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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.
An exciting introduction to the contribution which Wittgenstein made to the philosophy of religion.
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.
The commonly held view that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is fideistic loses plausibility when contrasted with recent scholarship on Wittgenstein's corpus and biography. This book reevaluates the place of Wittgenstein in the philosophy of religion and charts a path forward for the subfield by advancing three themes.
Are science and religion in accord or are they diametrically opposed to each other? The common perspectives-for or against religion-are based on the same question, “Do religion and science fit together or not?” These arguments are usually stuck within a preconceived notion of realism which assumes that there is a 'true reality' that is independent of us and is that which we discover. However, this context confuses our understanding of both science and religion. The core concern is not the relation between science and religion, it is realism in science and religion. Wittgenstein's philosophy and developments in quantum theory can help us to untie the knots in our preconceived realism and, as Wittgenstein would say, show the fly out of the bottle. This point of view changes the discussion from science and religion competing for the discovery of the 'true reality' external to us (realism), and from claiming that reality is simply whatever we pragmatically think it is (nonrealism), to realizing the nature and interdependence of reality, language, and information in science and religion.
Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion expounds and analyses the argument of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough . It details the reasons for Wittgenstein's rejection of the intellectualist theory of religion, and suggests a new interpretation of his rival view of ritual. Denying that Wittgenstein's account is straightforwardly expressivist, the author builds his own interpretation on Wittgenstein's claim that magic is akin to metaphysics. In the course of the book, the author considers such matters as expressivism, 'perspicuous representation', the nature of human sacrifice, and Wittgenstein's cultural pessimism.
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.
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.
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: 'I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.' This study, the last work of the distinguished philosopher Norman Malcolm, is a discussion of what Wittgenstein may have meant by this and its significance for philosophy. The book concludes with a critical discussion of Malcolm's essay by Peter Winch.