantinga, R. Swinburne, according to which the existence of a world in which there is free will is something more valuable than the existence of a world in which there is no free will. It is shown that contemporary forms of free will defences share with atheistic arguments from evil an anthropomorphic model of God, in which God is thought as an individual among other individuals, although endowed with attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence to an excellent degree. It has also been shown that another important point of similarity between contemporary free will defences and atheistic arguments from evil is that both attempt to assess what our world would be like if created by such an individual. In contrast to atheistic arguments from evil, contemporary free will defences argue that divine omnipotence and omniscience are subject to some greater restrictions, as usually assumed, especially due to God's desire to give some of his creations the ability of free choice, which logically implies the possibility and even necessity of the existence of evil. It is demonstrated that classical theism does not share the anthropomorphic model of deity typical for many contemporary philosophers of religion. Classical theism rejects both the anthropomorphic model of deity and the unaccountability of free will to God as the supreme good. On the contrary, it assumes that free decision was initially an opportunity for the voluntary consent of man which had an innate aspiration towards God as his supreme good. Nevertheless, due to the creation of man out of nothing, this consent could not be automatic but implied forming a virtuous character, and man's transition from a state in which he was able not to sin, to a state in which he would be not able to sin.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: TOWARDS A MEANINGFUL TALK ABOUT RELIGION

Wittgenstein’s profound thought had rich implications regarding religious belief and religion. In his early philosophy, silence occupies a central place to articulate what is beyond the boundary of language. Silence overcomes the limits of human language. In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, religious language and different religious languages are legitimized by the multiple uses of language. An evaluation of his linguistic philosophy and its application in religious belief reveals that despite the limitations of his philosophy, Wittgenstein has enriched the contemporary philosophy of religion. This paper discusses the meaningful talk about religion, religious speech acts and religious rituals with Wittgenstein’s later understanding of the religious domain. Though Wittgenstein was not a religious man, he saw things from a religious point of view. His insight on religious belief can be seen from different perspectives. From a pragmatic perspective, religious language is very much tied up with the form of life. It emerges from the everyday shared practices of the community of believers.

A Complex Ultimate Reality: The Metaphysics of the Four Yogas

This essay will pose and seek to answer the following question: If, as Swami Vivekananda claims, the four yogas are independent and equally effective paths to God-realization and liberation from the cycle of rebirth, then what must reality be like? What ontology is implied by the claim that the four yogas are all equally effective paths to the supreme goal of religious life? What metaphysical conditions would enable this pluralistic assertion to be true? Swami Vivekananda’s worldview is frequently identified with Advaita Vedānta. We shall see that Vivekananda’s teaching is certainly Advaitic in what could be called a broad sense. As Anantanand Rambachan and others, however, have pointed out, it would be incorrect to identify Swami Vivekananda’s teachings in any rigid or dogmatic sense with the classical Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara; this is because Vivekananda’s teaching departs from that of Śaṅkara in some significant ways, not least in his assertion of the independent salvific efficacy of the four yogas. This essay will argue that Swami Vivekananda’s pluralism, based on the concept of the four yogas, is far more akin to the deep religious pluralism that is advocated by contemporary philosophers of religion in the Whiteheadian tradition of process thought like David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, the classical Jain doctrines of relativity (anekāntavāda, nayavāda, and syādvāda), and, most especially, the Vijñāna Vedānta of Vivekananda’s guru, Sri Ramakrishna, than any of these approaches is to the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara. Advaita Vedānta, in Vivekananda’s pluralistic worldview, becomes one valid conceptual matrix among many that bear the ability to support an efficacious path to liberation. This essay is intended not as an historical reconstruction of Vivekananda’s thought, so much as a constructive philosophical contribution to the ongoing scholarly conversations about both religious (and, more broadly, worldview) pluralism and the religious and philosophical legacies of both Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. The former conversation has arrived at something of an impasse (as recounted by Kenneth Rose), while the latter conversation has recently been revived, thanks to the work of Swami Medhananda (formerly Ayon Maharaj) and Arpita Mitra.

Modern moral reinterpretation of Jesus and its value to the philosophy of religion


 
 
 The moral reinterpretation of Jesus conducted by Kant, Lessing and Feuerbach, is an interesting matter when it comes to the philosophy of religion. The abovementioned German philosophers claimed that Jesus ought to be understood only as a moral archetype and a revolutionist in morality. This concept arose on the grounds of moral religion which was one of the most interesting ideas of the Enlightenment. Thus, exploring this moral reinterpretation of Jesus is just an excuse to study the concept of moral religion. Despite the fact that this idea is no longer current, it has immense influence on the contemporary philosophy of religion. Therefore, understanding the concept of moral religion can broaden the context of the contemporary discussion.
 
