Religion | Philosophy Insider

Religion, Relativism, and Wittgenstein’s Naturalism

Article from International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

By Bob Plant

Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious and magical practices are often thought to harbour troubling fideistic and relativistic views. Unsurprisingly, commentators are generally resistant to the idea that religious belief constitutes a ‘language‐game’ governed by its own peculiar ‘rules’, and is thereby insulated from the critical assessment of non‐participants. Indeed, on this fideist‐relativist reading, it is unclear how mutual understanding between believers and non‐believers (even between different sorts of believers) would be possible. In this paper I do three things: (i) show why the fideist‐relativist reading of Wittgenstein is not wildly implausible (Sections 1–2); (ii) argue that, despite its initial plausibility, this reading fails to take into account Wittgenstein’s naturalism (Sections 3–4); and (iii) explain what sort of naturalism this is, and how it sheds light on Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief (Sections 5–6).

[Full article here.]

Pope Benedict’s challenge to positivism in the Bundestag

Natural law was the subject of the pope’s speech, attacking the notion that anything not scientific is simply personal preference

by Andrew Brown

Pope Benedict XVI really is an intellectual; and his speech to the Bundestag last Thursday, when he began his state visit to Germany, is dense with ideas. A lot of them deal with the questions that get kicked around a lot here so I thought I would publish the central chunk of it, with annotations, to promote discussion. In this, he is talking about the idea of natural law, which he claims predated Christianity and was the unquestioned foundation of European ideas of justice for 2,500 years.

“The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation arose.
Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. An ‘ought’ can never follow from an ‘is’, because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature and reason has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen – is viewed as ‘an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and effect’, then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it.
A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, in the way that the natural sciences explain it, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers.
The same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word.”

The view he describes is, I think, quite widely held on Comment is free belief, and certainly among scientific atheists. Jerry Coyne, for example, in the course of a recent attack on me, says that there are no moral truths, only opinions or preferences: “How can you possibly determine whether a statement like ‘[You ought to] forgive your enemies’ is true? It is not a reality about our universe, but a guide for behaviour.”

[read more: Guardian]

Rawls and the Problem of Honour

Article from Philosophia.

By Kevin W. Gray

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the difficult relationship between Rawls, religion and the values that religious believers might consider important in order to lead the good life. Contrary to many of Rawls’ defenders, I argue that at least some of the values that religious citizens are likely to hold cannot be accounted for under Rawls’ theory or under his conception of the good life. I argue that the model of goods which Rawls takes to be part of a thin theory of the good is tied to his belief that under the Original Position justice can be derived from calculations of self-interest alone. To perform my critique, I consider the paradigmatic case of honour in so-called traditional societies. I argue that the way Rawls thematizes primary goods in A Theory of Justice, including concepts like esteem, cannot account for the way honour manifests itself inside traditional communities. I conclude the paper by considering how Rawls might be able to defend his theory against my objection, by considering the relationship between Rawls’ theory, and the rationalization and secularization of society.

[Full article here.]