The Natural Theologian: Essays on Nature and the Christian Life

By Joel B Carini

Both our secular culture and our Christian discourse suffer from a lack of appreciation of nature. "Nature" describes the world as we find it, created by God, broken by the fall, exhibiting both stability and change. It is denied in different ways by postmodernists, progressives, evolutionary naturalists, technologists, and transhumanists, but a

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Natural Theologian
• Release date: Dec 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218334710

Book preview

The Natural Theologian

The Natural Theologian

Essays on Nature and the Christian Life

Joel Carini

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The Natural Theologian

First published by Joel Carini 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Joel Carini

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

First Edition

ISBN: 979-8-218-33471-0

To Anna and Kevin, with gratitude

It is not the spiritual that is first

but the natural, and then the spiritual.

—1 Corinthians 15:46

Read, not to contradict nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.

—Francis Bacon

Contents

Introduction

1.On Being a Natural Theologian

I. Language

2.Words and the World

3.The Assumptions of Analytic Philosophers

4.Christian Analytic Philosophy

5.The Perennial Philosophy of Language

6.The Divine Dictionary View

II. Common Grace

7.CGT: Common Grace Theology and the Theology of Nature

8.Can’t We Just Say Common Grace, Even if We Mean Nature?

9.Nature Fallen, but not Destroyed

10.Nature Destroyed

11.Why Aaron Renn Is Right About Common Grace

12.Three More Reasons Aaron Renn Is Right about Common Grace

III. Christian Empiricism

13.Christians, Atheists, and Gnostics

14.Why I’m Not Going to Read Biblical Critical Theory

15.Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender

16.Based Belief

17.Delano Squires and Glenn Loury Talk Gay Marriage

IV. Christ and Culture

18.Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture Revisited

19.Biblical Political Theology

V. The Christian Life

20.Whatever Happened to Reformed Theology?

21.In Defense of Christian Stoicism

22.Why You Should Leave Your Church

23.On the Idea of a Christian Village

24.Federal Vision, NA

VI. Same-Sex Attraction

25.Same-Sex Attraction and the Misery of Our Condition

26.Common Grace, Nature, and Our Most Fundamental Identity

27.Side B Celebrates Same-Sex Attraction. What Could Be More Controversial?

28.That Time I Wrote Agnes Callard a Paper on Love

29.Tim Keller and Kevin DeYoung Miss the Nature of Desire

VII. Christian Realism

30.My Dissertation: Bertrand Russell and the Objects of Thought

31.An Exchange on Christian Realism

32.Toward a Sophisticated Realism

33.Christians and Non-Christians Use the Same Concepts

VIII. Revoice

34.Why Am I Going to Revoice?

35.Nine Gifts the Revoice Conference Gave Me

IX. Against Theistic Evolution

36.Six-Day Creation Sunday

37.Aristotle’s Argument Against Evolution

38.Theistic Evolution? Clarifying Terms and Motivation

39.The Typological Pattern of Biology

40.Darwinism Is Devolution

41.Does Darwin Devolves Survive Criticism?

42.Should Christians Accept Methodological Naturalism in Science?

X. Sexual Orientation

43.Suffering from Original Sin

44.Our Unnatural Nature: On Homosexual Orientation

45.Is Sexual Desire Natural?

46.Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct

47.Gay: Identity, or Description?

XI. Evangelicalism

48.The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority

49.Conservatives Against Capitalism

50.Why You Shouldn't Go to Seminary

51.How to Be a Post-Theology-Nerd

52.Three Mindsets that Make Evangelicals Ineffective

53.A Falsifiable Faith

54.Conservative Christian, Do Not Fear

55.Are We Living in the Negative World?

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

Evangelical theology is shaped by its engagement with the Bible. Arguments begin from biblical passages as their premises. Biblical passages are exegeted down to the accent markings of the original languages, in the original manuscripts.

