Is Kai Nielsen becoming a Wittgensteinian fideist?

Abstract

In his recourse to a later Wittgensteinian or postmodern social focus, Kai Nielsen relinquishes the analytic argument he once took to be supportive of his naturalistic outlook. This shift raises the question of how he can continue to demand rationality of theistic visions that he no longer expects for his own naturalistic outlook. Rather than a rational naturalism and a fideistic theism, what seems to be involved are two coherent visions that are seen to be rational by different people. If the visions are this basic and comprehensive, however, what we come to ultimately, it would seem, is a basic faith, fideism. This is not the arbitrary fideism that Nielsen dismissed as Wittgensteinian fideism; it is a fideism that defines what it is to be rational, but it does this for Nielsen's naturalism as well as for religious visions. In this way, Nielsen's recourse to the social in the wake of the failure of positivism exposes his own fideistic base.