Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

150 J.J. Haldane
that which appears in Volume 2 of the Blackfriars Summa – of which McDermott
was also the translator.
17 This comes from notes of a conversation made by M. Drury, a former student
of Wittgenstein. See Rush Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 79. For a clear and interesting account of
how Wittgenstein’s philosophical anthropology might bear upon religious
questions see Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
For further subtleties regarding the place of religion in Wittgenstein’s thought
see Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View, edited by P. Winch
(London: Routledge, 1993).
18 Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a. 3 as translated by McDermott in Aquinas: Selected
Philosophical Writings.
19 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965), Book I, section III, pp. 79–80.
20 See Master Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues, translated by Armand Maurer
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), Question 1.
21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), I 304. Wittgenstein is writing about the sensation of
pain.
22 See Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Translations from the Philosophical
Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black, 3rd edn
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
23 This fact about the meaning of ‘good’ (and ‘bad’ and other evaluative terms)
is invoked by Aristotle in opposition to the view of Plato that goodness is a
single, simple property possessed by all good things. He writes: ‘Since “good” has
as many senses as “being” . . . clearly it cannot be something universally present
in all cases and single’, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I. 6, 1096a23–29, translated by
David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925). The definitive modern
discussion of this point is the essay ‘Good and Evil’ by Peter Geach, Analysis,
17 (1956), reprinted (and revised) in P. Foot (ed.), Theories of Ethics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967).
24 In the lapidary words of the Nicene Creed ‘For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate
from the Virgin Mary, and was made man (homo factus est). For our sake he
was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried ( passus et
sepultus est)’. These words derive from the first and second ecumenical councils
of Nicaea (325) and of Constantinople (381), hence it is strictly the ‘Niceno-
Constantinopolitan Creed’ – the common declaration of Christian faith of all the
great Churches of both East and West.
25 For an account and defence of the idea of dogmatic infallibility as that features
in the theology of the ‘extraordinary magisterium’ see J. Haldane, ‘Infallibility,
Authority and Faith’, Heythrop Journal, 38 (1997).