What Calvin and Wittgenstein Had Against Images
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Rethinking Fideism Through the Lens of Wittgenstein's Engineering Outlook
University of Dayton eCommons Religious Studies Faculty Publications Department of Religious Studies 2012 Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook Brad Kallenberg University of Dayton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub Part of the Catholic Studies Commons, Christianity Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Other Religion Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons eCommons Citation Kallenberg, Brad, "Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook" (2012). Religious Studies Faculty Publications. 82. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub/82 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Religious Studies at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religious Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Note: This is the accepted manuscript for the following article: Kallenberg, Brad J. “Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71, no. 1 (2012): 55-73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11153-011-9327-0 Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook Brad J. Kallenberg University of Dayton, 2011 In an otherwise superbly edited compilation of student notes from Wittgenstein’s 1939 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond makes an false step that reveals to us our own tendencies to misread Wittgenstein. The student notes she collated attributed the following remark to a student named Watson: “The point is that these [data] tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way: only the tables together with certain scientific theory determine that.”1 But Diamond thinks this a mistake, presuming instead to change the manuscript and put these words into the mouth of Wittgenstein. -
Wittgenstein in Exile
Wittgenstein in Exile “My thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.” -Wittgenstein to Drury, 19491 Wittgenstein was born in 1889 into one of the richest families in Central Europe. He lived and learned at home, in Vienna, until 1903, when he was 14. We have no record of his thoughts about the turn of the last century, but it is unlikely that it seemed very significant to him. The Viennese of the time had little inclination to consider the possibilities of change, and the over-ripe era in which Wittgenstein grew up did not really end until Austria-Hungary’s defeat, in World War I, and subsequent dismantling. But the family in which Wittgenstein grew up apparently felt that European culture had already come to an end in the 1840’s. And Wittgenstein himself felt he belonged to an era that had vanished with the death of the composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856).2 Somewhere in the middle of the Nineteenth Century there was an important change into the contemporary era, of which Wittgenstein did not feel a part. Wittgenstein’s understanding of history, and his consequent self-understanding in relation to his times, was deeply influenced by Oswald Spengler, who in 1918 published The Decline of the West [Der Untergang des Abenlandes]. This book, expanded to a second volume in 1922, and revised in 1923, became a best-seller in post-war Europe. Wittgenstein made numerous references to it in 1930-1931, and acknowledged Spengler as one of his ten noteworthy influences.3 According to Spengler, cultures grow, flower, and deteriorate naturally, according to their own internal form, much as a human being does. -
Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein's
ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein’s Methodology Dorit Lemberger Bar-Ilan university Abstract The dialogical character of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has received scant attention in the literature, given the work’s status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations. The main lines of interpretation that have been proposed see dialogue as a rhetorical technique intended to present erroneous positions and then refute them, as an exemplification of what can be expressed in language (McGinn 1997; Rhees 1998), or as a reflection of Wittgenstein’s informal teaching method (Malcolm 2001; Savickey et al. 1990). The present article adopts the perspective that Wittgenstein’s use of dialogue makes it possible to track the various modes of language-acts, consonant with his directions to examine the daily use of language (Wittgenstein 2009, §116 and esp. §132), “when language is, as it were, idling.” In his later inquiries, Wittgenstein frequently considers the nature of mental states, accompanied by an attempt to characterize the differences between them while at the same time dealing with the cases in which it is difficult to distinguish them. In this process he made a variety of uses of dialogue, each of which embodies a different aspect of language action. Subsequently I will demonstrate that these different uses are not haphazard. A scrutiny of the nature of the dialogue can help us understand the nature of the activity carried out of the state of consciousness. Finally, I propose a distinction among three main types of dialogue: technical, conversational, and reflexive. -
Wittgenstein on Freedom of the Will: Not Determinism, Yet Not Indeterminism
