Abstract
The debate between realist and non-realist understandings of religious language exposes the most fundamental of all issues in the philosophy of religion today. I say ‘today’ because although logically this issue is basic in a timeless sense, it has only come to be generally seen as an issue at all during the last hundred and fifty or so years — roughly since the pioneering work of Feuerbach — and has become sharply focused within the Western religious consciousness only during recent decades. Throughout the previous centuries, and indeed millennia, religious self-understanding has been implicitly or explicitly realist — perhaps the only significant exception being within one strand of what we now see to be the highly variegated Buddhist tradition. But today there are confident non-realist interpretations of Christianity and Judaism as well as Buddhism which make a wide appeal within our contemporary industrialised, science-oriented, de-supernaturalised Western societies.
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© 1993 Claremont Graduate School
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Hick, J. (1993). Religious Realism and Non-Realism: Defining the Issue. In: Runzo, J. (eds) Is God Real?. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22693-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22693-1_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-22695-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22693-1
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