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References
Frank J. Hoffman, ‘Remarks on Blasphemy” inScottish Journal of Religious Studies (Stirling University) vol. 4 no. 2, Autumn 1983, pp. 138–151; Roy W. Perrett, ‘Blasphemy’ inSophia (Deakin University) vol. 26 no. 2, July 1987, pp. 4–14.
I have benefited from a conversation and subsequent correspondent with Peter Winch on blasphemy which enabled me to think again about the issue. Ten years have passed since I wrote RB in London, and I would not now wish to defend every minor detail in that piece, although I still believe that the main argument is basically sound. It is arguable, for instance, that Rush Rhees' use of ‘I should not understand you’ (quoted in RB, p. 139) is not meant to make a general point about what is unintelligibleper se, but that here Rhees ‘speaks for himself’ (as in Wittgenstein's ‘Lecture on Ethics’ in which a similar point is made). I would also want to recast points made in RB about ‘worthiness of worship’ and God's power being ‘a different power’. However, as none of the points I now think require further thought and revision are ones that Perrett focusses upon, I relegate them to this brief footnote.
Mary Warnock, ‘A Fall from Grace’ inTimes Literary Supplement, February 12–18, 1988: ‘If pronography is the representation of the obscene, in whatever medium, we can begin to see why there has been such difficulty in defining pornography, and therefore in attempting to regulate or control it. For whether or not something represents the obscene depends partly on the attitude of the person who is the recipient.’ (p. 157)
Robert C. Roberts, ‘What an Emotion Is: A Sketch’ inThe Philosophical Review vol. XCVII no. 2, April 1988. Especially noteworthy for my purposes are his claims: ‘It is within my psychological repertoire as a rational chooser to construe the situation … and it is in virtue of this optionality of construal that I have emotional options’ (199) and ‘Sometimes we experience an emotion despite not believing its propositional content’ (183).
Perrett (1987), ‘Blasphemy’ inSophia (Deakin University) vol. 26 no. 2, July 1987, p. 8.
Sangharakshita, ‘Buddhism and Blasphemy’ (London: Windhorse Publicationa, 1978) p. 15.
Sangharakshita (1978) ‘, p. 19.
Sangharakshita (1978) ‘, p. 7.
Irving M. Copi,Introduction to Logic (New York: Macmillan, 1986) 7th edition, pp. 140–147. Copi distinguishes five types of definition: stipulative, lexical, precising, theorectical, and persuasive. (His sense of ‘stipulative definition’ is confined to previously undefined terms, and differs from Hospers' idea of the same term discussed in fn. 11 below.) In Copi's nomenclature, Perrett's definition is either a precising definition, a theoretical definition, or both (aside from being an attempt at persuasive definition). Either way there are difficulties, but in any case Perrett should have at least been specific as to what sort(s) of definition he was attempting to formulate. To the extent that Perrett's definition is what Copi calls a ‘theoretical definition’—a likely classification in view of the ‘illocutionary’ element—it is of course only as strong as the theory in which context it is articulated.
Anthony Burgesset al., ‘Obscenity and the Arts—A Symposium’ inTimes Literary Supplement, February 12–18, 1988, p. 159.
John Hospers,An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967) pp. 32–33. Here Hospers specifies three reasons why ‘stipulative’ (by contrast to ‘reportive’) definitions are formulated. Of these, I think that (2) specifies what actually goes on in B, despite Perrett's pretensions to a ‘descriptive account’. Consider: [We stipulate when] ‘(2) we believe that a word already in existence has no clear meaning and we stipulate a more precise one than it already has—such as when we stipulate a meaning for “democracy,” not implying thereby that this correctly reports how most people speaking English use the word, but only that it is a more precise one than people generally employ.’ (p. 33). This seems to be what Copi means by ‘precising definition’ (discussed in fn. 9 above), and Perrett's account may be classified in either way.
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Hoffman, F.J. More on blasphemy. SOPH 28, 26–34 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789856
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789856