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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Religious beliefs have often been taken either as absolutely foundational to all others or as ultimately founded on something else. This essay starts with an endorsement of the contemporary critique of foundationalism but sets its task as to search for the foundation(s) of religious belief after foundationalism. In its third and main part, it argues for a Wittgensteinian reflective equilibrium (within a belief system, between believing and acting and among people with different ways of believing and acting) as such a foundation. In this reflective equilibrium, religious beliefs are no more and no less foundational to, or founded by, other beliefs and practices. To appreciate this perspective better, I argue,in the first part, that Kai Neilsen's charge of Wittgenstein as a fideist is not accurate, and, in the second part, that D. Z. Phillips's fideistic contentions are unWittgensteinian.
1 For a powerful philosophical critique of foundationalism, see Quine, Willard van Orman, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper & Row, 1953)Google Scholar; Sellars, Wilfred, ‘Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities, 1963)Google Scholar, and Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. For a similar critique in theology and philosophy of religion, see Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, Foundational Theology: Jesus and Church (New York: Crossroad, 1984)Google Scholar and Thiemann, Ronald, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985)Google Scholar. For the most persistent defence of foundationalism, see Chisholm, Roderick M., Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For the most updated survey of various types of foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, see Audi, Robert, The Structure of Justification (Cambridge, UK, New York, USA & Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
2 See his work from the earliest essay on ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy, XLII (1967), 191–209Google Scholar, to his most recent book After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
3 See his work from the earliest essays collected in Faith and Philosophical Inquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)Google Scholar to his recent book Faith after Foundationalism (London & New York: Routledge, 1988)Google Scholar.
4 Initially, Nielsen's charge of fideism was directed to Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion, such as Peter Winch, G. E. Hughes, Norman Malcolm, Stanley Cavell, and D. Z. Phillips. See his ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’. Yet, before long, he realizes that this charge is equally applicable to Wittgenstein himself. See his ‘The Challenge of Wittgenstein: An Examination of His Picture of Religious Belief’, Studies in Religion, 111 (1973), 29–46Google Scholar.
5 Kai Nielsen, ‘The Challenge of Wittgenstein’, p. 30.
6 Nielsen, Kai, Scepticism (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigation (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §3Google Scholar.
8 Nielsen, Kai, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (New York: St Martin's Press, 1982), p. 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 54Google Scholar.
10 See Kai Nielsen, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, p. 201.
11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, p. 1.
12 See Kaufman, Gordon, Theology for a Nuclear Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press and Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), §447Google Scholar. Further references to this book will be parenthetically indicated with paragraph number in the main text.
14 ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, p. 60.
15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 124.
16 Kai Nielsen, ‘Challenge of Wittgenstein’, p. 29.
17 For example, see Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Frei, Hans, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise.
18 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §69.
19 For example, Wittgenstein argues, ‘does it [philosophy] make us healthy, I said, and not medicine? And similarly with the rest of the arts; does it direct their business, and not rather each of them its own?… So it will not produce health in us? – Presumably not. – Because health belongs to a different art? – Yes – Then, friend, neither will it produce utility for us. For this is a business we have too assigned to another art.’ (Zettel [Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970], §454).
20 Ibid. §455.
21 See Kai Nielsen, ‘The Challenge of Wittgenstein’, p. 35.
22 Of course, what Nielsen hopes is the opposite: since we can show that religious language is incoherent from this Archimedean point, it is to be rejected as a whole, and once for all.
23 Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy, pp. 175–6.
24 In ‘Wittgenstein and Religion: Fashionable Criticisms’, (in Belief, Change and Forms of Life) Phillips takes up all the main criticisms of his philosophy of religion as fideistic and rejects them all, it seems to me, both forcefully and convincingly.
25 For example, see his Faith and Philosophical Inquiry, p. 81.
26 In this context, Gordon Kaufman maintains that ‘the criteria for assessing theological claims turn out in the last analysis, thus, to be pragmatic and humanistic…because such considerations…are the only ones by which a way of life, a world-view, a perspective on the totality of things, a concept of God, may ultimately be assessed’ (An Essay on Theological Method [Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979], p. 76Google Scholar).
27 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965), 3–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Here on p. 5.
28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, p. 53.
29 Ibid. p. 56.
30 ‘Lecture on Ethics’, pp. 5–6.
31 In this hermeneutically informed age, even the fact/value distinction might be problematical to many. Yet, to say that the consequence of a scientific belief is value-free is not to say that it is a bare fact. It is always an interpreted fact, but it is scientifically interpreted. Thus, in so far as moral or religious issues are not involved, they are still facts without value in Wittgenstein's sense.
32 D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Inquiry, p. 132.
33 See Waismann, Friedrich, ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein’, The Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965), p. 15.Google Scholar
34 D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Inquiry, p. 223.
35 Ibid. p. 213.
36 Phillips, D. Z., The Concept of Prayer (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), p. 139.Google Scholar Christians of course often equate the voice of God with the voice of a specific person, Jesus, but, Phillips claims (ibid. pp. 143–4), ‘this does not mean, as I have tried to say, that religious community is not central in the task of deciding whether this person's voice is the voice of God or not’.
37 Phillips, D. Z., Death and Immortality (New York. St Martin's Press, 1970), pp. 74–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Phillips, D. Z., Faith and Philosophical Inquiry, p. 118Google Scholar.
39 Phillips, D. Z., Belief, Change and Forms of Life (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 Phillips, D. Z., Faith after Foundationalism (London/New York. Routledge, 1988), pp. 307–8Google Scholar.
41 Phillips, D. Z., Belief, Change, and Forms of Life, p. 79Google Scholar.
42 See Phillips, D. Z., The Concept of Prayer, p. 134Google Scholar.
43 See Ambrose's, Alice ‘Wittgenstein on Some Questions in Foundations of Mathematics’, Fann, K. T., ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1967), p. 274Google Scholar.
44 Compare Willard van Orman Quine's similar conception of belief system: ‘any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision’ (‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, From a Logical Point of View [New York: Harper & Row, 1961], p. 43)Google Scholar.
45 Ambrose p. 275.
46 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, p. 54.
47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 53.Google Scholar
48 See his Faith after Foundationalism, p. 152.
49 For an interesting argument against the naive coherentists, see Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘if they were foolish enough to pick up a conceptual system that told them they would fly and to act upon it by jumping out of a window, they would, if they were lucky enough to survive, see the weakness of the latter view at once’.
50 Fiorenza, Francis Schussler, ‘Theory and Practice: Theological Education as a Reconstructive, Hermeneutical, and Practical Task’, in Theological Education (Supplement, 1987), p. 121Google Scholar.
51 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §219.
52 Nielsen's conception of reasonableness is of course not as common as he thinks. It is scientific reason in disguise. For this, he ignores Wittgenstein's comment (‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, p. 58): ‘not only is it [religious belief] not reasonable, but it does not pretend to be.’
53 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 64.
54 Ibid. p. 53.
55 Ibid. p. 86.
56 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §201.
57 Ibid. §199.
58 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, §567.
59 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §232.
60 Ibid. §228.
61 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 16.
62 See Barrett, Cyril, Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA. Blackwell, 1991), ch. 12Google Scholar.
63 Nielsen, Kai, After the Demise of Tradition, p. 115.Google Scholar
64 Phillips, D. Z., Faith after Foundationalism, p. 134.Google Scholar
65 I would like to thank Gordon Kaufman for his critical comments on the previous version of this essay and Francis Schussler Fiorenza for his encouragement. I am also obliged to Francis Soo and the editors of this journal for saving me from many mistakes.