¹ PPO, p. 211 and OC, sec. 204, PI, p. 226, RPP-I, sec. 630.

WITTGENSTEIN ABBREVIATIONS:

PPO = Public and Private Occasions, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. New York: Rowman – Littlefield, 2003

OC = On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969

PI = Philosophical Investigations, 2d Ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001

RPP-I = Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980

TLP = Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and BF. McGuinness. London: Routledge – Keegan Paul, 1961.

LC = Wittgenstein: Lectures and Coversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief , ed. Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966

NB = Notebooks: 1914–ndash;1916, 2nd Ed., trans. G. E. M Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979

CV = Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

² Davies, , An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 3d edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 2–15Google Scholar.

³ Wittgensteinian Fideism? (London: SCM Press, 2005), p. 177Google Scholar.

⁴ Quoted on p. 37 of Phillips' Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001Google Scholar.

⁵ “What is God?”–“An eternal measure?”–“What's that?”–“A subsistent ideal.”–“A what?”… If we want to avoid going down that dark metaphysical road–as Phillips certainly did–then I think we need to begin by substituting a Wittgensteinian, “grammatical” question about the religious use of the word God for the traditional “What is God?” formulation. As part of his own grammatical investigation, Phillips suggests that “God,” along with the picture of divine judgment associated with it, functions as a “mirror in which we see and judge ourselves.” (Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 105). In view of this, we can say that the grammar of “God” is comparable–up to a point–with the grammar of such words as “standard, “measure,”“ideal,” and (even) “mirror.” Phillips also explains that this “eternal measure” is spoken of in personal terms (as “our heavenly Father,” for example) because that “answerability” must be mediated in the personal details of our lives: “The importance of ‘the personal’ is found in the fact that to engage with the love and grace of which I have spoken is to engage with the personal, not with blind causal forces” (from a ms. Phillips sent me: “Wittgensteinianism: Wittgenstein, Logic, Metaphysics and God”). He fleshes-out this rather thin explanation in (among other places) chap. 21of From Fantasy to Faith, where he makes illuminating use of a Flannery O'Connor short story. (See also Gareth Moore's Believing in God (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), pp. 42–45 and passim.).

⁶ Weil, Simone, Waiting For God (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 144Google Scholar.

⁷ Recovering Religious Concepts (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), p. 90Google Scholar.

⁸ Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy, ed. Phillips, D. Z. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 44Google Scholar. As his teacher and colleague, Rhees was a major infuence on Phillips' thinking about religion.

⁹ Anselm is bringing out this distinction when, in the so-called second version of his ontological argument of Proslogion, chap. 3, he argues that it would be contradictory to say that God, defined as “that, than which nothing greater [more perfect] can be conceived,” could (like any object) be conceived not to exist; for that would imply that God is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. In other words: Anselm came to understand that without eternal, necessary existence, the God he believed in could not be the supremely perfect Reality “than which nothing greater can be conceived.”

¹⁰ From “Sublime Existence,” chap. 2 in Wittgenstein and Religion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), p. 17Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 17.

¹² Ibid., p. 19.

¹³ Sorry to say, I lost the exact reference for this quote. For Phillips' major discussion of Ludwig Feuerbach, see chap. 4 of Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation. Cf. Through a Darkening Glass (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)Google Scholar, especially pp. 148–149.

¹⁴ The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (SCM Press: London, 2004), p. 95Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Compare Cora Diamond's discussion of Wittgenstein and riddles in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1991)Google Scholar, especially pp. 267–289.

¹⁶ Davies argues that when Aquinas says that God's existing is not other than his essence he is not committed to the dubious proposition that existence is a defining property of somebody called “God.” His point is that, “given the appropriateness of asking ‘How come the universe as opposed to nothing?’, one cannot reply by referring to something to which the same question equally applies… . “ (The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil[London: Continuum, 2006], p. 107Google Scholar).

¹⁷ Cf. TLP, 6.372: “People today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages… . [T]he view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus [of explanation], while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”

¹⁸ See chap. 4 of Orthodoxy. Cf. my “Chesterton, Wittgenstein, and the Foundations of Ethics”, Philosophical Investigations 14:4 (1991), pp. 311–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, p. 224.

²⁰ Hume thought that to speak of “necessary existence” or “what exists by its very nature” is to use words without meaning. Brian Davies would respond by explaining that when Aquinas spoke in those terms he meant that “God cannot be something the existence of which is derived.”I posed the following question to Davies: Supposing that, in fact, something exists whose existence is underived: why call this “something”necessarily existent? I see just two possibilities: first, that “necessary existence” is just another term for “underived existence,” adding nothing to its meaning; second, that it is supposed to refer to what accounts for underived existence. If he wants to say the latter then it looks like he is going in the circle of first explaining “necessary existence” in terms of “underived existence” and then “underived existence” in terms of “necessary existence.”He replied:“My point is just that if something exists by nature (and is therefore not something the existence of which is derived from something else), then it cannot not exist and is, in this sense, ‘necessary.’ I take ‘exists by nature’ to be just equivalent to ‘cannot not exist.’ This does not mean that there has to be anything that exists by nature. [T]o say that in God essence and existence are identical … is to say that whatever God is he cannot be something derived or something which might fail to exist. (I am supposing that this way of speaking does not commit one to supposing that existence is some kind of property with which God is to be identified).”I replied: You say both that what necessarily exists (i.e., exists by nature) cannot be something that might fail to exist and that this doesn't mean there has to be anything that exists by nature. It occurs to me that his this is the gist of Aquinas' objection to Anselm's argument. If something exists by nature, then it can't be something that might fail to exist. Yes. But, contrary Anselm, there is no a priori basis for affirming that antecedent. So it looks like we need to reject the criticism that the cosmological argument commits the same fallacy as that commonly ascribed to the ontological argument, namely that of trying to infer the real existence of something from a purely a priori premise. Davies: I've no problem with what you've written. But it makes an awfully long footnote!

