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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
In Meaning and Method, Anders Nygren has returned to his earlier field of study, the philosophy of religion, and has attempted to formulate a legitimate method for the philosophical study of religion. He accomplishes this task by retaining many of his earlier concepts including ‘motif research’, ‘a repudiation of metaphysics’, ‘religion as expressive of the concept of the eternal’ and adds to these the programme of language analysis proposed by the later Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Philosophy of religion becomes the logical analysis of the presuppositions found in the religious context of meaning. Such an enterprise is a science (Wissenschaft) because it is capable of objective argumentation.
page 208 note 1 Nygren, Anders, Meaning and Method: Prolegomena to a Scientific Philosophy of Religion and a Scientific Theology, tr. by Watson, Philip S. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972)Google Scholar. All references will be to this edition and I will use the abbreviation MM for it. For an exposition of Nygren's earlier philosophy of religion see: Bring, Ragnar, ‘Anders Nygren's Philosophy of Religion’ in The Philosophy and Theology of Anders Nygren, edited by Kegley, Charles W. (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970).Google Scholar
page 209 note 1 Nygren, Anders, Agope and Eros, tr. by Watson, Philip S. (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1969)Google Scholar. Cf. also the section of essay entitled ‘Motif Research’, in The Philosophy and Theology of Anders Nygren.
page 210 note 1 Nygren also cites Kant as having an anti-metaphysical method even though Kant did not succeed in eliminating metaphysics completely from his thought. Cf. MM, pp. 51, 58.
page 211 note 1 We shall deal with this issue more extensively in section 3.
page 212 note 1 Logical connectives do not always correspond perfectly with linguist usage. The difficulties of representing conditionals by material implication are well known; see, for example, Strawson, P. F., Introduction to Logical Theory (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 78ff.Google Scholar
page 213 note 1 There certainly are areas in which the law of non-contradiction and/or excluded middle does not seem applicable as in quantum mechanics, the physical description of light and perhaps in aesthetic judgments. Yet, for a commonsense situation like the imaginary legal situation and in many scientific explanations, the law does hold.
page 213 note 2 Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenhcim originally proposed this account of scientific explanation in a paper entitled ‘Studies in the Logic of Explanation’, Philosophy of Science, vol. 15 (1948), pp. 135–75. It is widely reprinted including an abridgement in Hempel's Aspect of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1965).
page 214 note 1 Cf. Hanson, Norwood Russell, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) and Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar
page 219 note 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 67.Google Scholar
page 219 note 2 Cf. my ‘Wittgenstein's Imagination’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Winter, 1972, pp. 453–461.
page 219 note 3 Cf. my ‘Metaphor Revisited’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. XXX (Winter 1971), pp. 17–24.
page 220 note 1 Cf. my ‘Meaning Variance and Metaphor’, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 22 (1971), pp. 145–59.