Given the title of the present collection of essays, some potential readers who are knowledgeable about Wittgenstein’s work might approach it with some suspicion. Despite the fact that Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks and lectures on religion have been the object of much philosophical and theological interest during the last fifty years or so, Wittgenstein did not in fact write or say very much about religion. Even scarcer were his comments related to interreligious relations – including interreligious encounter, differences and similarities, communication or miscommunication, agreement and disagreement, dialogue, and so on – topics which have gained increasing currency in philosophy and theology during the last couple of decades.
Yet, together with the contributors to this volume, we believe – and hope this volume will show – that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion and his thought in general continue to be highly relevant for present and future research on interreligious relations. In the light of recent developments in interpretation of Wittgenstein on the one hand, and those in philosophy and theology of interreligious encounter on the other, there is an important and under-explored potential for constructive and fruitful engagement between these academic fields. This book explores, and attempts to realize, some of this potential by involving both philosophers and theologians. Some of the contributors have previously explored intersections between Wittgensteinian philosophy and the study of interreligious relations, while others have decided to bring these streams of research together for the first time in their contribution to the present volume.
We hope the essays will prove interesting and useful not only for those whose interests include both Wittgenstein’s philosophy and interreligious studies, but also those whose primary interest lies in only one of these or related fields. Through engagements with Wittgenstein’s thought and that of the thinkers strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, the present volume offers new and illuminating perspectives on issues such as:
- A.the usefulness of the abstract concept ‘religion’ in today’s global perspective and the value of the family-resemblance understanding of the concept ‘religion’ in related academic contexts
- B.the problem of grammatical disparity between the central concepts of different religions for interreligious understanding
- C.the task of philosophy, understood as ‘grammatical investigation’ and linguistic elucidation, in the clarification of chosen aspects and examples of interreligious relations
- D.the potential of the Wittgensteinian critique of scientistic and evidentialist ‘misinterpretations’ of religious believing
- E.the benefits and the shortcomings of establishing interreligious understanding on a shared philosophical discourse, or on similar religious or existential experiences, or on so-called ‘primitive reactions’ (given their role in religious lives and concept formation)
- F.the significance of the logical peculiarity of theistic religious language, its ‘running against the boundaries of sense’, for interreligious understanding between Abrahamic traditions
- G.the significance for interreligious relations of the fact that some religious certainties are often deep-seated and unquestioned within the ‘normal stream’ of religious lives
- H.the delineation of the roles of different academic disciplines – especially theology, philosophy and religious studies – in the pursuit of understanding interreligious encounter, perceptions, communication, and the like, in their multiplicity and multi-faceted reality
- I.the increasing phenomenon of multi-religious belonging
The essays collected in this volume were developed from a selection of the papers presented at a conference entitled Wittgenstein and Interreligious Communication, which took place at Westminster College, Cambridge, UK, in June 2015, and subsequently updated with references to relevant new research that emerged after the conference between 2016 and 2018. We are thankful to the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, for making this conference possible and for funding Gorazd Andrejč’s research project on Wittgenstein and interreligious disagreement between 2013 and 2016, of which this conference formed a part. Special thanks goes to the founder and director of the Woolf Institute, Edward Kessler, who believed in and supported this project throughout. Thanks also to Westminster College, Cambridge, for enabling the conference to run smoothly, and Ben Humphris, whose administrative work for the conference was invaluable. We thank the Institute for Philosophical Studies at Science and Research Centre of Koper, and the Faculty of Divinity at University of Cambridge for their support in enabling us to complete the final stages of this project. We also thank Alexander D. Garton for his excellent and careful proofreading and editorial assistance. Finally, thanks are due to all those contributors to the conference whose essays we were not able to include here but whose ideas and contributions to the discussions also influenced the final shape of this book.
Gorazd Andrejč, Maribor
Daniel H. Weiss, Cambridge
December, 2018