Some identify this focus on the Bible as a fault. Catholics criticize evangelicals for ignoring the place of church history and church tradition in theology. From academia, evangelical postmodernists criticize evangelicals for ignoring the place that cultural assumptions play in our theological formulations. Historical scholars urge attention to the ancient historical contexts of biblical passages. And many of these groups criticize evangelicals for their failure to reach unanimity in biblical interpretation by operating from the Bible alone.

After a decade in evangelical, Catholic, and secular academic institutions, I have come to a different conclusion about the limitation of Bible-only theology: Evangelicals have neglected the role of natural human knowledge, both empirical and philosophical, in their theology. The fact that reason and experience play a role in theology is the reason for the divergence between different interpretations of Scripture; correctly, but in an unexamined way, thought and experience are influencing different theological formulations.

At the same time, the promise of theological convergence would depend on the hard work of philosophy, empirical observation, and modern science. Convergence is not impossible on account of different cultural assumptions; but neither is there a short-cut to convergence by outsourcing judgment to a magisterium, or to the biblical text itself. True knowledge of God and the world is only available by taking the risk of thinking.

The Risk of Thinking

And thinking is risky. If a young evangelical begins to think, there is no telling where he will end up - a Calvinist, a neo-Anabaptist, Catholic, Orthodox, postmodernist, nihilist, or gender theorist. If you allow your thinking to be determined by the outcome of empirical inquiry, you do not know in advance what you will come to think or whether it will be consistent with your religious or ideological presumptions.

This is why Christians invent strategies to eliminate the risk of thinking. We limit our reading to Christian books. We train ourselves and our children in the Christian worldview, identifying the corrupt, secular assumptions of all other worldviews. In the most theoretically advanced form, Christian presuppositionalists argue that all our thinking should begin with premises distinctive to Reformed, Trinitarian Christian theology. If we do so, we eliminate the risk that some premise will enter in from the outside from secular science, philosophy, or ideology.

In doing so, we make several errors. First, by only starting from the Bible, we diverge from the biblical teaching concerning general revelation, the book of nature, and the natural law of God, written on the hearts of men. Second, in doing so, we cease to have anything we can say in favor of Christianity to those who are not already believers in it. Third, we thereby leave unbelievers with an excuse before God; they didn’t know, which robs them of responsibility for sin and thereby of their humanity.

Other errors affect Christians particularly. We ourselves become confident that we have all the knowledge sufficient for life and godliness, potentially by the age of 25 (the age one might finish seminary). We do not seek for wisdom, to which experience, gained through age, is essential. We fail to understand other human beings and the world we live in because we refuse to use our God-given natural faculties, including the senses, to observe and understand them.

In making Christianity a set of lenses and concepts that we impose upon the world, we implicitly deny that Christian theology is about the world. If the claims of Christianity are not falsifiable - which they are not if all thought is to begin from Christian premises - then they are not accountable to how things are. If I speak about an object available to both our senses, you are able to judge whether what I say matches the reality before you. If what I say is not accountable to our experience of reality, then we have to call into question whether it is about the world of common experience.

The Theology of Nature

What is the alternative? A Christianity that might be false?

Indeed, for in opening up the possibility that Christianity might be false of the world around us, we allow the possibility that we might discover it to be true. Christianity might be thinkable not as a presupposition, but as a conclusion of thought.

To make this change in theology, we need two things, acknowledgement of philosophy and experience as sources of theological knowledge, and a doctrine of nature, including human nature.

Periodically, Christian theology has had need of a renewed theology of nature. Famously, it occurred in Emil Brunner’s defense of natural theology against Karl Barth's denial. ¹ While Barth’s reply to Brunner, Nein! is certainly more famous, Brunner’s cogent argument in Nature and Grace was more accurate. At the same time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer made his apology for the category of nature in Protestant theology in his Ethics; Brunner and Bonhoeffer's promotion of natural theology and natural law was overshadowed by Barth’s prominence in the neo-Orthodox theological movement.

