Search Results (11)

It is widely acknowledged that there is a similarity between Wittgenstein’s later conception of language and a “religious point of view.” An equally well-received view is that there is an essential shift in Wittgenstein’s thought from early to later. However, what both of these contentions ignore is that there is also a similarity between his early philosophy and the “religious point of view”, the negligence of which has led to an exaggeration of the divergence between his early and later philosophy. This paper aims to show that Wittgenstein in fact conducted his early philosophical work from a “religious point of view” and continued to demonstrate such a view in his later writings. I will first identify some essential characteristics of the “religious point of view” in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy by focusing on the mystical. I will then illustrate how these characteristics continue and are developed further in his later thought. The findings of this paper are critical in two ways: on the one hand, they clarify a host of misunderstandings through a comparative investigation into Wittgenstein’s early and later thought; on the other, they provide a more comprehensive overview of Wittgenstein’s “religious point of view,” which will help to deepen our understanding of his philosophy. Full article

This article examines Wittgenstein’s wartime private notebooks (MS 101–103), shifting attention from his philosophical reflections on religion and prayer to the abundance of written addresses to God found within the coded sections. Wittgenstein’s well-known assertion that “to pray means to think about the meaning of life” is juxtaposed with direct invocations of God and the Spirit, including the Pater Noster and prayers for courage and submission to the divine will. These invocations, accompanied by strokes or varied long em dashes framed by dots or exclamation marks which Martin Pilch has hypothesized to be symbolic representations of prayers—invite further reflection. Wittgenstein’s religious utterances are not merely outpourings of anguish, but manifestations of a sustained effort to align both life and work with the will of God, and to offer them for His glory. A compelling illustration of this spiritual orientation appears in M. O’C. Drury’s recollection of Wittgenstein’s declaration that his only wish was for his work to conform to the divine will. The interplay between philosophical inquiry and prayer evokes the Confessions of Saint Augustine, a spirit present throughout Wittgenstein’s work. Augustine’s integration of prayer and confession has similarly inspired 20th-century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. These Augustinian traces challenge conventional understandings of language and its limits, as well as the role of written language and punctuation, demanding a profound hermeneutics of the philosopher’s prayer. Full article

Ludwig Wittgenstein kept a box file titled “Nonsense Collection” that is now archived in the Research Institute Brenner-Archiv. Several items in this collection concern both science and religion (or spiritualism). Although Wittgenstein may have thought of them as jokes, these items do reflect his thoughts on the relationship between science and religion. In this paper, three items from the Nonsense Collection that touch both science and religion are presented. It will discuss first why these items are nonsensical by applying interpretation of the concept of nonsense given by McGuinness. Then it will take up different ideas of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion proposed by Pichler, Schönbaumsfeld, Somavilla, and Sunday Grève; it shows that the items presented in this paper would also be nonsensical, according to this kind of philosophy of religion. It concludes with historical and modern cases that also show dysfunctional relationships between science and religion and that these cases may have found their way into the Nonsense Collection. Full article

In his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein articulated a radical conception of the structure of rational evaluation, one that had arational hinge commitments at its heart. This proposal has recently been extended to the religious case, in the form of quasi-fideism, which treats basic religious commitments as being hinge commitments. My interest in this paper is how religious hinge commitments relate to one’s fundamental ideological commitments, such as the kinds of basic political or economic certainties that prevail in a predominantly capitalist society. While I argue that there are significant overlaps between fundamental religious and ideological commitments, there are also some significant divergences, which is why the former tend to be more plausible candidates to be genuine hinge commitments. In particular, I maintain that while allowing that there can be religious hinge commitments extends hinge epistemology beyond the paradigm, commonsense, cases that was Wittgenstein’s focus in On Certainty, it doesn’t thereby open the door to there being ideological hinge commitments, given the important ways in which religious and ideological hinge commitments diverge in their properties. Full article

