Background Theories and Religious Beliefs: Their Role and Relation in Reflective Equilibrium

Author(s):  
Ton van den Beld
1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Author(s):  
Yong Huang

Religious beliefs have often been taken either as absolutely foundational to all others or as ultimately founded on something else. This essay starts with an endorsement of the contemporary critique of foundationalism but sets its task as to search for the foundation(s) of religious belief after foundationalism. In its third and main part, it argues for a Wittgensteinian reflective equilibrium (within a belief system, between believing and acting and among people with different ways of believing and acting) as such a foundation. In this reflective equilibrium, religious beliefs are no more and no less foundational to, or founded by, other beliefs and practices. To appreciate this perspective better, I argue,in the first part, that Kai Neilsen's charge of Wittgenstein as a fideist is not accurate, and, in the second part, that D. Z. Phillips's fideistic contentions are unWittgensteinian.


1998 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-89
Author(s):  
JORDAN CURNUTT

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.


2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra C. Linscott ◽  
Hanna Lee ◽  
Phillip G. Gable ◽  
Cynthia B. Eriksson
Keyword(s):  

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