Religious Belief in the Later Wittgenstein—A ‘Form of Life’, a ‘Hinge’, a ‘Weltanschauung’, Something Else or None of These?

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religious belief (from around the mid-1930s onwards) have often been and continue to be interpreted in connection with other terms he used in his later philosophy. The most common interpretations argue that Wittgenstein understands religious belief as a language-game or a group of language-games, as (part of) a form of life, and/or as a hinge/part of a world-picture. The term ‘Weltanschauung’ is also occasionally used to interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief, and finally, Wittgenstein himself sporadically uses the term ‘style of thinking’ in connection with religious belief. In this paper, I will first conduct a meta-analysis of the secondary literature, presenting examples of the various lines of interpretation and criticism of these approaches. Subsequently, the various interpretations are examined to see whether or not they can actually be read from Wittgenstein’s remarks. The result of this investigation is that those interpretations which pursue a systematizing presentation of Wittgenstein’s remarks are, to a certain extent, reductive representations insofar as they can only draw on some of Wittgenstein’s remarks to support their interpretation, while other remarks stand in tension with the respective interpretation.