 

Sources of the Possibility of the Contemporary turn towards Religion

The return of religion in the philosophical reflection can be observed in the contemporary world. Thinkers like Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo or Charles Taylor can substantially exemplify that phenomenon. In this paper, we would like to focus on some of the aspects of modern and contemporary philosophy of religion and also on the sources that made it even possible. That is why at first we point out three critiques of religion present mostly in the XVIII-th and XIX-th century. Then we will inquire about the two main ways of understanding religion in the contemporary philosophy and about it’s source.

Либертарианство и классический теизм: к вопросу о взаимосвязи концепций

This paper aims to highlight the historical and conceptual interrelations between libertarianism and classical theism (CT). In the first part of the paper, I show that the concept of CT was introduced in the contemporary philosophy of religion by the proponent of process theology Ch. H. Hartshorne to criticize European philosophical and theological tradition. Hartshorne himself thought that classical theism contradicts the libertarian understanding of free will. I further propose two hypotheses to explain the existing association between libertarianism and classical theism in the contemporary philosophy of religion. In the second part, I explore conceptual dependencies and contradictions between libertarianism and CT. I argue that although libertarianism is more suited to address the problem of evil and the doctrine of eternal damnation than theological compatibilism, it nevertheless faces serious problems on the way of reconciliation with CT. To explain evil and eternal damnation libertarian free will have to be understood as having a great value. However, the value of libertarian freedom might be challenged by exploring its contradictions with such divine perfections as divine goodness and divine foreknowledge and the doctrine of divine conservation. I further argue that to solve theological puzzles one needs to develop explicitly theological libertarian understanding of free will that depends on theological values and does not pretend to be compatible with naturalism and atheism.

Wherein lies the debate? Concerning whether God is a person

Within contemporary philosophy of religion there are three main ways in which God is conceptualised in relation to personhood:God is a person and so personal (PP).God is non-personal, and so is not a person (NPNP).God is a personal non-person (PNP).The first two of these options will be familiar to many, with (PP) held by most contemporary monotheist philosophers of religion and (NPNP) mainly by those who are pantheists. (PNP), however, is a view some may not have come across, despite its proponents claiming it was the view of great philosophical theologians from the past. However, within recent times (PNP) has become more popular. On the face of it, it might not be clear what the difference between (PP) and (PNP) is, and whether debate had between the two positions is substantive. The goal of this paper is therefore to clarify the debate and assess whether the many claims advocates of (PNP) make as to why God cannot be a person (PP) stand up to scrutiny or are persuasive. My suggestion will be that on the whole they do and are not. As such, defenders of (PNP) will either need to defend these reasons in more detail or focus on the area I suggest the debate really rests on.

Hedendaagse godsdienstfilosofie: Een inleiding

Dit essay beoogt de mogelijkheden van een hedendaagse godsdienstfilosofie aan te tonen. Het geeft de lotgevallen weer van de Derridiaanse deconstructie in het hedendaagse intellectuele veld, met name door het denken van Martin Hägglund en John D. Caputo weer te geven, die respectievelijk een atheïstische en een theologische lezing van Derrida bieden. Dit artikel stelt een alternatief voor. In het denken van de vergeten filosoof Ludwig Binswanger, en diens fenomenologie van de liefde worden antwoorden gevonden op verschillende vragen die in de hedendaagse continentale filosofie worden gesteld. Binswangers fenomenologie biedt immers een empirische-transcendentale methode die zo de gebreken van zowel de deconstructie als de fenomenologische methode aanpakt. Binswangers ontologie van het groeten, tot slot, wordt hier geïnterpreteerd als een hedendaagse godsdienstfilosofie die, net omwille van haar ontologische stellingname, verschilt van veel gestalten die de hedendaagse theologie aanneemt.

