Language and Spirit

161 Pages·2004·0.491 MB·

by  D. Z. Phillips, Mario von der Ruhr (eds.)

Language and Spirit
Edited by
D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr
Language and Spirit
Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
General Editors: D.Z. Phillips, Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion,
the Claremont Graduate School, California; and Professor of Philosophy
Emeritus and Rush Rhees Professor Emeritus, University of Wales, Swansea;
Mario von der Ruhr, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Wales, Swansea.
At a time when discussions of religion are becoming increasingly specialized
anddetermined by religious affiliations, it is important to maintain a forum for
philosophical discussion which transcends the allegiances of belief and
unbelief. This series affords an opportunity for philosophers of widely differing
persuasionsto explore central issues in the philosophy of religion.
Titles include:
Stephen T. Davis (editor)
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
D.Z. Phillips (editor)
CAN RELIGION BE EXPLAINED AWAY?
RELIGION AND MORALITY
D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (editors)
KANT AND KIERKEGAARD ON RELIGION
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
RELIGION WITHOUT TRANSCENDENCE?
RELIGION AND HUME’S LEGACY
D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (editors)
LANGUAGE AND SPIRIT
Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (editors)
PHILOSOPHY AND THE GRAMMAR OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF
Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71465–2
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Language and Spirit
Edited by
D.Z. Phillips
and
Mario von der Ruhr
Editorial matter,selection and introduction © D.Z.Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr
2004
Chapter 1 © Anselm Kyongsuk Min 2004
Chapter 2 © Mario von der Ruhr 2004
Chapter 3 © Merold Westphal 2004
Chapter 4 © Schubert M.Ogden 2004
Chapter 5 © Patrick Sherry 2004
Chapter 6 © James Kellenberger 2004
Voices in discussion 1–6 © D.Z.Phillips 2004
Remaining material © Palgrave Macmillan 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-1820-8
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Language and spirit / edited by D.Z.Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr.
p.cm.– (Claremont studies in the philosophy of religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Philosophical theology.2.Spirit.I.Phillips,D.Z.(Dewi Zephaniah) II.Von
der Ruhr,Mario.III.Series.
BT55.L36 2004
211—dc22 2003070726
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
D.Z. Phillips
1 Hegel’s Dialectic of the Spirit: Contemporary
Reflections on Hegel’s Vision of Development and Totality 8
Anselm Kyongsuk Min
Voices in discussion 1 35
2 Spirit and Romanticism 39
Mario von der Ruhr
Voices in discussion 2 60
3 Kierkegaard on Language and Spirit 64
Merold Westphal
Voices in discussion 3 86
4 Toward Interpreting the Language of Spirit: The
Legacy of Rudolf Bultmann 91
Schubert M. Ogden
Voices in discussion 4 106
5 Is God a Spirit? 113
Patrick Sherry
Voices in discussion 5 125
6 Spirit and Truth 131
James Kellenberger
Voices in discussion 6 144
Name Index 151
Subject Index 153
v
Acknowledgements
The papers in this collection were delivered at the 2002 Claremont
Conference on Philosophy of Religion. I acknowledge, with gratitude,
the financial support by Claremont Graduate University, Pomona
College and Claremont McKenna College. I am also grateful to the
participants for their contribution to the Conference Fund. I am partic-
ularly grateful to Professor Van Harvey of Stanford University who was
invited to give critiques of the conference papers. His comments gave
shape and stimulus to all the discussions. I am indebted to Helen
Baldwin and Jackie Huntzinger, Secretaries to the Department of
Philosophy at Swansea, and to the School of Religion at Claremont,
respectively, for their administrative help. I am also grateful for the help
of graduate students during the conference, particularly my research
assistant Francis Gonzales – who was also responsible for typing my
Introduction and Voices in discussion. Finally, I thank my co-editor
Mario von der Ruhr for proof-reading the collection and for seeing it
through its various stages of publication.
vi
Notes on Contributors
Van A. Harvey retired as George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious
Studies at Stanford University in 1996. He is the author of A Handbook of
Theological Terms; The Historian and the Believer; and Feuerbach and the
Interpretation of Religion, which won the American Academy of Religion
Award for Excellence in 1996. He has written extensively on nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Protestant thought.
James Kellenberger is Professor of Philosophy at California State
University, Northridge, USA. His research interests include ethical the-
ory, religious pluralism, and philosophy of religion. He has published
numerous articles and eight books including The Cognitivity of Religion:
Three Perspectives;Inter-Religious Models and Criteria;Relationship Morality;
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance; and most recently
Moral Relativism, Moral Diversity, and Human Relationships.
