ABSTRACT
One of the aims of philosophy is to analyse concepts. In particular, one of the aims of philosophy of religion is to analyse religious concepts. The most important concepts of the three great Western religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – are those concepts clustered as a family round the concept of God. Other concepts in this family are the concept of the property of being divine and the concept of theism. In this work I shall try to analyse the concept of divinity. This book is within the tradition of perfect-being theology. Perfect-being theology claims that the key to analysing concepts of this family lies in another family of concepts, clustered around the concept of perfection. Among other concepts in this family is that of maximal greatness, or being as great as possible. The claim of perfectbeing theology may be made explicit in various ways, depending on whether it is construed as a metaphysical or as a semantic thesis, and which precise concepts or words we are taking as analysandum and analysans. Usually it is framed in terms of the word ‘God’or the being God. I shall, however, not discuss the more common versions, first, because I wish to avoid the ambiguity of the word ‘God’, which may be taken as a name for a being or as a definite description or as an indefinite description or as a title-term, and, secondly, because I wish not to seem to presume that there is a divine being, or even that it is possible that there be a divine being, and, thirdly, because I do not wish to seem to presume that there is, or could be, at most one divine being.
