Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. D. E. Buckner
Reference and Identity
in Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim Scriptures
Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives
Series Editors: Margaret Cameron, Lenny Clapp, and Robert Stainton
Advisory Board: Axel Barceló (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas), Chen Bo (Peking University), Robyn Carston (University College London), Leo Cheung (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Eduardo García (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas), Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern University), Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University), Catrina Dutilh Novaes (Vrije University Amsterdam), Eleonora Orlando (University of Buenos Aires), Claude Panaccio (University of Quebec at Montreal), Bernhard Weiss (University of Cape Town), and Jack Zupko (University of Alberta)
Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives comprises monographs and edited collections that explore connections between the philosophy of language and other academic disciplines, or that approach the core topics of philosophy of language in the Anglo-American analytic tradition from alternative perspectives. The philosophy of language, particularly as practiced in the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, has established itself as a thriving academic discipline. Because of the centrality of language to the human experience, there are myriad connections between the core topics addressed by philosophers of language and other academic disciplines. The number of researchers who are exploring these connections is growing, but there has not been a corresponding increase in the venues for publication of this research. The central purpose and motivation for this series is to address this shortcoming.
Titles in the Series
Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? by D. E. Buckner
Reference and Identity
in Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim Scriptures
The Same God?
D. E. Buckner
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-4985-8741-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4985-8742-6 (electronic)
Contents
4 Mentioning
5 Identification within History
6 Reference and Identity
7 Existence
8 The God of the Philosophers
9 Identification in the Present
10 Revelation
11 Intentionality
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Many books, often philosophy books, are a long time in the writing. As an undergraduate in 1974, I was surprised to learn that my tutor, the late Peter Alexander, had been working on his book on Locke for twelve years. The book was published in 1985, twenty-three years after its conception.1 But this book has been a very long time in the writing. It began with an idea in 1984 that I discussed in a rather bad paper I presented at one of the legendary seminars in room K, chaired by the late Christopher Williams at Bristol University. I write this preface in 2019, exactly thirty-five years and nearly half a lifetime later.
The idea was about what philosophers call reference statements, namely statements that (apparently) say of some word, let’s say the name “Boris,” that it refers to some person, namely Boris himself. In the 1980s, my example would have been “Margaret” referring to Margaret Thatcher, in the 1990s, “Major” referring to John Major, the 2000s, “Blair” referring to Tony Blair, and so on. The number of British prime ministers testifies to the lengthy gestation of this book.
It had struck me that while a reference statement appears to express a relation between a word and a thing, the appearance is misleading. Perhaps a reference statement is true not because of a word-world relation between language and reality, as the grammar suggests, but an intralinguistic or word-word relation. Do not misunderstand: I do not mean that the word “Boris” refers to the word “Boris.” On the contrary, what “Boris” refers to is not the word “Boris,” but Boris the man. The insight was that what makes the reference statement
“Boris” refers to Boris
true is a relation between the term that is mentioned, namely the grammatical subject of the reference statement, the one enclosed in quotation marks, and the term that is used, namely, the grammatical accusative of the sentence, the one without quotation marks. The relation is intralinguistic, not a relation between a word and a person. If that sounds strange, you may enjoy this book.
The idea needed a lot of work. I left teaching and research in the late 1980s for a somewhat different career, but stuck at the idea of intralinguistic semantics in my spare time, producing over the years at least three versions of this book. None of them was quite right, and none of them touched on any biblical subject, until my old friend and sparring partner Bill Vallicella published “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?”2 exactly four years ago as I write. (For complete disclosure, I must say that Vallicella, a philosophical realist, disagrees with practically everything I write, and endorses absolutely no part of the extreme anti-realist position of this book. He has always been supportive of my work, and strengthened it through his steady and inventive challenges, although he certainly disagrees, as he tells me, with the end result.)
While I had used scriptural texts as examples of reference before, the idea of basing a whole book on these examples had not occurred. But it seemed to me that these texts