Egzistencijalni dokaz vjere. Vjernička egzistencija i iz nje proizlazeći dokaz o Božjoj opstojnosti

U radu je analiziran specifičan aspekt vjerničke egzistencije u kojem zastupamo tzv. egzistencijalni dokaz vjere. Čovjek je, naime, oduvijek usmjeren na Boga u smislu da naslućuje da pored svih ciljeva koje u životu ostvaruje postoji onaj jedan najviši koji predstavlja krajnji cilj njegova egzistiranja. Sluti da je upravo Bog taj najviši cilj i smisao te pokušava dokazati Božju opstojnost, iako se iz perspektive naravne teologije i s obzirom na tradiciju (analitičke) filozofije religije pokazuje ne manje važnim proniknuti u temelje njegova egzistencijalnog življenja i iskazivanja vjere u Boga. To su također isticali suvremeni autori tzv. egzistencijalističke provenijencije poput Søerena Kierkegaarda i Karla Jaspersa. Promatrana u tom kontekstu rasprava o dokazivanju Boga predstavlja samo jedan aspekt šire rasprave u kojoj treba vidjeti na koji način čovjek živi, a zatim i opravdava svoju vjeru u Boga. U suvremenoj filozofiji religije, a posebice onoj analitičkoj, stručnjaci su najčešće posvećeni traženju evidencije o Božjoj opstojnosti, iako je prema našim autorima možda i važnije svjedočiti te na taj način dokazati svoju vjeru u Boga kao stvarnu svrhu i smisao cjelokupne egzistencije. Zato u radu nastojimo ukazati na iznimnu važnost egzistencijalne dimenzije vjere i života po vjeri.

Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa contra Gentiles”: A Guide and Commentary by Brian Davies

Reviewed by: Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa contra Gentiles”: A Guide and Commentary by Brian Davies Thomas S. Hibbs Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa contra Gentiles”: A Guide and Commentary. By Brian Davies, O.P. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 485. $105.00 (cloth), $45.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-19-045653-5 (cloth), 978-0-19-045654-2 (paper). In this Guide, Brian Davies aims to write a book that is “introductory, if also comprehensive.” In this, he has succeeded marvelously. Of all the books on Thomas that seek to be both expository and philosophical, this is among the most readable. It is grounded in a careful reading of Thomas’s own text, yet it brings to bear the most important debates in contemporary philosophy of religion as well as the best of contemporary philosophical writing on Aquinas. It moves with ease between exposition of the text and the raising of probing questions. It also provides illustrative examples in portions of the text where they are most useful, for example, in the notoriously forbidding argument from motion. This is the work of a masterful scholar and teacher who has spent years thinking deeply about the texts of Aquinas. Before turning to a lengthy and detailed exposition of the text itself, Davies supplies, in an opening chapter, background on Thomas’s life, work, and the setting of the Summa contra gentiles, a work whose purpose and structure have puzzled commentators for centuries. Davies notes that the structure and style of the Summa contra gentiles are distinct among Thomas’s texts. It is not a commentary, although it contains passages in which Thomas strives to show that his interpretation conforms to the text of Aristotle, nor is it organized according to the disputed-question model, although the listing of objections and responses occurs at important points in the text. The order of proceeding is quite different from that in the later Summa theologiae, in which Thomas adopts the method of theological scientia throughout and makes only a brief and passing reference to the philosophical sciences. By contrast, in the Summa contra gentiles he begins by dividing his treatment according to the “twofold mode of truth in what we confess about divine things,” with the first three books being devoted to that portion of divine truth accessible to reason, and the fourth to the segment that exceeds reason’s capacity. Davies speaks of the first three books as an “extended essay in natural theology” in which reason operates “without dependence on purportedly divine revelation” (7, 15). Like almost everyone now writing on the Summa contra gentiles, Davies dismisses the longstanding tradition that envisioned this work as Thomas’s response to the [End Page 643] request from Dominican superiors for a book able to be deployed by Dominican missionaries working in Spain and useful in countering Islam. Davies ends up calling it a “somewhat apologetic work” with three main purposes: “to reflect at length concerning what reason can tell us about God . . . to note ways in which what reason tells us about God harmonizes with what revelation teaches, and . . . to defend the articles of faith against charges of irrationality” (15, 13). That description works reasonably well, although it leaves out some of the peculiar structural features of the work, features that bear upon how we ought to understand Thomas’s own self-understanding: that is, how he understood his task in bringing together the two great sources of wisdom, philosophy and theology. I mentioned above that Davies not only provides a clear exposition of the arguments with consideration of some of the puzzles in the arguments themselves, but that he also takes up relevant contemporary literature. Especially helpful is his use of the writings of Peter Geach and Herbert McCabe, members of what might be called the Wittgensteinian school of Thomism, distinguished by its care with language—with its logical structure, of course, but especially with the grammatical subtlety of ordinary language. For example, in his consideration of the objection that natural theology should be avoided altogether, Davies examines a set of objections: that it offends against piety; that the very notion of God is incoherent (Hume); and that God is...