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The Meaning of ‘God’—II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Holding God to be transcendent does not mean having to regard the grammar of the word ‘God’ as isolated or unique or inscrutable: and in speaking of grammar I use this word in its familiar sense, not in some ill-explained neo-Wittgensteinian sense. I want to make a methodological suggestion. When a sentence containing the word ‘God’ is puzzling, it may help to look at a grammatically possible replacement for the word. For example, if we wish to understand the statement that God is man's last end, let us consider what it implies to say that gold, or sex, or military glory, is a given man's last end.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1992

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