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Huang on Wittgenstein on religious epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1998

JORDAN CURNUTT
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, St Cloud University, St Cloud, MN 56301-2234

Abstract

Yong Huang has recently claimed that after the demise of foundationalism, philosophy and theology can turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein's non-foundationalist or coherentist religious epistemology where, it is said, religious beliefs are justified by a ‘reflective equilibrium’ with other kinds of beliefs, with action, and with different ‘forms of life’. I argue that there are very good reasons to reject this reading of Wittgenstein: not only unsupported, it is seriously mistaken. Once the epistemological terms of the debate are properly understood, the evidence indicates that Wittgenstein's view of religious beliefs is a form of foundationalism, not coherentism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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