My first book, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) will be published this summer.
Here is the jacket description:
The commonly held view that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion entails an irrationalist defense of religion known as ‘fideism’ loses plausibility when contrasted with recent scholarship on Wittgenstein’s corpus, biography, and other sources. This book re-evaluates the place of Wittgenstein in the philosophy of religion and charts a path forward for the subfield by advancing three themes. The first is that philosophers of religion should question received interpretations of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, as well as the meanings of key terms used in interpretations, such as ‘fideism’. The second theme is that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, across his corpus, pursues a particular end: a searching clarity or perspicuity. The third theme is that with the rise of various religious movements within societies and around the world in recent decades, philosophy of religion has important tasks in clarifying global conversations on living well amidst human diversities and contemplating philosophy as a vocation.
This book originates in my dissertation, Fideism and Wittgenstein’s Ethic of Perspicuity (Boston University, 2009), but over the last few years, I have written two new chapters and further developed the arguments of the others. Only “The Traditions of Fideism” remains largely unchanged from it’s earlier published form.
