Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: alrazi on the anthropomorphism of the quran — October 20, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

Would be very interesting to contrast this with a quote from ibn Taymiyyah who both upholds the literal reading of such verses while insisting that reading is not anthropomorphic and accuses the Asharis (like Razi) of anthropomorphism.

I very firmly believe the true debate in this matter is one of philosophy of language and cannot be settled at the metaphysical level. Ibn Taymiyyah's approach to language as defined in his Muqadimma Usul al-Tafsir and elsewhere, which is more Wittgenstein-esque, essentially totally informs his theological conclusion on the Ṣifāt controversy.

There's a paper I've been meaning to read on this: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/files/66707882/Mustafa2018TMWIbnTaymiyyahandWittgensteinOnLanaguage.pdf

Al-Rāzī, who held a much more conventional theory of language (going back to Plato/Aristotlian conceptions of words representing forms) can obviously be expected to divide phrases into literal (muhkam) and metaphorical (mutashabbih), then construct his theory on the nature (Dhāt) of God accordingly. He elaborates on this extensively throughout his tafsir.

The other truly unique strain of linguistic-cum-metaphysical thinking in Sunnism is probably ibn Hazm's Dhahiri views on theology, but they gained almost no following even within the Dhahiri school. It also isn't anywhere near as sophisticated as Asharism or Taymiyyanism.

There's something to be said about Hume's bundle theory versus substance theory with respect to how different Muslims conceived of the Ṣifāt.

I also think a lot of these debates have to do with analytical versus synthetic thinking (I can't find anything in psychology to describe this). There's clearly a spectrum of human thought, on one side very literalistic, mechanical, mathematical, isolated, and atomistic and on the other figurative, fluid, layered, multidimensional, and literate. Perhaps the theory of language that speaks to an individual and therefore the subsequent philosophical or metaphysical conclusions they arrive at are as arbitrary as whether their neurology is wired to be more synthetic or analyic.