The Resurrection and the Philosophical 'We'

This investigation will address a question of the nature of philosophical inquiry. What is the philosopher's role, what does her authority consist in, in relation to the ways of thinking that she criticises or wants to make sense of?

Philosophical investigation involves, at least often, questions about what we would say on a given occasion. The philosopher suggests a reading of a concept and invites her reader to share it; this can be said to be the essence of the 'Socratic method' as well as the idea expressed by Wittgenstein in the dictum that to do philosophy is to assemble a number of reminders for a specific purpose.

Behind this view there is an idea of a philosophical 'we' whose way of thinking is simply articulated by the philosopher. The force of a philosophical argument is, in other words, dependent on whether the reader recognises (or reasonably ought to recognise) the philosopher's reading of a concept as an articulation of what he in fact means by the concept in question. Up to now, this notion of a philosophical 'we' has hardly been scrutinised.

In Philosophy of religion, the philosopher will be articulating her understanding of, what ways of thinking involve possible religious positions. But a 'possible position' means, in the context, a position that the philosopher and her audience can recognise as meaningful, spiritually nourishing, or profound as opposed to confused, blasphemous, or superficial. Thus, for instance, D Z Phillips's arguments against Realist interpretations of religion is that those interpretations cannot explain how belief in God can go deep in a person (e.g. Phillips 1993). But it is obvious that there are going to be sincerely argued, genuinely religious positions which do not, in this sense, constitute religious possibilities for the philosopher or her audience. What the philosopher can see as religiously possible will, in other words, depend on, what she can stand for. In other words there can be no general investigation of what kinds of religious position are philosophically admissible.

This raises again the question of the relation between the philosopher and the community of understanding whose understanding of a concept she is investigating. Questions will also arise about whether these points about philosophy of religion are applicable to other areas of philosophy.

The projected paper will be a critical investigation of Peter Winch's reading of the notion of the Resurrection in his paper 'Lessing and the Resurrection' (Winch, forthcoming; cf Lessing 1993). He purports to investigate the different possible uses of the notion and suggests one himself. But since a religious possibility has no independent existence in abstraction from people for whom it constitutes a possibility, the conclusion must be either:

(a) that Winch, as a matter of fact, has not identified a genuine religious possibility; or:

(b) that Winch implicitly sides with a certain reading of the notion of Christ's resurrection.

So far, the present investigation has resulted in a newspaper article (in Finnish) and a lecture given at the Department of Philosophy, the University of Uppsala. A paper (in English) on the basis of the lecture, and another paper (in Finnish, to be published by the University of Jyväskylä) are being prepared.

Related research is being carried out in Britain (D Z Phillips, M von der Ruhr) and Sweden (S Eriksson, S Stenlund, P Thalén).

Literature

Lessing, G E (1993): Werke vol. 8-9 (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag).

Phillips, Dewi Z (1993): Wittgenstein and Religion (N.Y.: St Martin's Press).

Winch, Peter (forthcoming): 'Lessing and the Resurrection'. Paper given at the Philosophy Society, Swansea, December 1995.