Phillips D., Ruhr M. (Edited) Language and Spirit

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. - 162 p. ISBN: 1–4039–1820–1Why has the concept of spirit been neglected in contemporary anglophone philosophy? Why has it been neglected in philosophy of religion where, it might be thought, a belief in God as Spirit would have commanded attention for the notion? I do not pretend to provide an adequate answer to these complex questions in this brief introduction. Neither am I going to trace, or repeat, the answers to the question one finds explicitly, or implicitly, in the papers which make up this collection.
Their clarity is such as to render such an attempt on my part utterly superfluous. I do, however, want to explore one aspect of replies to the questions which runs throughout the papers and discussions of them: this has to do with our difficulty in placing the concept of spirit. There seems to be a general lack of confidence about the use of the notion, one which is, at the same time, a hesitancy about the ways in which it can, or should, enter our discourse.
I can bring out what I mean by the difficulty of ‘placement’ by referring to a tension which, as far as I am concerned, was never far away in the papers and discussion. This is a tension between philosophy and theology or, more particularly, a tension between ontology and theology. At one end of the spectrum, there are those who entertain what might be called ontological ambitions for the notion of spirit, such that to talk about ‘spirit’ becomes a way of talking about ‘what there is’, or ‘all things’, in a way which appears, in different forms, in philosophical ontologies.