Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religious belief (from around the mid-1930s onwards) have often been and continue to be interpreted in connection with other terms he used in his later philosophy. The most common interpretations argue tha...
The paper offers a reinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s 1938 lecture on religious belief and challenges a prominent view that it commits Wittgenstein to a form of non-cognitivism and/or that it reflects a lack of understanding of religious practi...
This paper provides an overview of five defences of religious belief against criticisms offered by ‘modern atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins. All five defences maintain that the atheist’s criticisms are off target as a result of the...
One of the more well-known of Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the nature of religious beliefs is that we go wrong if we try to vindicate or refute religious beliefs in the same way as we do in the sciences. This may make it seem as if Wittgenstei...
Wittgenstein claims that religious belief does not stand on evidence, that only those with a religious point of view can see an event as a miracle, and that experiencing a miracle can influence a person towards religious belief. This has the unusual...
The present article aims to offer a new perspective on later Wittgenstein’s notion of belief by comparing the ideas in two well-known works of his, namely, On Certainty (OC) and Philosophical Investigations (PI), with ideas from a widely recogn...
In “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein”, Waismann reports Wittgenstein saying that in speaking about ethics “I can only appear as a person speaking for myself.” If we combine this with another remark, “What is Good is Divi...
In On Certainty, Wittgenstein introduces the metaphor of “hinge propositions” to refer to those propositions that must remain certain if a language is to be used meaningfully within a community, such as “the earth has existed long b...
This paper evaluates Pritchard’s account of religious conversion as a quantitative process along which gradual shifts in our system of empirical beliefs lead to a new, holistic view of the world. Wittgenstein’s own presentations of transi...
In this article, I argue that Newman’s emphasis on a gestaltic model of reasoning and the role played by the imagination in informal reasoning is a fruitful starting point for an exploration of convergence between the Grammar of Assent and Witt...
Under the ideas of ‘hinges’ and ‘pictures’, as these relate to deep disagreement, Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief is a multifaceted challenge to conceptions of thought-world relations. In this article, I discuss...
When Wittgenstein (2009, § 116) writes that “[w]hat we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”, many will presumably read this is an anti-religious statement. According to the everyday use of the word...
In a series of papers, Duncan Pritchard has argued that Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty (OC) provide the foundation for a quasi-fideistic account of religious belief. This account seeks to navigate a middle path between evidentialism&mda...
The article engages in a critique of Wittgensteinian non-cognitivism about Christian belief statements but argues that Wittgenstein himself can only partially be classified under the non-cognitivist label. The article has three parts. First, it argue...
In his article ‘Epistemic Injustice and Religion’, Ian James Kidd raises the possibility that some epistemic injustices might be deep. To spell out exactly what might be involved in deep epistemic injustices, especially those involving re...
The wrong idea that Wittgenstein proposes a version of hinge epistemology has stalled progress in understanding and applying his insights into religious life. The concepts of “belief system” and “hinge proposition” were nothin...
This article examines the conceptual connections between simpler and more complex forms of religiosity, focusing on the transition from ritual-based practices to religious narratives and theological reflection. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s method...
M. O’C. Drury and Norman Malcolm both report that Wittgenstein gave them copies of Samuel Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, a book that he said he valued highly. Given that Wittgenstein’s commentators have mined the ideas of other...
This essay examines pantheism within the framework of the ‘faith and reason’ field in the philosophy of religion, with an emphasis on the question of the relationship between pantheism and empirical–scientific rationality. I address...
Drawing on Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Duncan Pritchard argues for a position he calls quasi-fideism. Quasi-Fideism is the view that hinge commitments such as “God exists” are exempt from rational scrutiny within the language game...
Over the last couple of decades, philosophers have been drawing on ideas from Wittgenstein’s late work On Certainty in developing an approach to epistemology known as “hinge epistemology.” Hinge epistemology has been of particular i...