Wittgenstein on Freedom of the Will: Not Determinism, Yet Not Indeterminism Thomas Nadelhoffer This is a prepublication draft. This version is being revised for resubmission to a journal. Abstract Since the publication of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Freedom of the Will, his remarks about free will and determinism have received very little attention. Insofar as these lectures give us an opportunity to see him at work on a traditional—and seemingly intractable—philosophical problem and given the voluminous secondary literature written about nearly every other facet of Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy, this neglect is both surprising and unfortunate. Perhaps these lectures have not attracted much attention because they are available to us only in the form of a single student’s notes (Yorick Smythies). Or perhaps it is because, as one Wittgenstein scholar put it, the lectures represent only “cursory reflections” that “are themselves uncompelling." (Glock 1996: 390) Either way, my goal is to show that Wittgenstein’s views about freedom of the will merit closer attention. All of these arguments might look as if I wanted to argue for the freedom of the will or against it. But I don't want to. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Freedom of the Will Since the publication of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Freedom of the Will,1 his remarks from these lectures about free will and determinism have received very little attention.2 Insofar as these lectures give us an opportunity to see him at work on a traditional—and seemingly intractable— philosophical problem and given the voluminous secondary literature written about nearly every 1 Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Freedom of the Will” will be abbreviated as LFW 1993 in this paper (see bibliography) since I am using the version reprinted in Philosophical Occasions (1993). -
The Debate Over ›Wittgensteinian Fideism‹ and Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion
The Debate over ›Wittgensteinian Fideism‹ and Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion Thomas D. Carroll Sometimes in a philosophical dispute, conflicting parties debate the truth or falsity of a given proposition. ›A fetus is a person‹, ›The meaning of the truth predicate is captured by the disquotational schema‹, and ›Con- sciousness is an emergent property of complex neural systems‹, are some examples of propositions whose truth and relative warrant are debated in recent philosophical literature. While many philosophical disputes follow this model, not all do. After all, in some philosophical disputes, no uncon- troversial framing of the terms of disagreement is available. Indeed, in some such disputes, it is not the truth of or warrant for a proposition that is be- ing debated, but instead the very words used to describe the disagreement itself. When surveying the scholarly literature over Wittgensteinian fideism, it is easy to get the sense that the principal interlocutors, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips, talk past one another, but finding the right words for apprais- ing the distance between the two voices is difficult. In this paper, I seek to appreciate this intellectual distance through an exploration of the varying philosophical aims of Nielsen and Phillips, of the different intellectual im- peratives that guide their respective conceptions of philosophical practice. In so doing, I seek to show how a contemplative mode in philosophy may be used to appraise a philosophical dispute and the terms of disagreement. In this case, a contemplative approach to understanding the dispute would frame Nielsen’s and Phillips’ contributions against the backdrop of the ends they conceive philosophy to have. -
The Puzzle of Goethe's Influence on Wittgenstein
James C. Klagge The Puzzle of Goethe’s Influence on Wittgenstein Abstract: Wittgenstein was extensively influenced by Goethe, yet he specifically did not list Goethe as an influence. We examine this problem in connection with a single issue - the nature of causation and explanation: Goethe and Wittgenstein lived in different times that had different world-views (about, among other things, causation and explanation) pervading their life-contexts. How does one endorse a view that has a home in another life-context? Wittgenstein acknowledged but did not resolve this problem. He accepted Goethe's views, without knowing how to publicly endorse them in his times. This puzzle was created for Wittgenstein by his acceptance of crucial aspects of Spengler's philosophy of history. Brian McGuinness characterized Goethe’s place in Wittgenstein’s thinking as follows: To say what Ludwig admired in Goethe would almost be to say what he found remarkable or worthwhile in life, so many are the themes and attitudes from Goethe that recur in his thought.1 Yet in 1931, when Wittgenstein set down a list of the people who influenced his thinking — Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa — Goethe’s name was 2 conspicuously absent. 1 Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig (1889-1921), Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 34-35. 2 The list was published in: Culture and Value, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 , 19, and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998, 16; Vermischte Bemerkungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994, 41. At first the list contained only Frege, Russell, Spengler, and Sraffa. -
Religious Belief, Language Games and Postmodern Narratives
37 Al-Hikmat Volume 27 (2007), pp. 37-58 RELIGIOUS BELIEF, LANGUAGE GAMES AND POSTMODERN NARRATIVES MUHAMMAD IQBĀL AFAQI* Abstract. This paper is centred on the question of objectivity of religious truth-claims in the Wittgensteinian perspective and explains how the evidentialist standard model of rationality leads us nowhere except putting us in a flyglass wherein like distraught flies we hopelessly flutter and flutter without finding the way out. This flyglass was manufactured by the Cartesian epistemology which demanded proofs in order to establish the cognitive validity of a truth-claim. Wittgenstein rejects this standpoint as wholly mistaken and misguided. There is no objectively neutral place from which the philosopher can have a critical look on a particular mode of discourse. The question of true/false depends on forms of life and language games. This line of argument has been followed by D. Z. Phillips, Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm. They also denounced the claim that there must be a common paradigm of rationality for all modes of discourse. Indeed, there are many difficulties in Wittgensteinian criteriology. But it is a fact that evidentialism fails to take account of diversity in modes of discourse. Likewise, the scientism suffers the fallacies of generalization and exclusivism. Rationalist ontology fallaciously promotes the idea of transcendental truth which Prof. Stuhar rejects as a system of delusion. Taking lead from Wittgensteinianism, postmodernism lays emphasis on equality of different cluster of meaning and affirms that there is no objective point of view that gives us access to a global truth. Hence, what is temporary, immanent and historically particular is accepted. -
