ABSTRACT
Austin Farrer was undoubtedly the central figure of the Metaphysicals until his death in 1968; indeed a major reason for the rest of us in the early days to go on meeting was to make sure that Farrer continued to work seriously in philosophy and not spend too much of his time in New Testament exegesis. Analytical philosophy of religion has always to some extent suffered from the taint of illegitimacy. The ‘ordinary language’ that philosophers purported to analyse and interpret in a supposedly neutral fashion was in fact deeply theory-laden, and the theories themselves involved substantive claims that it was the task of philosophy to articulate and criticize. In an admirably careful and impartial comparison between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophers of religion, Grace Jantzen outlines the latter’s project of exploring the former’s dependence upon an unacknowledged power base. The postmodern critique is sometimes expressed in terms of philosophical viewpoints being ‘culture-bound’.
