Introduction

When I came to Utrecht in 1967 I was struck by two assumptions that all my students in theology seemed to hold intuitively. First of all they all seemed to assume a picture theory of language: words refer to things and sentences state facts about the world. My encounter in Oxford with the works of Wittgenstein and with John Austin’s theory of speech acts had convinced me of the inadequacy of this kind of view of language. We use words to do much more than refer to things and we use sentences to do many more things than merely stating facts. At UNISA I had read Donald Evans’ book on The Logic of Self-Involvement and there discovered how fruitfully a theory of speech acts can be applied to religious language. This approach opens the way to a more adequate understanding of the existential (or ‘self-involving’) aspects of religious faith. Secondly, all the students seemed intuitively to assume an essentialist view of concepts. Concepts were true when they expressed the essential nature of the things to which they referred. My course on John Hospers’ Introduction to Philosophical Analysis at the University of Natal had made me deeply suspicious of this kind of essentialism. This was reinforced at UNISA where I had to get to grips with Aquinas, Scotus and Occam for a course on medieval philosophy. It became clear to me that we have no precise way of distinguishing between essential and contingent properties. As my UNISA colleague Bert Meyer used to say, the so-called essential properties of things do not have red stickers pasted on them to tell us that they are the essential ones. At the time I also read Richard Robinson’s book on definition ¹ and became convinced that the search for ‘real definitions’ that express the essential nature of things was fundamentally confused.