Logic, God and Metaphysics

In the 20th century, the interests of most philosophers and theologians have fallen into only one of three areas: logic, God or metaphysics. Since much of Anglo-American philosophy in this century has been analytic and antimetaphysical because of the influence of positivism, there have been few attempts at continuing metaphysical inquiry. In the early part of the century, the logical atomists combined logic and metaphysics by arguing that the structure of reality is mirrored isomorphically in the structure of a formal, logically perfect, truth-functional language, but their effort was short-lived. Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophers have focused upon God and metaphysics but usually by adopting terminology and distinctions which are unique to certain systems - making rigorous, logical analysis difficult or impossible. The papers included in this volume are illustrative of the application of careful, rigorous logical analysis (and sometimes logical systems) to critical philosophy of religion and what has been called constructive metaphysics.