Aleksei Rakhmanin

While in recent decades there have been interpretations of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as naturalistic, this possibility has not yet been fully explored in the philosophy of religion. The main obstacle to this seems to be twofold. First, it is often claimed that Wittgenstein’s philosophy was anti-scientistic in spirit (and thus cannot be naturalistic by definition) and, second, his views on religion left room for supernaturalist claims. I argue that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is naturalistic precisely because of its anti-scientistic underpinnings, which stem from the idea of the autonomy of philosophical practice. On this basis, I show that Wittgenstein’s allegedly acknowledging the supernatural content of religious utterances does not lead him to incorporate this content into his philosophical practice. Moreover, in the light of his anti-scientism, the established distinction between cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches to religion might be reconsidered. Based on Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism, I show that although his philosophy of religion may be characterized as cognitivist, it still does not allow for supernaturalism. In the end, I demonstrate how Wittgenstein’s combination of anti-scientism and non-supernaturalism can contribute to rethinking methodological naturalism in philosophy of religion.

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debates about methodological naturalism in philosophy by examining the interpretations of Wittgenstein as a naturalist philosopher. Through analyzing these interpretations, I characterize Wittgenstein’s position as a rare kind of naturalism independent of ontological or metaphysical claims. I show that what makes Wittgenstein’s naturalism methodological is its metaphilosophical thrust, which I exemplify in two interrelated features of Wittgenstein’s thought. First, the idea of philosophy’s radical autonomy prevents philosophy from committing itself to any metaphysical thesis. Second, the emphasis that Wittgenstein places on the descriptiveness of philosophy makes “general facts of nature” not the material of observation but the hinges of philosophy. Naturalism in Wittgenstein’s thought, I argue, is the precondition for philosophy as opposed to science. Since Wittgenstein’s naturalism is metaphilosophical, it is methodological: it prevents a philosopher from adopting the supernatural positions embodied in metaphysical theses. Thus, the proposed interpretation not only refines dominant views of Wittgenstein’s naturalism as liberal or liberating, but also adds to the diversity of naturalistic positions in philosophy.

In recent years, the question of naturalism in the study of religions has been increasingly debated. Primarily, these discussions converge in the widely held view that naturalism is the only way for religious studies as an academic enterprise to exclude supernaturalist assumptions from its methodology. While I fully agree with this view, I argue that naturalism is usually formulated with the help of metaphysical assumptions, which are problematically embodied in the location problem, that is, the problem of how to locate certain phenomena, such as meanings and values, in the order of nature. By unfolding the dynamic between the elements of the location problem, I show that the kind of naturalism based on Wittgenstein’s thought prevents the location problem from arising and can serve as a balanced version of naturalism for use in the study of religion. While metaphysical naturalism often leads to dilemmas, within Wittgenstein’s kind of naturalism, it seems possible both to maintain anti-supernaturalism in the study of religion and to resist the metaphysical temptations hidden in our assumptions about language. These two features make Wittgenstein’s naturalism truly methodological.

The paper discusses Norman Malcolm’s interpretation of Anselm’s ontological argument. Since Malcolm had shown no interest in religious or theological issues prior to publishing his article on that subject in 1960, the analysis takes clue from Malcolm’s earlier writings. By doing so, I revisit the assessment of the ontological argument as fallacious and the tendency to assess Anselm from the traditional framework initiated by Kant. As I demonstrate, Malcolm interpreted Anselm based on the method elaborated during the 1950s. That method involved a synthesis between ordinary language philosophy and common sense philosophy, associated with the late Wittgenstein and Moore respectively. As I further argue, the usual objections to Malcolm’s approach ignore the main line of his reasoning: that Anselm’s ontological argument does not violate ordinary language. Indeed, the two concepts of God as “the greatest of all beings” and of the necessity of God’s existence both perfectly fit in how language works. The “God-talk” is therefore logical only in accordance with Malcoms definition of logical: an explication of the rules of ordinary language, whereas each and every argument against Anselm’s ontological proof violates ordinary language drastically. In his late works on the subject, Malcolm suggested that multiple proofs of God’s existence should be viewed as expressions of a specific philosophic pathology whose underlying drive is a justification of various forms of life. Instead of regarding this idea as “fideistic” (e.g., in K. Nielsen’s work), I propose that the very concept of ordinary language, as Malcolm developed it, makes a treatment of language games along the lines of dependence or independence obsolete. Rather, a crucial issue that Malcolm pushes to investigate is how religious statements correlate with ordinary language.

This article discusses the philosophical status of the methodological agnosticism principle established in religious studies. Elaborated by Ninian Smart in the early 70s, it is commonly interpreted as a convenient principle for research in comparative religion, since it doesn’t presuppose any strong ontological commitments concerning the truth or falsity of religious belief. Since religious studies in academia have everything to do with the situation of religious pluralism, it is rationally imprudent to take either atheism or theism as a sufficient requirement to religious research, so the agnostic attitude is the only viable position. The situation provokes the question: can, and should, methodological agnosticism be grounded and justified by philosophical means? The status and function of the philosophy of religion in Smart’s project of religious studies is emphasized, as well as rationality as its central element. Among the possible solutions to the problem of rationality and religion depicted by Smart, it is the linguistic philosophy approach, which he calls the Language Game Thesis, that is of special interest. Smart rejected its applicability in religious studies primarily because of the restrictions determined by its inevitable religious, i.e. Christian, spirit. This assumption rests on Smart’s conception of the language rule in religion as autonomous and independent, while this understanding of game and rules is, at the least, not common to all of linguistic philosophy. Yet, it is possible to interpret methodological agnosticism according to the Language Game Thesis while not losing the pluralistic principle. Certain elements in arguing for agnosticism, especially the elaboration of “parables”, show that rationality here corresponds to that of everyday language, as the only possible space for the combination of different rules. While arguments for atheism stress the incompatibility of religious and scientific rationalities, and theism stresses the independence of the former, agnosticism proclaims their mutual meaningfulness. The essential question here arises: is it at all possible to treat agnosticism in any other way than in ordinary language?

This article assesses the metaphilosophical significance of the interpretation given to the ontological argument by two Wittgensteinian philosophers: Norman Malcolm and Morris Lazerowitz. Contrary to the usual approach to the subject, I do not consider what the ontological argument reveals about religious language and reasoning, but what it says about the nature of philosophy. I argue that despite Lazerowitz's and Malcolm's common Wittgensteinian background and shared foundations of philosophy, the opposite conclusions they reach about the ontological argument illustrate their opposite views of philosophy. In Malcolm's approach, the ontological argument can be interpreted as an instance of the paradigm case argument, which by showing the bounds of sense is meant to display the work of language in its entirety. From this perspective, the ontological argument is philosophically irrefutable, as one cannot refute a piece of language. For Lazerowitz, the ontological argument is irrefutable as it represents a philosophical intervention into language and thus must be disregarded.