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In Support of Felix Wilfred: Some Implications of Wittgenstein's World‐Pictures for Interreligious Dialogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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Felix Wilfred, a Catholic theologian working in an Indian context, provides a trenchant critique of traditional Western theology’s ability to find relevance in India’s multi-religious context. This article explores how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of world-pictures provides a philosophical support for Wilfred’s critique and indicates a different, more productive model of interreligious dialogue.
There is a large amount of interreligious dialogue that is interested in ascertaining what is indeed true about the world. When different religious traditions make different and sometimes conflicting assertions about the world, the question arises about the relationship between these various claims. As these claims are part and parcel of the traditions themselves, springing from the core of the various religions, the question becomes how the religious systems themselves are related and what is the relationship between the truth claims of various religions? Various approaches to this can be categorized in three broad categories, exclusivist, inclusivist and relativist.
In his last book, On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed the problem of making truth-claims, how anyone can validly say they were “certain” that something was indeed the case. He noticed that truth- claims were intrinsically connected to world-pictures with which they mutually arise, and that no truth-claim can therefore claim a status that transcends all world-pictures. This critique casts suspicion on the usefulness of the exclusivist-inclusivist-relativist categorization of theories of religious pluralism and points to a more productive model of interreligious dialogue that respects and utilizes the differences in different religions. Rather than comparing statements made by various faiths and determining which in fact are correct, I propose a model of dialogue that allows each side to attain a better perspective on their own position as they come to see a different way of understanding the world.
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- Copyright © 2003 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Philosophical Investigations §83
2 PI §71.
3 Ibid.
4 This is not to say that the word “essence” doesn’t have a place in the language-game, but that even this word, “essence,” is simply another word in the language-game and does not stand apart from it. C.f. PI §§76 and 371.
5 PI §67.
6 PI §23.
7 PI §65.
8 Ibid and PI §23.
9 PI §71.
10 OC §410
11 OC §102
12 OC §105.
13 OC §135.
14 OC §§139-140. See also §274.
15 OC §141.
16 OC §143.
17 OC §144.
18 OC §559.
19 OC §245.
20 OC §125.
21 OC §250.
22 OC §558.
23 OC §232.
24 OC §§341-3.
25 OC §145.
26 OC §229.
27 OC §103.
28 OC §494.
29 OC §558.
30 OC §495. See also OC §138.
31 OC §446.
32 OC §97. see also OC §§318-321.
33 OC §99.
34 OC §98.
35 From the Dusty Soil p. 183.
36 Ibid. p. 185.
37 Culture and Value p. 64e.
38 From the Dusty Soil p. 188.
39 Ibid.
40 OC §94.
41 OC §231.
42 OC §336.
43 From the Dusty Soil p. 179.
44 Ibid. pp. 179-180.
45 Ibid. p. 180.
46 Ibid. p. 181.
47 Ibid. p. 182.
48 Ibid. p. 185.
49 Ibid. p. 186.
50 Ibid.
51 I say “world-pictures’’ (plural) because there is not one Christian world-picture that all Christians share, but this element is common to most world-pictures that Christians share.
52 Ibid. p. 200.
53 Ibid. p. 201.
54 OC §§608-610.
55 OC §98.
56 From the Dusty Soil p. 191.
57 Ibid. p. 192.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid. p. 193.
60 Ibid. p. 194.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid. p. 196.
63 OC §611.
64 From the Dusty Soil pp. vii-viii.
65 I am surprised not to find more in his writings about power struggles since it was such an issue in his life, with his fighting in WWI, living through WWII, battling with Russell and others.
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