In the last several months, I’ve had two articles appear in open access journals, Religions and Agatheos. I think of both of these pieces as being within the orbit of Rethinking Philosophy of Religion with Wittgenstein—not least because my work on these two articles happened roughly at the same time as my work on the book. For various thematic reasons, they did not quite fit with the arc of the argument I pursue across the book’s chapters.
The first article, which was published in July, is “On Atheistic Hinges,” which is part of an expansive special issue of Religions edited by Sebastian Sunday Grève on new work in Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. While many of the articles in that special issue concern hinge epistemology of religion, my essay considers to what extent it may be helpful to interpret at least some forms of atheism using Wittgenstein’s notion of “hinge” commitment. (“Hinge epistemology” is a contemporary approach to interpreting Wittgenstein and his relevance to a host of problems in epistemology takes inspiration from various remarks found in the late work On Certainty about the certainties that ground human epistemic life.)
After tracing out a variety of instances of atheism and their general unsuitability to be interpreted according to the notion of a hinge commitment, I consider two possibilities that are, arguably, helpfully interpreted in this way. The two examples I have in mind are Martin Hägglund’s idea of secular faith and expressions of atheism that one sometimes encounters in contemporary China. The idea is that Hägglund, explicitly, and some contemporary Chinese atheists, implicitly, hold to atheism in a way such that it not only becomes a presupposition for thinking and acting but also is closely connected to existential questions of meaning and identity.
Photo from the Museum of World Religions in Taipei
The next article to appear, “Wittgenstein, Religious Diversity, and Communicative Reticence” was published in September in AGATHEOS: European Journal for Philosophy of Religion. This article has been in development for a long time but is in many ways the product of years of thought about dynamics relating to communication and its breakdown. The paper draws on Wittgenstein to develop a rich picture of the forms of communicative reticence that may play out within religious discourses or in inter-religious and cross-cultural communication involving religions.
In a way, both of these articles have to do with Wittgenstein and hermeneutics. My appeal to hinge commitments in “On Atheistic Hinges” is interpretive, while my interest in communicative reticence in the Agaetheos article has to do with trying to grasp some of the circumstances in which communication fails (either for reasons internal to a religious discourse, such as the perceived ineffability of the object of communication, or external, such as contextual political dynamics that may make communicative trust unlikely or effectively impossible).