The same happened in Catholic theology in the first decade of the 21st century, as Lawrence Feingold and Steven Long rebutted half a century of Henri De Lubac’s nouvelle théologie, the Catholic equivalent of neo-Orthodoxy. ² While De Lubac attempted to argue that human nature was incomplete without a supernatural relation to God, Feingold and Long reaffirmed the integrity of created nature.

In evangelical theology, Cornelius Van Til played the role of Barth in evangelical theology, denying natural theology a place in Christian thought. His extreme version of Kuyperianism trickled down into evangelicalism through Francis Schaeffer and other advocates of a Christian worldview. ³ Christian analytic philosophy, especially in the persons of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, can be seen as the late 20th-century rebuttal of presuppositionalism.

However, I encountered a strong Van Tillian presuppositionalism at Westminster Theological Seminary in the 2010s that was unfazed by these various rebuttals. In spite of its distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies, I felt that it was a concentrated dose of the same kind of insular Christian thought that pervaded conservative evangelicalism.

My experience at a more broad-minded Christian institution, Wheaton College, in spite of its wealth of the liberal arts and sciences, did not have the philosophy to ground a humane Christian intellectual life, because of the attraction of its faculty to postmodernism. Both Christian postmodernism and presuppositionalism, in spite of a great difference in spirit, agree in letter that Christianity cannot be known to be objectively true through experience, but is rather a lens through which we view the world.

Therefore, I conclude that another defense of the role of nature and experience in Christian theology is in order. That is what I seek to provide in The Natural Theologian.

Theology from Experience

In this volume, I have compiled a year’s worth of my online writing at my Substack by the same title. In some of the essays, I discuss the theory, the theology and philosophy, of a Christian account of nature and an empiricist theological epistemology. In most of the essays, this theory is demonstrated by being put into practice and into conversation with contemporary political, theological, and ecclesial controversy.

My premonition had been that theology that gave place to nature and empirical knowledge would cut a middle way between opposed views or select a slate of theological positions that bridge contemporary theological divides. This can be seen in the range of views I take in political theology, creation and evolution, and the theology of same-sex attraction.

But the question of same-sex attraction is the one that, this year, has exhibited my method most clearly. The lines have been drawn in the theological debate, with one side claiming to be the most biblical, the other to respect people’s subjective experience. Over the course of about a dozen essays, I asked the question what conclusion we would come to if we sought objective knowledge from experience. My thinking was also shaped by actual experiences, over the course of the year, as I met several Side B, celibate, gay Christian individuals and attended the fabled Revoice conference. I came to conclusions firmly on one side of this debate, yet in terms unique to my natural-theological method.

When theology is open to experience, a theologian can be changed. My attendance at Revoice changed me, and the change is evident in the two halves of this volume. I organized the chapters by topic, except for dividing it in half with the section on Revoice as the mid-point. Readers will notice a change in tone. In the first half, I adopted a more combative political posture. I used the word based a lot. I advocated some things that I no longer wish to advocate, for example, in the concluding list of recommendations of Whatever Happened to Reformed Theology?

My concluding section on evangelicalism shows my transition from a relative defender of the evangelical majority to one more critical of the conservative evangelical subculture.

Such change is relatively uncommon among theologians. They stake out a position and spend a career defending it. But that is what is exciting about doing theology from experience; you don’t know how it will turn out, and you don’t know how you will turn out.

In this volume, I lay out a unique approach to Christian theology and the Christian life. I dare say that almost no one agrees with all of my conclusions. But I warrant that, if you open yourself to experience and the empirical knowledge of nature, you will be challenged, and you will be changed. Tolle lege!

1. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, Natural Theology: Comprising Nature and Grace by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the reply No! by Dr. Karl Barth.

2. Henri De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural.Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters.Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace.

3. In other ways, Schaeffer dissented from Van Til, advocating the kind of preparationism I advocate.

1

On Being a Natural Theologian

After plumbing the depths of theology, the gospel remains the same. The real theological work is to persuade the natural man that the content of Christianity coheres with the world we see around us.

