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Philosophy and religion: Attention to language and the role of reason

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Notes

  1. See Nicholas Wolterstorff's essay in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds,Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).

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  2. See Alexander Broadie, ‘Maimonides and Aquinas on the Names of God’,Religious Studies 23 (1987), and myKnowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).

  3. See myAnalogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).

  4. John Milbank'sTheology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) offers a trenchant and polyvalent critique of this strategy.

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  5. References are to his autobiography,Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage 1965): on Freud, ch. 5passim; on grace, p. 335. See myExercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), Ch. 5.

  6. This is the thematic of his major work,Insight (London: Longmans, 1957), recently reissued by University of Toronto Press as part of the collected works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan.

  7. But see Fergus Kerr'sTheology after Wittgenstein (New York: Blackwell, 1986) for an independent corroboration of Lonergan's reading of Aquinas.

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  8. ‘Leading’ is C.S. Peirce's term; ‘basic’ is is Alvin Plantinga's, most recently elaborated in his tandem volumes:Warrant and Proper Function, andWarrant, the Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  9. See the translation of the relevant questions from theSumma Theologiae by Mark Jordan:On Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), and James Ross's discussion of faith as a way of knowing. ‘Aquinas on belief and knowledge’, in G. Etzkorn (ed.),Essays Honoring Allan B. Wolter (Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, n.d.)

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  10. See Nicholas Lash's introduction to the University of Notre Dame Press edition of John Henry Newman'sGrammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN, 1979), and my ‘Religious belief and Rationality’, in C.F. Delaney (ed.), Rationality and Religious Belief (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

  11. Guy deBroglie, S.J., ‘La vraie notion Thomiste despraeambula fidei’,Gregorianum 34 (1953), pp. 341–389.

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  12. The telling use of ‘comme’ in the title of M.-D. Chénu'sLa théologie comme science au XIIIième siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1943) offers us a clue to Aquinas’ recognition of the delicacy of this endeavor.

  13. Aquinas,In Aristotelis Posterioris Analyticae 1.1[10] (Roma: Marietti, 1955).

  14. This is the burden of the first part of myAquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

  15. See Alven Neiman, ‘Augustine's philosophizing person: The view at cassiciacum’,New Scholasticism 58 (1984), pp. 236–255.

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  16. I have been immensely assisted in understanding this background operative in Aquinas by M.-D. Chénu'sThéologie au douzième siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1957), significant portions of which have been translated by Jerome Taylor asNature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), though without the key chapter: ‘Grammaire et Thèologie’.

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  17. This is the account developed in myAnalogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).

  18. Cited by Janet Martin Soskice in ‘The truth looks different from here’,New Blackfriars 73 (1982), pp. 528–41; ‘An interview with Hilary Putnam’,Cogito (Summer 1989), p. 90.

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  19. I am indebted to Josef Pieper'sSilence of Saint Thomas (New York: Pantheon, 1957) for this insight, where he insists that the ‘hidden elemment in the philosophy of St. Thomas’ (p. 46) is indeed creation, so that what I have called ‘the primal intelligibility’ expresses the relation of creatures to their creator: the very relation which bestows intelligibility in bestowingesse, while itself remaining unknowable to us.

  20. Jacques J. Waardenburg,L'Islam dans le miroir de l'Occident (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), p. 260.

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  21. SeeFreedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

  22. Most recently and notably,Three Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

  23. With Nazih Daher, I have translatedAl-Ghãzali on the Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1992), and am currently engaged in rendering his ‘Book of Faith in Divine Unity [Tawhid] and Trust in Divine Providence [Tawakkul]’ from his magnum opus:Ihya’ Ulum ad-Din [Revivification of Religious Learning].

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  1. College of Art and Letters, University of Notre Dame, 46556, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    David B. Burrell

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Burrell, D.B. Philosophy and religion: Attention to language and the role of reason. Int J Philos Relig 38, 109–125 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01322952

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