Quasi-Fideism and Intellectual Virtue

Abstract According to quasi-fideism, our most fundamental religious commitments are to be understood as being essentially arational. In short, they are hinge commitments, as Wittgenstein outlined in his final notebooks, published as On Certainty. There seems to be a prima facie tension between quasi-fideism and the idea of virtuous intellectual character, in that one would naturally expect the virtuous intellectual subject to not have arational commitments. It is argued that this tension is illusory. When quasi-fideism and virtuous intellectual character are properly understood, there is no reason why an intellectually virtuous person could not be a quasi-fideist. This point is further illustrated by considering the specific case of the religious virtue epistemology offered by John Henry Newman, which as we will see can be shown to be in principle compatible with quasi-fideism (even though Newman was not himself a quasi-fideist).