What is Apophaticism? Ways of Talking About an Ineffable God

Abstract

Apophaticism – the view that God is both indescribable and inconceivable – is one of the great medieval traditions of philosophical thought about God, but it is largely overlooked by analytic philosophers of religion. This paper attempts to rehabilitate apophaticism as a serious philosophical option. We provide a clear formulation of the position, examine what could appropriately be said and thought about God if apophaticism is true, and consider ways to address the charge that apophaticism is self-defeating. In so doing we draw on recent work in the philosophy of language, touching on issues such as the nature of negation, category mistakes, fictionalism, and reductionism.

Ontological Commitment and Its Implication to Semantical Objects of Religious Language

“…Research on the language of religion has become a topic that is seriously discussed in the history of philosophy, for quite a long time, namely since the Middle Ages (Scott, 2017). Much attention has come from medieval theologians and philosophers who are concerned with the meaning of divine predicates which encompasses the debates around analogy and apophaticism (Scott & Citron, 2016;White, 2010). Besides that, the history of religious language can also be referred to the debate about the meaningfulness of religious language pioneered by A.J.…”

Conceptions of Supreme Deity

“…One instance of this kind of approach is apophaticism: according to certain traditions in both the East and the West, while we can say what supreme deity is not, we cannot say what supreme deity is. (For more on apophaticism and negative theology, see, for example: Lebens (2014), Scott and Citron (2016), White (2010), and Wildman (2017).) Some theists suppose that the attributes of supreme deity that have intrinsic characterisation are only accessible to us through analogy, or metaphor, or the like.…”

Agnosticism II: Actions and attitudes

“…In its traditional form, apophaticism or negative theology—the position, developed in the context of Christian theism, that God's nature cannot be known or described (see Scott & Citron, 2016, p. 25)—is inconsistent with agnosticism: the apophaticist does acknowledge the existence of God on which the agnostic suspends her judgment. Nevertheless, on some accounts, suspending judgment on the existence of God is a consequence of suspending one's judgment on God's nature or its aspects.…”

“…One difficulty arises from divine indescribability (inconceivability) and the other from unknowability. As argued by Michael Scott and Gabriel Citron, it is possible for the divine nature to be both unknown to us and in principle describable, but if one cannot conceive or describe it, one also cannot know it, since knowledge requires belief (see Scott & Citron, 2016, p. 26). David Efird and David Worsley, on the other hand, state that it is possible to completely know God in an experiential way without any propositional knowledge of him (see Efird & Worsley, 2017, pp.…”