This article examines the conceptual connections between simpler and more complex forms of religiosity, focusing on the transition from ritual-based practices to religious narratives and theological reflection. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation (übersichtliche Darstellung), the authors propose a series of models that illuminate this spectrum. These models demonstrate how religious narratives achieve autonomy of a sort that challenges reductionist interpretations. Rituals, initially guided by primitive reactions, become structured through linguistic conceptualisation and are woven into cohesive narratives that, in turn, serve as internal justifications for ritual practices, creating a linguistic space that encourages reflection. The article contends that theological reflection emerges when narratives encounter discrepancies—whether from external challenges or internal inconsistencies—prompting a systematic re-evaluation of beliefs. By critiquing Wittgenstein’s own reductionist tendencies, along with the “Wittgensteinian fideism” that emerged in its wake, the authors seek to emphasise the importance of recognising disputes within and between religious narratives as being integral to human life. Full article

John Cottingham argues that traditional university modules in the philosophy of religion take us into a ‘very abstract domain that is often far removed from religion as it actually operates in the life of the believer’. This paper makes four moves based on Cottingham. First, it argues that the application of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s methods supports and facilitates a shift to the anthropological in the philosophy of religion (as evidenced in the work of Mikel Burley). Second, literature is examined as a tool for doing the philosophy of religion, following Danielle Moyal-Sharrock’s notion of the literary text as surveyable representation. Three works are investigated, namely Silence by Shūshaku Endō, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Gospel of John. It is argued that, far from being merely illustrative of religion, story is (in its widest sense) constitutive of belief. Third, it is shown how Wittgenstein’s remarks on mysticism in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be read as a transmutation of literary writing that creates a non-abstract mysticism of the world. Wittgenstein’s remarks are placed in dialogue with Angelus Silesius’s poetry and Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief. Fourth, the relevance of Wittgenstein to the current debate on cultural Christianity is brought out. Philosophers of religion must take leave of the abstract, if only to return to it and to view it differently. Wittgenstein’s thought is too important to ignore in this venture. Full article

The role of background knowledge in human intelligence, knowledge, and consciousness has been a topic of discussion among several philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, and Hubert Dreyfus. Hubert Dreyfus criticizes what he calls the mediational approach and offers the contact theory to clarify the concept within his theoretical framework. In alignment with Heidegger’s existential phenomenological perspective, he posits that our contact and our embodied coping with the world constitute a background by which we become acquainted with preunderstanding that encompasses both prelinguistic and pre-propositional understandings. In this article, Dreyfus’s analysis of background knowledge is criticized by focusing on his latest writings. It is argued that, although Dreyfus claims to be defending horizontal foundationalism rather than vertical foundationalism, he primarily emphasizes the foundational nonlinguistic role of motor intentionality in absorbed coping. Furthermore, it is asserted that nonlinguistic embodied coping alone cannot provide the basis for linguistic communication and a humanly way of understanding. Rather than serving as a foundation, embodied coping is more appropriately situated within a linguistic context, because we perform deeds with words. Full article

This article discusses the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophies of logic during the time of Wittgenstein’s interactions with the Vienna Circle and up to 1934 when the German edition of Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language was published. Whilst Section 1 focuses on the relationship between Carnap and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, including Wittgenstein’s accusation of plagiarism against Carnap in 1932, Section 2 discusses the relationship between Carnap’s principle of tolerance and Wittgenstein’s similar principle of the arbitrariness of grammar. I argue that, although Carnap’s claim in Logical Syntax to ‘go beyond’ Wittgenstein has certain justification in relation to the Tractatus, so does Wittgenstein’s priority claim. The relationship between Carnap’s philosophy of logic and the Tractatus is thus more complicated than is often recognized. If the reference point is Wittgenstein in the early 1930s, however, Carnap cannot be described as going beyond him, and by 1934, Wittgenstein had advanced further than Carnap would ever venture. Despite evidence that Carnap knew about Wittgenstein’s principle of the arbitrariness of syntax well before his first articulations of his principle of tolerance, the extent of the influence of Wittgenstein’s principle on Carnap remains unclear. What can be established with certainty is that Wittgenstein’s principle predates Carnap’s and that Carnap resisted acknowledging him despite being urged to do so. Arguably, Wittgenstein’s account of syntax as both arbitrary and non-arbitrary is also superior in clarity to Carnap’s misleading claim about a ‘complete freedom’ implied by the principle of tolerance, because such a freedom only exists for idle syntactical systems that are not put to work. In Section 3, I discuss the relationship between Carnap’s notion of expediency and Wittgenstein’s account of the correctness or truth of logical accounts. As my discussion of Wittgenstein’s account brings out, Carnap’s rejection of truth in logic for expediency as the goal of logical clarifications does not follow from the principle of tolerance and is not justified by it. It remains unclear what justifies Carnap’s rejection of truth as the goal of logical clarification. Again, Wittgenstein’s account seems preferable, given the vacuity of the claim that expediency constitutes the basis of choice between different logical languages and clarifications. Full article

Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) started his studies in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1934. His teacher, Professor Eino Kaila (1890–1958), was an associate of the Vienna Circle who had changed the course of Finnish philosophy with his own version of logical empiricism. Under Kaila’s supervision, von Wright wrote his early studies on probability and defended his doctoral thesis The Logical Problem of Induction in 1941. Von Wright met Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1939 and 1947 and eventually became his successor there in 1948–1951. Later, von Wright characterized these two philosophers as his “father figures”: “Kaila had turned me into a logical positivist or empiricist. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thoroughly eradicated this personality of mine.” This article studies von Wright’s changing relation to logical empiricism. The main sources include his correspondence with Kaila in 1937–1958 and his books Den logiska empirismen (in Swedish in 1943; in Finnish in 1945) and Logik, filosofi och språk (in Swedish in 1957, in Finnish in 1958). In his “Intellectual Autobiography” (1989), von Wright described the former book as “a farewell to the philosophy of my student years”. Wittgenstein’s influence can be seen in von Wright’s denial of the unity of science and his cool cultural pessimism as expressed in his critical essays. But it is also evident that logic and exact thinking continued to be central tools and ingredients of his subsequent and highly appreciated work as an analytic philosopher. Full article

This essay examines pantheism within the framework of the ‘faith and reason’ field in the philosophy of religion, with an emphasis on the question of the relationship between pantheism and empirical–scientific rationality. I address this question from what I call the Wittgensteinian Nonoverlapping Magisteria (WNOMA) approach to religion and science. WNOMA affirms a categorial difference between religious and scientific language and attitudes. This difference is interpreted with the help of Wittgenstein’s distinction between religious and scientific beliefs and van Fraassen’s distinction between religious and empiricist stances. This means that WNOMA is antievidentialist regarding religious beliefs and sees the experiential and instinctive aspects of religion as more fundamental than the systematic–intellectual aspect. Part of the variety in contemporary pantheism relates to the question of whether the emphasis is on the experiential–spiritual side of pantheism or its intellectual side, i.e., whether pantheism is ‘hot’ or ‘cold’. I examine a few telling examples: Spinoza, Einstein, the World Pantheism Movement and a recent awe-some argument for pantheism by Ryan Byerly. The main contribution of this paper is a critical reading of these versions of pantheism from a WNOMA perspective, through which I hope to establish the plausibility and show some of the persuasive force of the WNOMA approach to pantheism, focusing on the relation of pantheism to scientific rationality on the one hand and felt experience on the other. I argue that hotter kinds of pantheism can be intellectually virtuous if they find a way to combine the empiricist stance and pantheist religious stance, even without a developed philosophical or theological system. I also argue that colder and philosophically rigorous pantheism can be problematic if it assumes religious evidentialism, neglects the experiential part of pantheism in favor of intellectualism or/and confuses the spheres of science and religion. Full article

The logical problem of artificial intelligence—the question of whether the notion sometimes referred to as ‘strong’ AI is self-contradictory—is, essentially, the question of whether an artificial form of life is possible. This question has an immediately paradoxical character, which can be made explicit if we recast it (in terms that would ordinarily seem to be implied by it) as the question of whether an unnatural form of nature is possible. The present paper seeks to explain this paradoxical kind of possibility by arguing that machines can share the human form of life and thus acquire human mindedness, which is to say they can be intelligent, conscious, sentient, etc. in precisely the way that a human being typically is. Full article