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Description
Flashcards by Izzy Noone, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Izzy Noone
almost 7 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| The Verification Principle | The idea that statements which are neither analytic nor empirically testable are meaningless. |
| The Vienna Circle | The group responsible for the VP. |
| Logical Positivism | The philosophy that the Vienna Circle launched |
| Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921) | Constructed the picture theory of language, a big influence on the Vienna circle. |
| The picture theory of language | The idea that language is only meaningful if it pictures the world in a 1 to 1 relationship. |
| AJ Ayer (1910-89) | A leading supporter of the VP in Britain. |
| Language Truth and Logic (1936) | Ayer’s book. |
| An analytic statement | One in which two descriptors of equal meaning are joined by a copula (an ‘is’). |
| An empirically testable statement | One that you can test to find out whether they are true or false. |
| Karl Popper (1902-94) | Critic of the VP. Founder of the Falsification Principle. |
| Eschatological verification | John Hick’s claim that ‘There is an afterlife’ is verifiable since, if there is an afterlife, we’ll verify it. |
| The Falsification Principle | The idea that statements are meaningless if they are not falsifiable. |
| ‘Parable of the Gardener’ | John Wisdom’s parable to show that religious beliefs are unfalsifiable. |
| Anthony Flew | Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, in the 1950s. Agreed with Wisdom. |
| RM Hare (1919-2002) | Argued that religious statements such as ‘God is love’ and ‘God exists’ are what might be called ‘Bliks’ |
| A blik | A statement of a deep conviction so basic to the person’s world-view that it isn’t capable of being falsified. |
| Univocally/ Equivocally | With exactly the same meaning/ with completely different meanings. |
| Analogy upwards/downwards | Where something corresponds to the thing in a greater/ lesser way than the original. |
| Analogy of Proportion | Where a being has such a characteristic in proportion to the level of being it possesses. |
| Analogy of Attribution | When a term is used of something because it is caused by something else, where that term applies more properly |
| Language Games | The idea that there are as many types of meaning as there are areas of human discourse. The meaning of a word or sentence is, mostly, its use. |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) | The founder of language game theory, in his Philosophical Investigations (1951). |
| Noncognitivism | Non-cognitive uses of language are uses that do not intend to deal in knowledge. |
| The Via Negativa | The view that only negative statements can be made about God, not positive. |
| Apophatic theology | After the Greek verb apophemi, another word for the Via Negativa. |
| Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite | The main ancient proponent of the Via Negativa. |
| Cataphatic theology | “Cataphatic” is a combination of the two Greek verbs cata (‘to descend’) and femi (‘to speak’), and roughly means, ‘to bring God down so that we can speak of Him’. |
| The Via Positiva | Cataphatic theology. The idea that God can be spoken of in positive, informative terms. |
| -RB Braithwaite -JH Randall -DZ Phillips | Three non-cognitivist philosophers of religious language. |
| Myth | A story in which religious truths are encapsulated and from which they may be inseparable. |
| Rudolph Bultmann (1884-76) | A proponent of ‘demythologisation’ – getting rid of the more deeply mythological aspects of religion. |
| Symbol | Something that represents something else by association, resemblance or convention. |
| Paul Tillich (1886-65) | A proponent of the idea that all religious language is symbolic. |
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