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This book explores Wittgenstein's conception of ethics, religion and philosophy. It aims at providing us with the tools necessary for assessing to what extent the Austrian philosopher can be considered an anti-Enlightenment thinker. The articles collected in this volume explore the relationship between Wittgenstein's thought and that of several authors who were, in various ways, key to the counter-enlightenement, authors such as Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, James and Pierce. One of the central issues examined here is Wittgenstein's opposition to the Cartesian method of doubt – a cornerstone of the enlightened movement against prejudice and superstition.
Cursory allusions to the relation between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are common in philosophical literature, but there has been little in the way of serious and comprehensive commentary on the relationship of their ideas. Genia Sch?nbaumsfeld closes this gap and offers new readings of Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's conceptions of philosophy and religious belief. Chapter one documents Kierkegaard's influence on Wittgenstein, while chapters two and three provide trenchant criticisms of two prominent attempts to compare the two thinkers, those by D. Z. Phillips and James Conant. In chapter four, Sch?nbaumsfeld develops Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's concerted criticisms of certain standard conceptions of religious belief, and defends their own positive conception against the common charges of 'irrationalism' and 'fideism'. As well as contributing to contemporary debate about how to read Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's work, A Confusion of the Spheres addresses issues which not only concern scholars of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, but anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, or the ethical aspects of philosophical practice as such.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an outstanding 20th-century philosopher whose influence has reverberated throughout not only philosophy but also numerous other areas of inquiry, including theology and the study of religions. Exemplifying how Wittgenstein's thought can be engaged with both sympathetically and critically, Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics pushes forward our thinking about religion and ethics and their place in the modern world. Bringing Wittgenstein's ideas into productive dialogue with several other important thinkers, including Elizabeth Anscombe, St Thomas Aquinas, Georg Cantor, Søren Kierkegaard and George Orwell, this collection fosters a highly informative picture of how different strands of contemporary and historical thought intersect and bear upon one another. Chapters are written by leading scholars in the field and tackle current debates concerning religious and ethical matters, with particular attention to the nature of religious language. This is a substantial contribution to religion and ethics, demonstrating the significance of Wittgenstein's ideas for these and related subjects.
Many have observed how Wittgenstein's later philosophy illuminates the philosophy of religion. Rarely, however, have they paid attention to his early philosophy. Those who have argued that Wittgenstein refuted his early positions in his later work. This book proves otherwise. The proof is found in the answer to an important, but largely ignored, question: what is the relation of Wittgenstein's discussion of logic to his discussion of religion and ethics in the early work? Lazenby's answer is that Wittgenstein, in his discussion of logic, describes the boundaries of factual discourse for the purpose of fixing a common language. And in his discussion of religion and ethics, Wittgenstein suggests that when religious and ethical statements fall outside this common language, we should reconstruct them to make sense within the common language. Such reconstruction ensures that the meaning of religious utterances agrees with how believers actually live and speak. Lazenby's approach is novel because it finds unity in what commentators have considered incommensurable topics in Wittgenstein's early work-logic and religion-while also finding unity between his early and later philosophy. Lazenby ends the book by considering the implications for theology and inter-religious dialogue. If theologians reconstruct the meanings of words that have lost their meaning in the common language of the modern world, these words will regain their force in the lives of believers. And the very possibility of a common language allows logical space for theologians from among the world's religions to find a common language in which to communicate.
Examines the significant contributions to philosophy of religion made by Ludwig Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips.
Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas 'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, then a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances—one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. And once this alignment between Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension—in that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology and philosophy have traditionally called 'perfections' and 'transcendentals', particularly concepts such as Being, Truth, and Unity or Oneness. This results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and so in the relation between philosophy and theology.
In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary (as opposed to philosophical) approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification.
Does Wittgenstein's philosophy lead to atheism? Is it clearly religious? Perplexingly, both of these questions have been answered in the affirmative. Despite the increasing awareness and use of Wittgenstein's philosophy within theological circles the puzzle persists: 'Does his philosophy really fit with theology?' It is helpful to show that Wittgenstein has no agenda towards atheism or religious belief in order to move ahead and properly discuss his philosophy as it stands. A study of Wittgenstein's key concepts of logic and language in his major works from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty reveals how he came to see in his later work that meaning is not simply intuitive or a consequence of solitary empirical investigation; rather, meaning is shown in how words are woven into the community of concrete life practices. A discussion of Christology and Luther's distinction between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross provide clear theological analogies for Wittgenstein's later philosophy. It also provides important evidence to show-through examples of scripture, liturgy, and practice-that Wittgenstein's philosophy is a useful tool that can fit with theology.
Wittgenstein's religious thought is not well understood. And Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is charged with fideism, religious non-realism, and even crypto-atheism. These charges, however, are borne of misunderstandings that are a result of the critics' being oblivious of apophatic theology. This book is intended to help clear some of those misunderstandings and neutralize the above-mentioned charges. It argues that Wittgenstein's religious thought shares kinship with the thought of apophaticists in Christendom such as the Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Thomas Aquinas. What appear to be fideism, non-realism, or crypto-atheism to the critics appear differently to those who see Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion from the apophaticists' point of view--Wittgenstein's religious point of view.
Wittgenstein once said, 'I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view'. However, since he never advocated any one religion many people have wondered just what this religious point of view could be. This book answers this question by clarifying the overall nature(s) of his philosophies (the early and the later) and then by exploring the idea of a religious point of view as an analogy for a philosophy. As a result, the author reveals the concordance between the later Wittgenstein and central aspects of Hebraic thought. Although perhaps this ought not to be surprising (Wittgenstein himself described his thought as 'one hundred per cent Hebraic'), the truth of the matter has been obscured by popular supposition that Wittgenstein was anti-Semitic.