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Catholic and Apostolic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Nicholas Denyer
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1 TQ

Extract

Whatever else Christianity may be, the agapeistic way of life, a personal relationship with Jesus, or whatever, it is also a matter of holding certain things to be true. Of recent times that has been denied by some whose job it is to think about these things. For there are theologians who, though apparently convinced by logical positivism that the traditional formulations of Christian belief do not express truths, wish nevertheless to retain the name of Christian. Positivism however in any case never had much more than fashion to recommend it; and it was already ceasing to be fashionable among philosophers as it started to be fashionable among theologians. To conjoin furthermore an acceptance of positivism with a wish to be called Christian strikes me at least as mere perversity.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1985

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References

page 517 note 1 See on this topic Anscombe's, G. E. M. ‘Faith’, in her Collected Philosophical (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1981), vol. III, pp. 113120Google Scholar, and the important series of papers by Welbourne, Michael: ‘The Transmission of Knowledge’, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 29 (1979), pp. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Community of Knowledge’, ibid., vol. 31 (1981), pp. 302–14; and ‘Knowing and Believing’, Philosophy, vol. 55 (1980), pp. 317–28.

page 518 note 2 See Turner, E. G., Greek Papyri: An Introduction (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1968), pp. 6667.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 521 note 3 Much of what follows owes its inspiration to a paper by Tony Coady on ‘The Disappearance of History’ at the Moral Sciences Club, Cambridge, in Lent Term 1983.

page 523 note 4 There is a useful exposition, with bibliography, of the elements of textual criticism in Reynolds, L. D. and Wilson, N. G., Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Creek and Latin Literature, Second Edition (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1974), pp. 186ff., 247ff.Google Scholar

page 524 note 5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1953), p. 33.Google Scholar Wittgenstein's critique of the ‘bad philosophy of mind and language’ that I mention in this paragraph is lucidly expounded in Kripke, Saul A., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

page 528 note 6 This paper gained much from the kind comments of several audiences in Cambridge to whom it has been read. I have been particularly helped also by remarks of Lynne Broughton, Paul Gooch, Julius Kovesi, Jorge Secada and Jenny Teichman.