Thinking Differently

Wittgenstein on Religious Forms of Life

Bibliographic Data

ID3352936
AuthorsChristopher Hoyt (0009-0004-7301-2528, Western Carolina University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume16
Issue5
Pages575
Publication date2025-04-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel16050575
OpenAlexW4410033854
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

The wrong idea that Wittgenstein proposes a version of hinge epistemology has stalled progress in understanding and applying his insights into religious life. The concepts of "belief system" and "hinge proposition" were nothing more than metaphors for Wittgenstein, not theoretical posits. The misinterpretation of that point by hinge epistemologists has obscured and diminished what Wittgenstein means when he says that religious believers "think differently" than non-believers do. The difference is not merely a matter of fundamental assumptions, as hinge epistemology suggests, but a matter of living and thinking entirely differently, so that our ordinary concepts of "belief", "assumption", "inference", and so on fundamentally misrepresent them. To understand such different modes of living, Wittgenstein's philosophy implies that we must strive to see life from the believer's point of view. We must give up trying to explain other ways of life and instead strive to "catch on" to what it would be like to live as others live, to think as they do

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

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