If you’re reading this, you may be asking the question, What is a natural theologian? And why does Joel describe himself as one?

There is no reason to delay in answering your question: A natural theologian is a theologian who primarily explores what can be known of God, morality, and true religion from nature alone and apart from Scriptural revelation.

This task has fallen on hard times. Secular thinkers think that the project of natural theology, which they think of more narrowly as providing arguments for God’s existence, is futile and maybe impossible. Christian thinkers argue that it concedes too much to secularists and naturalists, who believe that nature is independent of God.

But I would argue that no task is more urgent than that of natural theology. If observation of the world yields no knowledge of God, morality, or true religion, then Christians have nothing to say to non-Christians to persuade them of the purportedly true religion. Worse, if nature does not reveal God, then what reason is there to think that God exists, much less that he became man and died for our sakes?

So, a natural theologian I aspire to be. And The Natural Theologian remains the title of this newsletter.

But so many questions remain: Working on a philosophy Ph.D., isn’t Joel a philosopher? Does this mean that Christianity can be known by reason alone? Is Joel denying the sufficiency and necessity of Scripture? In the rest of this post, I’ll answer these questions and lay the groundwork for the next season of The Natural Theologian. Thank you for reading.

Why Theologian, and not Philosopher?

In naming my newsletter, I chose a title that represents what I aspire to be as an intellectual. Even as I formulated the title, that aspiration came into focus. After my seminary degree, my academic focus shifted from theology to philosophy, and I began to aspire to be, not primarily a theologian, but a philosopher. I did not intend to abandon my Christian faith nor its centrality to my thinking, but only to shift my academic discipline from theology to philosophy.

However, in the public intellectual realm, where Substack lies, my role is best described, not as that of a philosopher, but of a theologian. The philosophers I admire and from whom I have learned most think in a way that is bottom-up. They do not begin with religious commitments but demonstrate their utility or attractiveness and gradually shift towards at least sympathy with the faithful. Among these, I think of Roger Scruton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jordan Peterson, and Paul Kingsnorth, prior to his conversion. The theology in which I had been trained articulated well the content of Christian belief; but it was these thinkers who best recommended that belief to others.

But, as a Christian, I cannot serve the same intellectual role as these philosophers. These thinkers’ credibility comes from their intellectual independence of each religious tradition. If Jordan Peterson, for example, professed Christian faith today, he would continue to have intellectual influence outside of Christendom only briefly. For a couple of months, he would explain to the media his reasons for moving in a direction that guaranteed his own obsolescence. Within six months, he would be a fixture primarily of Christian media, detailing his conversion. After a year, he would be confined to Christian media and have ceased to be more broadly relevant. A version of this has already occurred with Peterson’s alliance with the American political right.

Accordingly, for better or worse, to the public, a Christian intellectual is a theologian and not a philosopher.

How then to describe my commitment to doing theology in a way that is informed by and continuous with philosophy?

The phrase that came to mind was, The Natural Theologian. Natural theology, traditionally, was the task of demonstrating the existence of God from nature. At times, it has included the attempt to have a religion within the bounds of reason alone, excluding so-called supernatural theology. But generally, it has been the task of stating and demonstrating what Thomas Aquinas called the preambles of faith, that which can be known of God and the Christian religion without special, Scriptural revelation.

The preambles of faith include the existence of God, the nature and goodness of the created order, the moral law, and the sin and misery of our condition. In a common theological schema, Creation and Fall, but not Redemption and Consummation, belong to the province of natural theology. These are presupposed by the specifically Christian message of the gospel, delivered by special, supernatural revelation.

Without recognition of the preambles of faith, in some manner, the Christian religion does not make sense. Apart from these truths, Christianity offers the love of God who is not known to exist, forgiveness for sins we do not believe we have committed, and escape from a condition we had not recognized to be as tragic as it is. The preambles of faith are preparatory to the gospel because they acquaint us with our need for salvation of the kind Christ offers.

