Martin Warner

Literature, Truth and Logic

Analytic philosophys characteristic downgrading of literatures putative concern with truth, and envisaging of its interest to philosophy merely in terms of material for logical analysis, was prefigured by Frege. The initial plausibility of this approach was in part a function of certain preferred models of philosophy as analysis which were themselves deeply flawed. An exploration of their weaknesses in the light of more adequate theories of language, truth and logic enables us to give proper weight both to rhetorical and imaginative aspects of philosophical discourse, and to the capacity of works of literature to bear on issues of truth—and thereby contribute to philosophical understanding.

The Poetic Image

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Philosophy, Implicature and Liturgy

The Lesser Doxology provides an important touchstone for Christian worship. Its scriptural basis lies in a conflation of the ascription of worth to (worship of) God and the Lamb in the Book of Revelation 5 (and analogous ascriptions of praise at the close of several of St Paul’s Epistles) with the Trinitarian formula of Our Lord’s final charge to his disciples recorded in St Matthew’s Gospel. Its regular use goes right back to the early Church. As far as the contemporary Church is concerned, the essay on ‘Theology of Worship’ in one of the best known recent ecumenical works in English on liturgy, The Study of Liturgy, points out that ‘almost all collects begin with an ascription of praise to the Father, make petition through the Son and conclude with a mention of the Holy Spirit’, maintaining that these phrases, together with the Doxology which concludes the Eucharistic prayer, serve to ‘remind us that the aim of the whole liturgy is entrance into communion with God, a communion in the divine life and love that constitute the Trinity’.1

Philosophy, Language and the Reform of Public Worship

When I studied the Scriptures then I did not feel as I am writing about them now. They seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the grand style of Cicero (Augustine, III, 5). As for the absurdities which used to offend me in Scripture, … I now looked for their meanings in the depth of mystery ( sacramentorum ) (Augustine, VI, 5).

Philosophical Autobiography: St Augustine and John Stuart Mill

Many classic philosophical debates converge on the twin questions ‘What is man?’ and ‘What is his place in nature?’, in the sense that taking up a position in those debates normally commits one to a certain range of answers to these questions. Such answers typically lie near the centre of ones web of belief, deeply entrenched in the structure of ones concepts, and thus remain remarkably resistant to the standard techniques of confirmation and refutation.