With last year being the 70th anniversary of the publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, the Journal of Mind, Language, and the Arts (JoLMA) has been putting together a thematic issue on the legacy of this core work of Wittgenstein’s. I've got an article forthcoming in the issue. I'm looking forward to reading the other pieces when the issue comes out.
My article concerns the way the text has been read in philosophy of religion (to date) and considers some possible new ways in which the text might be explored in the field.
Rereading the book again in working on my article, I was reminded that this is one of those philosophy texts that has been with me most of the way through my philosophical education and development. I first read the work closely in a Wittgenstein seminar taught by Saul Traiger during my final year at Occidental College. I’m not sure exactly what I gleaned from the text at the time, but I sensed in Wittgenstein’s writing a certain depth and impatience with nonsense that was very appealing if also slightly frightening as well.
In that course, I attempted to write a final paper on ethics and the PI. I say “attempted to write” because I am certain the paper must have failed to grasp what “the ethical” might mean in connection with that book. Yet, this was a question present in my mind and one that has stayed with me over the decades. Even as I was then seeking to see the relevance of Wittgenstein to mainstream topics in analytic philosophy—such as meaning and reference, truth, the possibility of private language—I also was then beginning to think about and am now very interested in considering the bearing of this work on questions in theory of value, philosophy of religion, and comparative/cross-cultural philosophy.
It was to my great surprise then that I discovered more or less by accident that there were figures who had considered how ideas in the PI might be relevant to philosophy of religion. While not exactly encouraged at either Occidental or San Francisco State, I began to become interested in analytic philosophy of religion. I first read Alvin Plantinga and William Alston during the years of my Masters program at SFSU and while I found them refreshing for seriously engaging with philosophical questions concerning Christianity, I also found them to be more theologically conservative than my own philosophical and perhaps even “spiritual” sensibilities about religiosity. I think it was in a piece by one of these two that I came across a critical remark about a certain D. Z. Phillips and his “Wittgensteinian fideism.” That stuck with me. It seemed like an inadvertent recommendation.
(Incidentally, during these years I had the chance to meet Plantinga, Alston, and Phillips, who were each very generous with their time and patient with my questions. That really meant a lot to me at the time, and still does.)
During my time at Boston University, I came to have my own views on “Wittgensteinian fideism,” and the overall inadequacy of the expression in academic discourse. Nevertheless, it is not for nothing that there has been confusion about how Wittgenstein's philosophy bears on problems in philosophy of religion. Since Wittgenstein did not develop a philosophy of religion per se, the work falls to students, later interpreters, and critics to piece together what a philosophy of religion after Wittgenstein might look like. That is where my article picks up. Since the PI was the first work of Wittgenstein’s mature thought to see publication, it has had a very significant influence on how Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion developed and came to be perceived. My contribution to the JoLMA issue aspires to offer a portrait of how some philosophers of religion interacted with the PI and the ideas contained within it.
I was reminded a few years ago, when watching the presentations from a conference on the Swansea “school” of Wittgenstein interpretation, that in addition to what is published is what is written but left unpublished, and in addition to that is what is discussed in seminars and informal settings and never put down in writing. This too is part of the history of philosophy although it shadows the better known byways. Within history, there are always many more voices who could and should figure into the stories later generations tell about earlier times. I know there is much that is not included my portrait; it is a gesture towards that larger history of reception of Wittgenstein’s ideas and arguments among philosophers interested in religions. And, of course, this reception is still ongoing.
*Update 10/29/2024 -- The article is now available here.
