Abstract
Christoph Schneider sets about the task of developing a compelling Eastern Christian philosophy of language. According to him, a convincing theory of meaning must take into consideration the object in the world that a term or linguistic sign refers to (i.e., reference), the relationship between the sign and the sign-user (i.e., use), and the sense or aspect under which the object is being interpreted (i.e., sense). Schneider argues that the twentieth-century’s re-discovery of the pragmatic dimension of meaning, which heavily emphasises the relationship between a sign and a sign-user, may lead to an uncritical acceptance of a post-Kantian finitism that is unamenable, and even hostile to Orthodox religious language and metaphysics. Drawing heavily on the writings of Russian religious philosophers such as Soloviev, Florensky, and Bulgakov, Schneider sets out to show how Orthodox philosophers might respond to this challenge, paving the way for future work in this important area.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations from German and Russian texts are my own.
- 2.
I am again following Deely’s definition of idealism: “[T]he things we immediately apprehend in all that we apprehend of them the mind itself makes (…) in contrast with whatever it be that exists or may exist independently of those workings: that is the true essence of modern idealism” (Deely, 2001, p. 557, note 24).
- 3.
The question is whether this seemingly neutral philosophical theory proposed by Eco is not itself ideologically charged. The only world view that can be legitimately universalised is the non-universalisability of any particular system of knowledge. Is this really a neutral position?
- 4.
It is important to note that Wittgenstein understands ‘family resemblance’ metaphorically, whereas in the above quotation, Florensky elucidates the nature of genus in the sense of human kinship. Nonetheless, the philosophical problem the two thinkers address is fundamentally the same.
- 5.
Yet, as William Desmond points out, there is no simplistic dualism between equivocity and univocity, time and enternity in Plato, who is ultimately—like Desmond himself—a metaxological thinker. Plato’s philosophy is plurivocal and does not absolutise univocity. To elucidate the interplay between equivocity and univocity, Desmond explains, we need to resort to a sense of being that transcends both.
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Schneider, C. (2022). The Mystery of Words: Orthodox Theology and Philosophy of Language. In: Siemens, J., Brown, J.M. (eds) Eastern Christian Approaches to Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10762-7_8
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