A Particular Kind of Love: On Faith and Understanding

The article aims is to make the case for an essential entanglement between faith and understanding, and to show how Wittgenstein’s philosophy, like that of Socrates’, was informed and/or underpinned by such an entanglement. Centrally, the article argues that Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysical uses of words and the subsequent turn from explanation to description in his Philosophical Investigations have crucial affinities with Socrates’ claim, in the Apology, to “human wisdom”. The first part of the article comprises a somewhat novel reading of Plato’s Apology, while the second part focuses on Wittgenstein and on capturing the entanglement between faith and understanding shared by the two.