Martin, Michael. 1990. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Quinn, Philip L., and Charles Taliaferro, eds. 1997. A Companion to Philosophy of
Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
end p.446
18 WITTGENSTEINIANISM
Logic, Reality, and God
D. Z. Phillips
The twentieth century saw a revolution in philosophy. The philosophical giant in that
revolution was Ludwig Wittgenstein. P. M. S. Hacker writes: “Wittgenstein's influence
dominated philosophy from the 1920s until the mid 1970s. He was the prime figure
behind both the Vienna Circle and the Cambridge school of analysis, and the major
influence upon Oxford analytic philosophy in the quarter of a century after the Second
World War” (2001, 124). Yet, the influence of Wittgenstein on the philosophy of
religion, even during this period, was never dominant. Neither is it dominant today,
although Wittgensteinianism is one of the main movements in the subject. How is one to
account for this? There are at least five reasons that come to mind.
First, there was the influence of logical positivism, which held that all religious and
theological propositions are meaningless (see Ayer 1936). People wrongly associated
Wittgenstein with this view. He, by contrast, respected religious belief as a deep tendency
in human beings, but, in his early views, struggled with the issue of how its sense is to be
understood. Wittgenstein reacted angrily to the positivists' misunderstanding of his
Tractatus. Second, the Cambridge and Oxford movements Wittgenstein influenced were
analytical and antimetaphysical. Most philosophers who adhered to them simply assumed
that religion shares the fate of metaphysics. Third, even among philosophers influenced
by Wittgenstein, many
end p.447
came to the same conclusion with respect to religion. Fourth, there were and are
philosophers sympathetic to religion, who were influenced by Wittgenstein but who
parted company with him when it came to his remarks on religion. The most important
reason is the fifth, namely, that the twentieth-century revolution in philosophy had little
effect on mainstream philosophy of religion, whose concerns remained rooted in the
epistemology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Wittgensteinianism's relation to contemporary philosophy of religion is complex,
especially its relation to analytic philosophy of religion. The use of “analytic,” in this
context, is very different from its use as a description of the Cambridge and Oxford
movements Wittgenstein influenced. Whereas those movements were antimetaphysical,
contemporary analytic philosophers of religion take metaphysical realism for granted (see
Wolterstorff 2000).^1 Further, the earlier analytic debates about the meaning of religious
belief involved the leading philosophers of the day, believers and atheists alike (see Flew