Philosophy of Religion: Taking Leave of the Abstract Domain
Religions February 8, 2025 Philip Wilson 1 citation
Philosophy of religion should move away from abstract theorizing and toward the concrete, lived reality of religious belief, as argued by John Cottingham. This paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's methods to support that shift, showing how literature—such as Shūshaku Endō's Silence, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and the Gospel of John—is not merely illustrative of religion but constitutive of belief itself. Wittgenstein's remarks on mysticism in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are read as a literary transmutation that creates a non-abstract mysticism, placed in dialogue with Angelus Silesius's poetry and Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief. Wittgenstein's thought is also relevant to debates on cultural Christianity.