Wittgenstein did not write on the philosophy of religion. But certain strands of his later thought readily lend themselves to what I call Wittgensteinian Fideism. There is no text that I can turn to for an extended statement of this position, but certain remarks made by Winch, Hughes, Malcolm, Geach, Cavell, Cameron and Coburn can either serve as partial statements of this position, or can be easily used in service of such a statement. Some of their contentions will serve as (...) targets for my argumentation, for as much as I admire Wittgenstein, it seems to me that the fideistic conclusions drawn by these philosophers from his thought are often absurd. This leads me back to an inspection of their arguments and the premisses in these arguments. (shrink)

Faced with what he saw as the danger to society in the ascendancy of natural science and decline in religion and morals, the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim sought the origins of both religion and science in their function in primitive societies as guarantors of social solidarity. In contrast to Frazer, Tylor, and other early anthropologists, he looked for the internal intelligibility of myth and ritual in social terms, rather than regarding them just as failed attempts to state objective truths (...) about the natural world of the same kind as those later arrived at by natural science. One does not have to accept Durkheim's ultimately atheistic identification of God with Society, nor the politically authoritarian consequences which have some-times been held to follow from this identification, to see that Durkheim has raised a set of issues of crucial importance for a discussion of science and the myths and doctrines of religion. For what he has done is to reintroduce a third factor into the perennial and by now rather frustrating dichotomy between science and religion, namely society and the sciences of man. It is some consequences of this approach that I want to explore in this paper. (shrink)

Wittgenstein did not write on the philosophy of religion. But certain strands of his later thought readily lend themselves to what I call Wittgensteinian Fideism. There is no text that I can turn to for an extended statement of this position, but certain remarks made by Winch, Hughes, Malcolm, Geach, Cavell, Cameron and Coburn can either serve as partial statements of this position, or can be easily used in service of such a statement. Some of their contentions will serve as (...) targets for my argumentation, for as much as I admire Wittgenstein, it seems to me that the fideistic conclusions drawn by these philosophers from his thought are often absurd. This leads me back to an inspection of their arguments and the premisses in these arguments. (shrink)