The Method of Natural Theology

The task of a natural theologian is also differentiated by its method. Contemporary evangelical theology operates primarily by deduction from biblical premises, which are assumed to be indubitably true. The force of any statement in theological discourse is determined by the strength of its proof texts, even if these proof texts are lengthy and developed in a canonical, biblical-theological way, with attention to historical context, et cetera.

The natural theologian rejects this method of theology. First of all, such theology has nothing to say to those who do not accept the biblical text as true in every proposition it affirms. This includes not only all non-believers but also a number of believers. Accordingly, such theology is intellectually insular and lacking in apologetic value.

Second, this method assumes that, without any other recourse, we already fully comprehend the content of each biblical statement. This assumption has already been challenged by those who urge attention to the historical context, noting that the biblical text was delivered by human authors within a certain historical context, in which words had certain meanings, place-names certain referents, and so on.

But there is so much more that is assumed in our comprehension of biblical statements. Biblical statements assume the basic human understanding of the world with which each person is, in the ordinary course of things, equipped. When the Bible speaks of a donkey, for example, it assumes our familiarity with that species. (This also means that the Christian does not have a distinctively Christian concept of a donkey, as I argue in Christians and Non-Christians Use the Same Concepts.) More generally, it assumes our knowledge of the physical and human environment which only the strictest Cartesian skepticism calls into question. Such knowledge does not have the Bible as its foundation but is epistemically prior to our knowledge from the Bible.

Third, this method also assumes that biblical statements have a quasi-magical character. Such statements are supposed to be the only firm foundation of knowledge, indubitably true, and different in character from all other statements. However, on the contrary, biblical statements are not magical. They are just as accountable to empirical reality as any other statements because they are about reality. The Bible refers to real people and places, and to the extent that these are knowable or verifiable by other means, its accuracy is confirmed or disconfirmed. To render the Bible immune to falsification is effectively to deny that it is about this world.

The contents of the book of Proverbs, for instance, are found in other ancient texts. ¹ According to the magical view, when stated by ancient sages, these statements were fallible. When transcribed into an Israelite scroll, they were inspired and infallible. On the contrary, when they were originally written, by prophet or not, they expressed wisdom concerning human life. In God’s providence, they were included in the biblical canon, in which they continue to express wisdom concerning human life, wisdom which, by the way, is not best expressed as propositional truth following the law of non-contradiction: Answer a fool according to his folly…don’t answer a fool according to his folly. ²

Confidence in the Bible generally must rely on non-biblical confirmation. We must discover, to the extent we can, that the Bible conforms to and speaks truth concerning the world we inhabit.

The task of summarizing and deducing from the Bible the unique content of Christian theology remains a valid one. However, there are hundreds, if not thousands of such theologians throughout evangelical institutions of higher education, not to mention Christian pulpits.

But there is a dearth of theologians operating in the way that I have described, concerning themselves with the preambles of faith, asking whether the Bible conforms to experience, and using non-deductive methods of philosophy and empirical investigation to explore the preambles of faith and produce from it a kind of informal natural theology. And even those who do perform this task do not see it as a unified discipline of this character.

The Limits of Natural Theology

I remember, shortly after I began hanging out with my now-wife, looking over her philosophy homework about Thomas Aquinas. The subject was the difference between the preambles of faith and the articles of faith. (Technically, they’re called preambles to the articles of faith - assistant to the regional manager). At the time, I was a committed presuppositionalist and so, I denied this distinction. Every truth - every truth - was an article of faith, dependent on Scriptural or supernatural revelation.

I repent of that error. Chesterton captured it when he said that the doctrine of original sin is one that you can prove empirically. Lewis demonstrated it when he began Mere Christianity from common human moral experience. Aquinas formulated it when he argued that we could know that God exists and is one in being or substance from reason, but that God is a Trinity required supernatural revelation.

