Contemporary Empiricism And The Philosophy Of Religion

Extract

There has been a very lively renewal of interest in religion of late, especially among intellectuals. The part which philosophers take in this is reflected in a number of popular discussions of religion by philosophers, in radio talks and symposia, conferences on the philosophy of religion, as well as in subtle contributions to learned journals. The reasons for this interest in religion are many, but prominent among them is the peculiar position of philosophy today. As is well known, the dominant strain in philosophy, in English–speaking countries at present, is a severely empiricist one, and this has as one of its most distinctive features the technique by which it is claimed to show that assertions which seem to be of a non–empirical character, other than strictly logical or mathematical ones, gain their apparent plausibility through linguistic confusions of various kinds, notably our proneness to hypostatize abstractions. This development in philosophy has led to concern with religion in a number of very different ways, of which the following seem to be the most important.