ABSTRACT
It is unusual for a philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to discuss the subject of spirituality. This might once have been attributed to a view of philosophy as confined to conceptual analysis and the theory of logic. Now, however, when almost every aspect of human life has been made the subject of some department of ‘applied philosophy’ it could hardly be said that the subject of spirituality lies outside the sphere of reasonable philosophical enquiry. Yet it is almost entirely neglected. There is another reason why academic philosophers might not think to explore
the subject. For ‘spirituality’ smacks of religion, and not of the interesting metaphysical aspects that form the subject matter of natural theology, but of those devotional and pietistic preoccupations that are felt to belong to the affective domain, if not to the sphere of irrationality. Occasionally a passing philosopher will, so to speak, stop at the church door and approach the credulous man in the pew in order to point out what nonsense talk of spirituality really is. In an essay entitled ‘What is “Spirituality”?’2 Anthony Flew performs such an exercise by looking at several terms with which the word is linked: these are ‘spirited, spirit, spiritist, spiritual and spiritualist’. He distributes these into various categories: psychological disposition (spirited), incorporeal substance (spirit), those believing in the latter (spiritists and spiritualists), and then that pertaining to higher human characteristics, or to non-earthly matters (spiritual). As an atheist who regards immaterialism as absurd Flew barely lingers over the incorporeal, but he dwells awhile to denounce modern educationalists who favour policies of spiritual development in the (state)-maintained school system. Readers familiar with Flew’s spirited writings may feel that by this point he had been joined in the aisle by a couple of restless hobby-horses.