I was guilty of an unbiblical biblicism. The Bible itself says that the existence of God and his invisible attributes are clearly seen in the things that have been made. ³ Also, the moral law of God is written upon the heart. ⁴ (Presuppositionalists have forced workarounds for these passages.)

What became even clearer to me over time was that the distinctive truths of the Christian religion are summed up in the body of information we call The Gospel, that Christ died and rose for our justification, together with the doctrinal truths of the Trinity and Incarnation that are revealed in that salvific event. For any non-Christian to hear and respond to this gospel, he had to be already acquainted with several things: The existence of God, the law of God, the moral responsibility of man, the inevitability of death, and human sin and misery. If someone doesn’t grasp all of these truths then the gospel offers salvation by a non-entity from a non-problem.

Two related objections immediately come: Don’t unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness? And isn’t it, therefore, necessary to learn all of these truths from the Bible in order to know them aright? This is a misunderstanding. Unbelievers couldn’t suppress this body of truths if they weren’t already publicly available to all humans living in God’s world. This means that we need unbelievers to come to see clearly truths that are available to them and with which they are at some level already acquainted.

The Bible, too, will have the function of pointing us to truths that are available elsewhere. When the Psalmist and Paul quoting him say that None is righteous, no, not one, they are observing something, not magically revealing something previously unknown. The Bible’s moral instruction coheres with and makes explicit the moral fabric of human life and the ethical and legal structures that are just. (See C.S. Lewis’ catalog of human laws exemplifying the Tao throughout human civilizations, at the end of The Abolition of Man.)

At the same time, I am not advocating a religion within the bounds of reason or arguing that natural human knowledge suffices to know the truth of Christianity. Quite the contrary. Natural human knowledge can essentially acquaint us with the truths summarized in Christian theology under the headings of Creation and Fall. But the truths of Redemption and Consummation are particular to the gospel and require supernatural revelation. In emphasizing natural theology, then, I am not downplaying supernatural theology, only correcting the overemphasis on special revelation and denigration of natural theology that I have encountered.

As it happens, I think that the majority of creative and innovative theological work has to be on the level of natural theology. After plumbing the depths and climbing the heights of scholastic Reformed theology, I can report that the content of the gospel remains just the same, Repent and believe in Christ for salvation. The real theological work is to persuade the natural man that this good news is the answer to his condition and that the content of Christianity coheres with what we can see around us, summarizing and fulfilling it.

A Natural Style

There is one more facet to being a natural theologian that bears mentioning. A natural theologian is to be contrasted with an academic one. A natural theologian is not a writer of journal articles, but rather of essays, comprehensible by and directed toward the general public. The language of a natural theologian should be ordinary human language, without unnecessary technical terminology, which I will attempt to avoid. A natural theologian is one who demonstrates the relevance of what he says to the one to whom he says it. After all, what use is it to say what is irrelevant? Readers, I ask you to hold me accountable on this and to ask for clarification or the removal of jargon as necessary.

What’s Next for the Natural Theologian?

In the coming months, I plan to continue to write on a variety of subjects, sexuality, economics, evolution, each of which requires engaging with extra-biblical sources of information. These are subjects that weren’t covered in seminary, on which expertise in biblical exegesis cannot settle matters. You can also expect continued discussion of knowledge (epistemology) and theological and philosophical method.

But I hope to cultivate something even more: A model of thoughtful Christian engagement that avoids the errors of dogmatism - which often comes with being a theology nerd - and skepticism - which often comes with questioning the narrowness of Christian sub-cultures. As you read, perhaps The Natural Theologian will become too narrow, and The Natural Theologians will replace it. A new breed of Christian humanists, able in both supernatural and natural theology, engaged with the world not only to save it, but also to learn from it: That is the goal. Would you join me?

