Partial Knowledge: Philosophical Studies in Paul

This book is the product of philosophical activity practiced on a biblical writer. Something of what this means may be found in the first chapter, but here I want to say briefly how the work came about and to discharge some debts of gratitude. Since my acedemic training is more philosophical than anything else, no one can tell from my education when I began to be interested in Paul; and my own memory cannot answer that question. Nor do I know precisely when that interest turned philosphical; one's mental life does not seem to care much about temporal correlates in the world of datable events. nevertheless the approach taken in this book first took written form shortly after I completed my doctoral dissertation on Plato. As a post partem diversion I decided to work out an issue in the philosophy of religion - the metaphysical status of resurrected persons - by applying to a text of Paul the type of philosophical questioning I practised on Plato. the result, publised in a small journal, Crux, in 1971, was my initial attempt to explore the possibility that Pauline resurrection is compatible with a view of persons as disembodied after death. A decade later this thesis was more fully developed in Religious studies, in 1981, and now, recognizing that such an uncommon thesis needs to take detailed account of Paul's textm I have written a new piece on the same theme, set in wider context, for this book.