As George Boolos once remarked, much of our ordinary discourse seems to involve reference to abstract objects. It’s not just numbers and sets, though we do talk about them. We talk also of sentences: How many and what words they contain; how those words are spelled and pronounced; whether they were uttered on certain occasions. We talk of books...we read them; talk about what sentences they contain; and argue about what is and is not said in them. One might almost be tempted to say that abstract objects are all around us, but for the fact that they aren’t, since they aren’t located in space. It is this that gives rise to the ontological and epistemological problems that abstract objects pose.
- R. Heck, "The Existence (and Non-existence) of Abstract Objects"
Next week on the podcast, I have an episode coming out with a philosopher from MIT. We talk aesthetics, time, academic freedom, and much more. But first...
I went into my PhD program with an interest in the metaphysics of abstract objects, thinking I would focus on that topic. What ended up not being my focus specifically, but it led to an interest in the metaphysics of language, because a sentence, for example, can’t be just sound waves or black ink. This article, part of which is quoted above, was formative. My first published article, in the journal Synthese, was on the metaphysics of words in particular.
An interest in the metaphysics of language led to an interest in the metaphysics of the Bible: what exactly is it?
The Bible can’t be just a single physical manuscript (otherwise if we destroyed the manuscript we would destroy the Bible itself). It can’t be even several physical manuscripts, for the same reason. It can’t be the physical sound waves originally spoken by Jesus and others, for example, also for the same reason.
So if we don’t want to say that the Bible itself can be destroyed if physical manuscripts are destroyed, or if physical sound waves are not around anymore, it looks like the Bible itself is non-physical. And this is not particular to the Bible, but true of any book.
Further, we also want to say that when we are reading a translation, like the English Standard Version, in an important sense we are reading the Bible. Reading the Bible can’t be limited to reading the original manuscripts in the original languages, otherwise no one but the original authors and audience have read (or listened to) the Bible.
And we also want to say that not any ol' translation of the Bible should count as the Bible. So just like other objects, there are limits of how much change the Bible as an object can admit before it becomes something else.
The Bible also has parts. Catholics believe Tobit is a part of the whole object that is the Bible, and Protestants do not. The Eastern Orthodox include 3 Maccabees as a part, while Catholics do not. We can run the same line of thinking for the metaphysics of the parts of the Bible–the individual books, like Ephesians–showing that those parts are also non-physical.
What goes for the Bible also goes for the books of the Bible, goes for the chapters, the verses, the sentences, and the words.
None of this is to devalue the physical representations of the Bible; the ones on our bookshelf, the words spoken when reading, the manuscripts from centuries and millennia ago. At time we talk as if the physical thing we hold is the Bible. If someone holds up the book and says, “This is the Bible”, while technically it’s a copy, translation, and therefore a representation of the Bible, we know what they mean in the same way someone says “That’s me” when pointing to a photo (representation) of the person.
Much more to say, but I would like to see more philosophical and theological work on the metaphysics of the Bible and, most appropriately, the Word.
Until next time.
Jared
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