Wittgenstein's illustrative comparison of linguistic activities with games, his defence of a single term for items having no more than a ‘family resemblance’ and not even one common distinguishing feature, and his objections to any proposal seeming to imply an unshareably private language appear to have been accepted as interesting and important if not always as persuasive in English language philosophy. But these themes, and others introduced along with them are most often taken as separate items, belonging to distinct compartments (...) of philosophy, and justice is not done to their inter-connections and coherence. (shrink)

This paper examines how Heidegger's view that language is poetry might provide a helpful way of understanding the nature of religious language. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is language in its purest form, in that it both reveals Being, whilst also showing the difference between word and thing. In poetry, Heidegger suggests, we come closest to the essence of language itself and encounter its strangeness and impermeability, and its revelatory character. What would be the implications for viewing religious language in this (...) way? Through examining Heidegger's view that poetry is the purest form of language, I suggest that it would also be possible to view religious language as poetry in this way, in that it also shows the transcendence of what cannot be brought to presence in language, except as concealed. Such a view of religious language does not regard it as a problematic type of language, deserving special treatment, but rather suggests that in religious language the inarticulable relationship between word and world is revealed. (shrink)