Annalisa Coliva: Religious Hinges?

Annalisa Coliva (University of California Irvine):

Religious Hinges?

Venue: Sala Rossa, via Azzo Gardino 23

Time: 3.30 pm

Abstract. According to Duncan Pritchard, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty may profitably be read “as a way of working through the implications of [John Henry] Newman’s ideas” (2015, p. 197), such that the concern with skepticism is a fall out of Wittgenstein’s interest in Newman’s thought, rather than its central preoccupation. Moreover, Pritchard holds that “this exegetical approach … leads to a distinctive quasi-fideistic conception of the epistemology of religious belief” (ibid.). Key to that approach is a parity argument between religious and non-religious beliefs, according to which their rationality can be redeemed only against a background of a-rational hinges.
In this paper, I challenge Pritchard’s claims. Not only is the influence of Newman rather superficial (§1), but it is also the case that, contrary to Newman’s project, no epistemology of religious belief capable of steering a middle path between fideism and evidentialism can be evinced from On Certainty (§2).
I then consider the prospects of reading Newman and Wittgenstein in parallel, on a different kind of hinge epistemology than Pritchard’s. Accordingly, non-religious hinges may be subdivided into de jure and de facto ones (Coliva, 2023 and forthcoming). While having better prospects than Pritchard’s quasi-fideism vis-à-vis the aim of avoiding both fideism and relativism, I claim that such an account of hinges cannot be put at the service of a parity argument between religious and non-religious beliefs (§§3-4).