richard and pastor pete,

The topic I had under consideration for my MA thesis was related to Aristotle’s "Nicomachean Ethics" and for which I splurged and purchased a reprint-on-demand of Stewart’s 1892 commentary. With sections and illustrations in English, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc. was enough for me to look for a different topic, being monolingual, or nearly.

Yet I did notice in skimming Stewart that his translation of "logos" seemed to offer an endless list of English terms. Having previously bought into Heidegger’s insistence that its most ‘authentic’ Greek meaning was "setting/laying before by gathering together," Stewart led me to speculate that if "logos" for the Greeks gathers, it does a most comprehensive job.

So if it is to be translated as ‘word,’ to pretend we know what ‘word’ means is self-defeating. The so-called "linguistic turn" in contemporary philosophy illustrates that we have barely begun to understand what ‘word’ means.

To begin with, the growing consensus is that words have a meaning only in a context and that the minimal meaningful context is the sentence or proposition. Quine goes so far as to insist (although his reference here is science) that the minimal context is the whole of science.

I am not qualified to compare religion and science to see if Quine is of any help in religion. He makes clear, however, that philosophy’s traditional (and his ideal for philosophy, like Kant’s, is physics) reliance on "meaning" is up for grabs.

In philosophy, we do not know what "meaning" means. Likewise, unless Heidegger proves right, we do not know what "logos" means to mean. And if H’s critique of absolutes in traditional metaphysics holds up, the neo-platonic early church creeds are toast.