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Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object. And you really get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word 'this' innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also say the word 'this' to the object, as it were address the object as 'this' - a queer use of this word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §38
In employing the meaning of 'fideism' that I do, I have followed what is fairly common usage in the literature in English. Further, I think that this usage brings out more clearly the sceptical element that is involved in the fideistic view, broadly conceived. However, it is obvious if that if the classifications 'sceptic' and 'fideist' were differently defined, the various figures whom I so classify might be categorized in a quite different way.
Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism
Since Kai Nielsen's widely read essay 'Wittgensteinian fideism' was first published in 1967, philosophy of religion influenced by Wittgenstein has often been associated with fideism.1 One need not search far to see how extensive this association is, and it has affected what philosophers understand fideism to be. Definitions and explorations of fideism since 1967 rarely fail to mention Wittgenstein's thought on religion. While much has been published on whether or not Wittgenstein or Wittgensteinian philosophers are in fact fideists,2 comparatively little has been written on fideism itself.3
The diverse and sometimes conflicting individual definitions of fideism call out for some philosophical housekeeping if the term is to be useful academically. This preliminary investigation into the genealogy of fideism shows that the meaning of the term is not at all clear in either philosophical or theological discourse. Because of this confusion, academic investigations into the fideism of, for example, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, or philosophers influenced by them are often disconnected from the historical...