Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. D. E. Buckner

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Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures - D. E. Buckner Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives

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      Reference and Identity

      in Jewish, Christian, and

      Muslim Scriptures

      Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives

      Series Editors: Margaret Cameron, Lenny Clapp, and Robert Stainton

      Advisory Board: Axel Barceló (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas), Chen Bo (Peking University), Robyn Carston (University College London), Leo Cheung (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Eduardo García (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas), Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern University), Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University), Catrina Dutilh Novaes (Vrije University Amsterdam), Eleonora Orlando (University of Buenos Aires), Claude Panaccio (University of Quebec at Montreal), Bernhard Weiss (University of Cape Town), and Jack Zupko (University of Alberta)

      Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives comprises monographs and edited collections that explore connections between the philosophy of language and other academic disciplines, or that approach the core topics of philosophy of language in the Anglo-American analytic tradition from alternative perspectives. The philosophy of language, particularly as practiced in the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, has established itself as a thriving academic discipline. Because of the centrality of language to the human experience, there are myriad connections between the core topics addressed by philosophers of language and other academic disciplines. The number of researchers who are exploring these connections is growing, but there has not been a corresponding increase in the venues for publication of this research. The central purpose and motivation for this series is to address this shortcoming.

       Titles in the Series

      Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? by D. E. Buckner

      Reference and Identity

      in Jewish, Christian, and

      Muslim Scriptures

      The Same God?

      D. E. Buckner

      LEXINGTON BOOKS

      Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

      Published by Lexington Books

      An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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      Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

      ISBN 978-1-4985-8741-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

      ISBN 978-1-4985-8742-6 (electronic)

      

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

      Contents

       4 Mentioning

       5 Identification within History

       6 Reference and Identity

       7 Existence

       8 The God of the Philosophers

       9 Identification in the Present

       10 Revelation

       11 Intentionality

       Bibliography

       Index

       About the Author

      Many books, often philosophy books, are a long time in the writing. As an undergraduate in 1974, I was surprised to learn that my tutor, the late Peter Alexander, had been working on his book on Locke for twelve years. The book was published in 1985, twenty-three years after its conception.1 But this book has been a very long time in the writing. It began with an idea in 1984 that I discussed in a rather bad paper I presented at one of the legendary seminars in room K, chaired by the late Christopher Williams at Bristol University. I write this preface in 2019, exactly thirty-five years and nearly half a lifetime later.

      The idea was about what philosophers call reference statements, namely statements that (apparently) say of some word, let’s say the name “Boris,” that it refers to some person, namely Boris himself. In the 1980s, my example would have been “Margaret” referring to Margaret Thatcher, in the 1990s, “Major” referring to John Major, the 2000s, “Blair” referring to Tony Blair, and so on. The number of British prime ministers testifies to the lengthy gestation of this book.

      It had struck me that while a reference statement appears to express a relation between a word and a thing, the appearance is misleading. Perhaps a reference statement is true not because of a word-world relation between language and reality, as the grammar suggests, but an intralinguistic or word-word relation. Do not misunderstand: I do not mean that the word “Boris” refers to the word “Boris.” On the contrary, what “Boris” refers to is not the word “Boris,” but Boris the man. The insight was that what makes the reference statement

      “Boris” refers to Boris

      true is a relation between the term that is mentioned, namely the grammatical subject of the reference statement, the one enclosed in quotation marks, and the term that is used, namely, the grammatical accusative of the sentence, the one without quotation marks. The relation is intralinguistic, not a relation between a word and a person. If that sounds strange, you may enjoy this book.

      The

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