²¹ Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 291.

²² The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, pp. 103 and 131.

²³ From a letter to me from Brian Davies: “You are dead right to say that what links me to Phillips is a critique of anthropomorphism. He saw it that way too, which is why he organized a Claremont conference based on an article of mine in which I deplore anthropomorphism in contemporary philosophy of religion while giving good marks to Phillips on this score. See Davies, ' “Letter from America” in New Blackfriars, 84:989 (2003), pp. 371–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, pp. 226–227.

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 226–27.

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 199–200.

²⁷ Gravity and Grace, p. 90.

²⁸ Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 105.

²⁹ Gravity and Grace, p. 90.

³⁰ Wittgensteinian Fideism?, p. 323.

³¹ Ibid., pp. 370 and 221.

³² Introducing Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 162–63Google Scholar.

³³ Wittgensteinian Fideism?, pp. 287–88.

³⁴ Cf. Peter Winch, quoted in Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 284Google Scholar: You say that people wouldn't use religious concepts unless they believed that God exists? But then what is the context for this belief? If you answer–as I think you should–‘a religious context,’ then we have an example of … thought trying to catch its own tail.”[paraphrased] and cf. Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell's, 1986), p. 183: It is because people exult and lament, sing for joy, bewail their sins and so on, that they are able, eventually, to have thoughts about God. Worship is not the result but the precondition of believing in God. Theological concepts, like all concepts are rooted in certain habitual ways of acting, responding, relating, to our natural-historical setting. The very idea of God depends on such brute facts as that, in certain circumstances, people cannot help shuddering with awe or shame, and so on… . [I]f we cannot imagine what it is to observe rites, enjoy singing hymns and the like, the nature of religion is bound to remain opaque.

³⁵ Summa Theologiae, 2a-2ae. lxxxiii.2.

³⁶ Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 30.

³⁷ Worth quoting here is the following exposition of Aquinas by the distinguished Thomist, the late Herbert McCabe: Natural causes, operating as trans-formers, provide the answer to the question: Why did these things come to exist instead of those others?… God, on the other hand, would provide the answer to the question Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?… I say that God would provide the answer to that question because, since we do not know what God is, we do not have an answer to our question.–” The Logic of Mysticism—I” (in Religion & Philosophy, ed. Martin Warner[Royal Institute of Philosophy, Supp. Vol., 31], p. 50Google Scholar). McCabe then remarks that Aquinas' distinction between the creative act of God (which we do not understand) and natural causality (which we do) is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's distinction in the Tractatus between the mystical [“that the world is”] and “what can be said”[“how the world is”]. There is unfortunately no room in this paper to investigate how McCabe develops that intriguing comparison.

³⁸ I think the later Wittgenstein would say that, in speaking of “wonder at the existence of the world,” we may be using the word wonder in what he calls “a secondary sense.” I talk about this on pp. 144–45 of my Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (SUNY Press, 1999Google Scholar).

³⁹ Cf. my “Creation, Causality, and Freedom of the Will,” in Arrington, Robert L. and Addis, Mark, eds., Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 51–65Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, p. 36.

⁴¹ That remark continues in the revised and augmented edition of CV as follows: “Now why am I so anxious to keep apart these [theological] ways of using ‘declarative sentences’[from other, more familiar uses]?… It is simply an attempt to see that every usage gets its due. Perhaps then a reaction against the over-estimation of science… . But of course the words ‘see that they get their due’ & ‘overestimation’ express my point of view. I could have said instead: ‘I want to help this & this to regain respect’: only I don't see it like that.”–Alois Pichler, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 70). Phillips insisted that his point of view, like that of Wittgenstein, was that of “contemplative philosopher,” not an apologist.

⁴² Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 98.

⁴³ “Religion, on a Heideggerian account, can be described as a way being-in-the-world… . On this conception, ‘the gods’ or ‘holy godly ones’ comprise an integral element of the world … Being religious is a matter of understanding things in advance as related to the ‘gods’, so that they can show up as sacred, as ‘creation’, etc.”– Benjamin D. Crowe, “Heidegger's Gods,”International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 15:2 (2007), p. 241. In a footnote, Crowe points out “a certain resemble to contemporary Wittgensteinian accounts of religion, such as D. Z. Phillips.”

⁴⁴ Rudd, Anthony, “Warming Up the Cool Place: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips” (Faith and Philosophy 22:2 [2005], pp. 127–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar).