Abstract

This is a study in both comparative ontology and philsophical theology. It attempts to develop an explicit conception of the religious life grounded in the complementary ontological views of Justus Buchler, Wittgenstein, and the classical Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. ;Buchler's principle of ordinality, Wittgenstein's language-games, and Nagarjuna's sunyata are complementary in a number of respects. They all articulate the general ontological view that the nature of what "is" is a function of its traits, and that a broad context in which anything is located conditions its nature. For all three figures this entails the rejection of both a substance/attribute ontology and the possibility of ontological simples. While Wittgenstein and Nagarjuna claim not to advance any metaphysical theories, their works reflect a general ontological position. The chapters of Part I develop these comparisons. ;Part II develops the religious implications of the ontological positions explored in Part I. The concept of creation ex nihilo is shown to be untenable from the perspectives of ordinality and sunyata. The fundamental point is that given ordinal location and the fact that complexes are constituted by their traits, it is not possible that what "is" is created from nothing. Similarly, a creator ex nihilo cannot be sunya or asunya, and is therefore impossible. ;Buchler's metaphysics of the human process, with its basic categories of proception and judgement, and Wittgenstein's concept of a form of life, enable us to develop a conception of the religious life. It is argued that a form of life is best understood as something like Buchler's "perspective," and the concepts of perspective and community, both central to Buchler's analysis, are employed in the discussion of the religious life. The "religious" perspective" is seen to be fundamentally communal and soteriological, and concerned primarily with meaning, value and liberation. The religious perspective differs from certain traditional views in a number of ways. It is not perception or knowledge of religious objects, nor is it primarily a personal matter. Its emphasis is on the meaning and value of human lives in both their personal and social aspects