Anselm Kyongsuk Min is Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate
University, USA. His theological interests are in contemporary construc-
tive theology (trinity, Christology), theological method, theologies of
liberation, religious pluralism, and Asian theologies. His philosophical
interests include Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, recent European thought, clas-
sical American philosophy, and political philosophy. He has published
on liberation theology, Hegel, pluralism, Christology, pneumatology,
ecclesiology, and Asian theologies. He is the author of Dialectic of
Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberationand is currently writing Nature,
Grace, Glory: Aquinas’s Trinitarian Theology of Creation.
Schubert M. Ogdenis Professor Emeritus at Perkins School of Theology
at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, USA and Marty
Center Visiting Senior Scholar in Religion at the University of Chicago
Divinity School. His publications include The Reality of God and Other
Essays; Faith and Freedom: Towards a Theology of Liberation; and Doing
Theology Today.
D.Z. Phillips is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at
Claremont Graduate University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
and Rush Rhees Professor Emeritus at the University of Wales, Swansea.
He is the author of many books, the most recent being Philosophy’s Cool
Place; Recovering Religious Concepts; Religion and the Hermeneutics of
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Contemplation. He has newly completed books on Religion and Friendly
Fire; The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God; and Wittgensteinian
Fideism?(with Kai Nielsen).
Patrick Sherry is Professor in Philosophical Theology Emeritus at
theDepartment of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK. He is the
author of many books including Spirit and Beauty;Images of Redemption;
Religion, Truth and Language Games; and Spirit, Saints and Immortality. He
was the editor of Philosophers on Religion, and with N. Smart, J. Clayton,
and S.T. Katz, he co-edited Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the
West.
Merold Westphal is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University,
USA. His primary interest lies in Continental Philosophy from Kant to
the Present. In particular, he is currently interested in the historical
development and systematic integrity of individual thinkers and the
dialogue or debate between pairs of thinkers; their contributions to the
philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and aesthetics; and their
contributions to issues of philosophical methodology in terms of dialecti-
cal holism, ideology critique, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneu-
tics,deconstruction, and so on. He is the author of many books including
Overcoming Onto-Theology, and Postmodern Philosophy and Christian
Thought.
Mario von der Ruhris lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wales,
Swansea. His research interests include the Philosophy of Religion,
Kantian ethics, Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and the thought of Simone
Weil. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations,
and co-editor of the series Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
andExistential Themes in Theology and Philosophy of Religion.
Introduction
D.Z. Phillips
Why has the concept of spirit been neglected in contemporary
anglophone philosophy? Why has it been neglected in philosophy of
religion where, it might be thought, a belief in God as Spirit would have
commanded attention for the notion? I do not pretend to provide an
adequate answer to these complex questions in this brief introduction.
Neither am I going to trace, or repeat, the answers to the question one
finds explicitly, or implicitly, in the papers which make up this collec-
tion. Their clarity is such as to render such an attempt on my part utterly
superfluous. I do, however, want to explore one aspect of replies to the
questions which runs throughout the papers and discussions of them:
this has to do with our difficulty in placing the concept of spirit. There
seems to be a general lack of confidence about the use of the notion, one
which is, at the same time, a hesitancy about the ways in which it can,
or should, enter our discourse.
I can bring out what I mean by the difficulty of ‘placement’ by refer-
ring to a tension which, as far as I am concerned, was never far away in
the papers and discussion. This is a tension between philosophy and
theology or, more particularly, a tension between ontology and theol-
ogy. At one end of the spectrum, there are those who entertain what
might be called ontological ambitionsfor the notion of spirit, such that to
talk about ‘spirit’ becomes a way of talking about ‘what there is’, or ‘all
things’, in a way which appears, in different forms, in philosophical
ontologies.
It might be said that ontological ambitions for ‘Spirit’ reach their
highest point in Hegel. Ever since the answers given by the Presocratics
to the question, ‘What is the nature of all things?’, advocates of ultimate
ontologies have had to face the question of how the ontological reality,
whatever form it takes, is supposed to account for that which comes to
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