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BOOK REVIEWS 705 Logical Analysis and Contemporary Theism. Ed. by JoHN DoNNELLY. New York: Fordham University Press, 197~. Pp. 348. $1~.50. Professor John Donnelly's work is a collection of essays in philosophical analysis directed toward issues in the philosophy of religion. Most of the essays have been written by philosophers justly famous in analytic circles. In fact, essays by five of the seven members scheduled to participate in the 1973 Council for Philosophical Studies Conference in the Philosophy of Religion are included in Donnelly's anthology: Roderick Chisholm, Anthony Kenny, George Mavrodes, Nelson Pike, and Alvin Plantinga. Any student even vaguely familiar with analytic studies in contemporary philosophy of religion will immediately recognize nearly all of the authors whose essays are contained in this impressive anthology. The collection contains twenty essays. Of these, fifteen were originally published in journals known for their exemplification of critical philosophical analysis. Of the remaining five, Kenny's article is from his quite good Doubleday anthology on Aquinas. The essay by John Hick, certainly a well-known philosopher of religion in analytic circles, first appeared in the Scottish Journal of Theology. Two articles are from the Proceedings of the 1970 Convention of the American Catholic Philosophical Association , whose general theme is the " Existence of God." Lastly, Donnelly has included a previously unpublished study of his own on Kierkegaard. Of these twenty essays, only two appeared prior to 1960, while eleven had originally been published during the last five years. Obviously, the accent of this anthology is on the contributions of contemporary logical analysis on theism. In a very real sense the gist of Donnelly's collection is a definite attempt to show that much " natural theology " has been done in the circles of analytic philosophy since the publication of Flew and Macintyre's New Essays in Philosophical Theology. The determined bent of New Essays to deal directly with the epistemological, ontological, and linguistic ramifications of logical positivism and its corresponding verification criterion of meaning on philosophical theology is well known. During the last fifteen years probably every graduate student concerned with the philosophy of religion has confronted New Essays at one time or another. Donnelly is anxious to show, nevertheless, that philosophical analysis need not accept nor has not accepted the negative conclusions of much of New Essays-and, a fortiori, of logical positivism-regarding the issues of philosophical theology . In his essay contained in the anthology Paul J. Dietl probably best sums up the general direction of the material contained in Logical Analysis and Contemporary Theism: Some of the most .remarkable turns in recent philosophical discussion have been the resurrection of issues original readers of Language, Truth and Logic would have thought forever dead. (p. 286) 706 BOOK REVIEWS It is manifestly evident from a reading of the essays contained in Donnelly's anthology that " God-talk " certainly has not passed into the realm of meaningless discourse as demanded by the logical positivists. Two important correlative implications of this series of essays are: (I) analytic philosophy has certainly not paid strict adherence to the verification criterion of meaning and its ramifications for ontology, epistemology, and theodicy; and (2) analytic philosophers have not been convinced that the non-cognitive conclusions of much of New Essays is the last word in the question of significance of religious language. In other words, the overall direction of Logical Analysis and Contemporary Theism seriously points to the claim that non-cognitivism, as demanded by the verification criterion of meaning in matters of philosophical theology, is false. This assertion, I believe, parallels Professor Henry Veatch's claim that an adequate ethical language demands cognitivity. To paraphrase Veatch, as noncognitivism in ethical discourse leads one to a bankrupt meta-ethics, so too will non-cognitivism in religious discourse lead one to a bankrupt theodicy. The converse of the above claim, I would suggest, is that both meta-ethics and natural theology demand an adequate ontology. Although this demand for an ontology as well as an adequate epistemology is not expressly stated in all of the essays contained in Donnelly's collection, nevertheless there are strong structural indications in some of these essays-three of which I will consider in...

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