D. Z. PHILLIPS was an influential philosopher of religion whose work might in large part be seen as a commentary on some aspects of the thought of Wittgenstein.
When Phillips began to study the philosophy of religion, the discipline was in crisis. It remained dominated by the attempt to reconcile religious truth-claims with rationality; to unite theology and philosophy.
Such an approach seemed questionable on both philosophical and theological grounds. Gradually, the philosophy of religion began to find a new role for itself: not in uniting theology and philosophy, but in recognising and analysing their different functions. Phillips made a very significant contribution to this paradigm shift.
A Welsh speaker, Dewi Zephaniah Phillips was born in 1934 in Morriston, near Swansea. His family was strongly involved in the local Congregational church, and from an early age Phillips intended to become a minister. He was educated at Swansea Grammar School and the University College of Wales, Swansea, where he graduated in 1956 with first-class honours in philosophy. His teachers — J. R. Jones, Rush Rhees, R. F. Holland and Peter Winch — were known as the Swansea School: they had a lasting influence on Phillips’s philosophical development, especially Rhees. Between 1956 and 1958 he wrote a dissertation on Moral and Religious Conceptions of Duty under the supervision of Rhees.
In 1958 he began studying for the BPhil at Oxford. He switched his candidacy to the BLitt, writing a dissertation on The Language of Talking to God, later to be published as The Concept of Prayer. In 1959 he was invited to become the minister of Fabian’s Bay Congregational Church in Swansea. He was inducted but not ordained: he switched back to his academic vocation, taking a post at Queen’s College, Dundee, in 1961, as assistant lecturer in philosophy. In 1965 he returned home to Swansea.
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He was promoted to a senior lectureship in 1967 and became professor and head of department in 1971 in succession to J. R. Jones. He was head of department for 21 years, during which he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1982-85) and vice-principal (1989-92).
From 1992 he divided his time between Swansea and Claremont Graduate University in California where he had been appointed the Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, a post he held until his death. In 1996 he became Rush Rhees Research Professor at Swansea, devoting himself to the editing of Rhees’s papers which had been purchased by Swansea after his death.
Phillips helped to establish Swansea as an international centre of Wittgenstein studies. His own work continued to explore Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and its significance for religion. Wittgenstein had contested the idea that language is a tool with which we describe the world, claiming instead that it forms our understanding of reality. Language is always something communal, social, practical — there can be no “private language”, he famously said.
Wittgenstein occasionally applied these insights to theology, suggesting that religion be seen as a sort of language, rooted in certain communal practices, and that theology be seen as the grammar of this language. Theologians were not immediately receptive to these insights: Phillips patiently explained why they should be.
In doing so, he made a significant contribution to postmodern theology. His book Faith After Foundationalism (1988) contested the assumption that religious belief needed foundations in some other intellectual framework, such as philosophy. Using Wittgenstein and others, Phillips showed how theology could move away from this presupposition.
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He wrote many other books: one was a study of his compatriot R. S. Thomas, whose poetry enabled Phillips to approach familiar themes in a fresh way.
Because his writing preserved a distance from Christian discourse, he was not, in the strict sense, a theologian. His work, he said, is “not that of a Christian philosopher or a Christian scholar. Hopefully it is the work of a philosopher endeavouring to become clear about a cluster of beliefs which have been and are extremely important in the lives of men and women.”
He felt that it was his role to stand outside Christian discourse, in order to clarify its boundaries, and to guard against the sort of category mistakes to which theology is always prone. But outside academia, his Christian commitment was clear and unambiguous.
His commitment to the language and culture of Wales was similarly clear. He was instrumental in the founding of the Taliesin Arts Centre on the university campus in Swansea, and promoted the use of the Welsh language in local schools. He was honoured by membership of the Gorsedd Circle of the National Eisteddfod.
He married Margaret Monica Hanford in 1959 and they had three sons.
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Professor D. Z. Phillips, philosopher, was born on November 24, 1934. He died on July 25, 2006, aged 71.