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Beliefs and Attributes1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Gershon Weiler
Gershon Weiler
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin.
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Extract

In a philosophical paper the point one wishes to make should be stated at the very outset. And in dealing with a problem which is as controversial as religion, the bias should be confessed before any points are made. I want to conform at once to both these requirements. I want to discuss beliefs, ordinary beliefs but mainly religious ones, for the expression of which, oddly enough, we use the same word. “Belief” and “Faith” are admittedly different in English, but many languages possess only one word for these and further I shall try to show that even in English the difference is not very great and that they have, if not the same, at least a very similar logical grammar. The point of my argument is that beliefs can be discussed rationally and that they should be so discussed. Religious arguments have been going on for a very long time, and I find it incredible that people of immense intellectual qualities, who devoted their time and energy to these discussions, have been working under a simple delusion, not understanding the very nature of the thing they were doing.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 137 , April 1961 , pp. 196 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1961

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References

2 This suggestion was made by Miss Anscombe when I read this paper in Oxford. If polytheism were our universe of discourse, then this theory would be absolutely adequate. But I fail to see how one could maintain it in a monotheistic context unless one was also willing to say that it is a mere accident that there is only one god and not more. Should we claim that it is necessary that there is only one God, i.e. His uniqueness belongs to his essence, then we should have to incorporate the specification of the range of application in the list of class-defining characteristics. It is one thing to say that extension is determined by intension and quite another that the extension is stated explicitly in the intension.