ABSTRACT
I shall limit myself to discussing the role of language in philosophy concerning religion (more speci cally Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions) during the twentieth and twenty- rst centuries. But it should not be forgotten that well before the linguistic turn with twentieth-century analytical philosophy, there was also concern with linguistic and conceptual issues. The astute and complicated discussion of predication concerning God during the Middle Ages is a prominent example. Moreover, there is a concentrated concern with language during much of the histories of world religions (Soskice 1984; 1997). But it is with the rise of analytic philosophy that such attention moves to center stage. I shall start by discussing the veri cationism that became central with the emergence of logical positivism, moving to the metaphysical realism that rose in reaction to veri cationism, then turning to the Wittgensteinian reaction as an alternative to both of the above, and ending with the neo-pragmatist reaction to all this characteristic of Richard Rorty and Jeffrey Stout (Rorty 2002; Stout 2002).