September 26, 2023

1. Tremper Longman III, How to Read Proverbs.

2. Proverbs 26:4-5.

3. Romans 1:20.

4. Romans 2:15.

I. Language

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The Natural Theologian

2

Words and the World

Toward a Based Philosophy of Language

The theoretical and the practical; the abstract and the concrete – most PhD students feel some tension there as, inspired by some pressing practical difficulty, they perform research that, under the pressure of the university, becomes increasingly technical and inaccessible.

Analytic philosophy of language certainly has that reputation, yet I, who had for years studiously avoided it for that reason, find myself proposing a dissertation on just that subject. I’m not interested in language; I’m interested in reality, I used to say as I studied topics that were more straightforwardly practical or metaphysical.

Now, I am persuaded that the questions I am examining in the philosophy of language are at the core of a proper philosophical approach. What changed? I discovered that, in diagnosing what was wrong with linguistically distracted forms of philosophy it became apparent what the proper role of philosophy and of language was. The problem was not the philosophy of language per se; it was the wrong approaches to the philosophy of language that are most prevalent. The answer lay in a proper understanding of language’s role in our thought and our apprehension of reality.

Nevertheless, the way in which I study language in philosophy is increasingly technical and inaccessible to my fellow man. It is not as though, in discovering the value of certain types of philosophy of language I found it to be accessible and practical. No, there is work for me to do in making it apparent to myself and others what the payoff of my studies are.

If I could put it in a nutshell, the current divide, in philosophy and culture, is between those who insist that language is separate from reality, socially constructed, and a tool for the social construction of reality itself, and those who think that our job is to guess the entries in a divine dictionary, the verbally formulable essences of things, the definitions of our terms. But in both of these views, language is too separate from reality to give us a solid appreciation of the real. In both cases, language appears to be an imposition on reality. The question is simply which language to impose, or whether to impose at all.

Another way to put the problem is that these approaches to language fail to be, as the internet would have it, based. A based approach to philosophy, thought, reality would ground our language in reality as it is, without a hint of imposition, whether that imposition is socially constructed - whether in the name of the oppressors or the oppressed - or divinely ordained.

And surprising as it may be, the key to a based philosophy of language lies in a philosophical point found at the intersection of some of Plato’s lesser-known dialogues and the lesser-known writings of Bertrand Russell. Who’d have thunk?

My goal in this series is to articulate the connections between these thinkers and topics in a way that is more accessible than what I am writing in my own dissertation. But the goal is not only to be more accessible; it is to describe the very purpose of why I am bothering to write the more technical dissertation - something you’re supposed to keep on the DL in academia. The task of articulating one’s thoughts in common human language, instead of analytic-speak, is not an optional one. It is, ultimately, the true test of whether what one is saying is based.

January 17, 2023

3

The Assumptions of Analytic Philosophers

The prejudices of analytic philosophy constitute a narrow Overton window.

Iwrote yesterday about wanting to arrive at a based philosophy of language within analytic philosophy. Yet I implied that much of existing analytic philosophy of language is not based - how so?

First, a brief explanation of analytic philosophy, for those not in the know: A sociological divide arose in the mid-twentieth century between at least two different kinds of philosophy and kinds of philosophy departments. Though two of its founders were German, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy dominated the British academy and, from there, the American academy. Its concerns focused on logical, quasi-mathematical analysis of language as a way of either answering or bypassing the traditional questions of philosophy.

Continental philosophy is, perhaps, the moniker analytics use to describe all that is non-analytic, though it makes geographical reference to the dominance on the European continent of a different style of philosophy. Following on the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, this approach retained a focus on traditional questions of philosophy and with an existential emphasis. However, it did so without the same faith in a method, in achieving clarity through rigor.

Today, philosophy departments are quite well-sorted as either analytic or continental. The forms of philosophy are so different that an expert in one can be quite ignorant of the other. The best shorthand I have ever heard for the difference between them is the following quip: Analytic philosophers provide lucid answers to inane questions, while continental philosophers address deep questions with incomprehensible answers. Let’s just say that neither of