Summary Twentieth Century Perspectives Notes for Religious Studies A Level
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Course
G581 - A2 Philosophy of Religion
Institution
OCR
These notes follow the specification whilst compiling information and knowledge from resources both within and outside of the curriculum. These notes cover all the necessary sub topics for the exam with key topics, such as the verification principle, Hume's fork, and the challenge of falsification,...
The Vienna Circle, its background, and AJ Ayer
- roots in Hume’s fork which makes the distinction between matters of facts
(empirical knowledge) and relations of ideas (rational knowledge)
- anything that isn’t a synthetic or analytic statement must be rejected, Hume
calls to ‘commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but
sophistry and illusion.’ it is just meaningless wordplay in between the
region of empiricism and rationalism
- in the 1920s the Vienna Circle was developed the concept of logical
positivism which maintains that all philosophy should be centred around
things that can is meaningful and can be criticised
The Verification Principle
- AJ Ayer developed the strong and weak verification principle
- strong: a statement is meaningful if it can be verified immediately
- weak: a statement is meaningful if it can be verified in theory
- ‘only assertions that were in principle verifiable by observation or
experience could convey factual information’ Ayer
It’s success in rendering RL as meaningless
1. Locke’s notion of primary v secondary qualities shows how observations
can be trusted and used for verification as primary qualities of an
experience do not rely on perception
2. if language is used differently and imperfectly when applied to God, is it
still meaningful if it’s not meaningful in the same way?
3. ‘unless he can formulate his ‘knowledge’ in propositions that are
empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.’
Ayer
4. man is at an epistemic distance from God and shouldn’t make statements
that our beyond our possible experience
It’s failure in rendering RL as meaningless
1. Hume’s notion that non synthetic/analytic statements are meaningless
can’t be verified through reason or observation. The theory itself can’t be
verified.
2. can verifications be trusted if observations are deceiving (Cartesian doubt
and ‘cogito ergo sum’)
3. Berkley challenges empiricism by arguing there are no objective
observations, ‘esse est percepi’, or ‘to be is to be perceived.’ Hanson
maintained the idea that nothing can be verified neutrally, perspective
gets in the way.
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