Rush Rhees: Main Publications
Rush Rhees: Main Publications Books Without Answers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1%9. Discussions of Wittgenstein, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Contributions to Books Introduction to George Boole, Studies in Logic and Probability, London, 1952. ' "Ontology" and Identity in the Tractatus', in Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Peter Winch, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. 'Postscript', in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. 'Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual', in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. Brian McGuiness, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Introduction to Jakob Friedrich Fries, Dialogues on Morality and Religion, trans. David Walford, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Editorial work etc. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, ed. with an Introduction by R. Rhees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'A Lecture on Ethics', ed. R. Rhees, Philosophical Review, Vol. 74, 1965. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett, from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966. 'Wittgenstein's Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data"', ed. R. Rhees, Philosophical Review, Vol. 77, 1968. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Eine Philosophische Betrachtung, ed. R. Rhees, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Schriften 5, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough"', trans. A. C. Miles and R. Rhees, ed. R. Rhees, The Human World, No. 3, May 1971. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. J.P. -
The Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion Is Misunderstood
CHAPTER EIGHT THE WITTGENSTEINIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IS MISUNDERSTOOD Ludwig Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy of religion is not very widely appreciated.1 From among those who bother themselves with such contribution critics are so easy to come by. Though it is D. Z. Phillips, rather than Wittgenstein, who bears the brunt of the criticisms.2 This is so probably because he is the most prolific of all those who dealt with religious matters in a Wittgensteinian manner— which makes it probably right to designate him the doyen of the so-called neo-Wittgensteinians, the propagators of the Wittgenstein- ian philosophy of religion—or because his interest in philosophy of religion and theology is a lot more focused than that of Wittgenstein whose concern is less on matters within religion or theology proper than on how religious matters are spoken of, and whose most signifi- cant contribution is providing philosophical materials to those who would care to specialize in philosophizing about religion (cf. Bar- rett 1991, 258). However the criticisms against the Wittgensteinian 1 One commentator points out that “the impact of Wittgenstein in [analytic philos- ophy of religion] has been minimal is self-evident. philosophy of religion goes on as if [he] never existed, or as if he had never written anything on the philosophy of reli- gion. [He] and his followers have certainly not succeeded in changing the agenda in philosophy of religion” (Moore 2005, 210). But, to put this claim in perspective, this case in the philosophy of religion is probably representative of the case in philosophy as a whole: as suggested by one other commentator, mainstream Anglophone philoso- phy has become practically anti-Wittgensteinian (Hacker 1996, 272). -
Wittgenstein and Mid-20Th Century Political Philosophy: Naturalist Paths from Facts to Values
chapter 7 Wittgenstein and Mid-20th Century Political Philosophy: Naturalist Paths from Facts to Values Andrius Gališanka The mid-20th century witnessed a transformation of analytic political philoso- phy. By the 1960s, meta-ethical discussions about the nature of the good and the meaning of ethical utterances were replaced by discussions about the na- ture of justice, liberty, and other substantive political values. This change drew on a variety of intellectual sources and was inspired by a variety of events.1 In this paper, I explore Ludwig Wittgenstein’s role in this intellectual transforma- tion, focusing on his influence on political philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s. While Wittgenstein wrote little directly on political philosophy or ethics, his philosophical approach inspired, among others, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philip- pa Foot, Stephen Toulmin, and John Rawls.2 The nature of this influence is still largely unexplored. Analyzing it will help us to better understand the patterns of political thinking that emerged in mid-century. I argue that Wittgenstein’s influence in the 1950s and 1960s was twofold. Primarily, his thought helped to argue that there is such a thing as normative reasoning, or reasoning about values and ways of life in which values are em- bedded. Wittgensteinians argued that the rules of this reasoning, including in- ferences from facts to values, were embedded in the conventions of normative practices or “language games.” Assuming that these rules have fixed meanings, they concluded that the fact-value gap did not -
Wittgenstein and Religion
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Philosophy Theses Department of Philosophy 8-3-2006 Wittgenstein and Religion Daniel Patrick Corrigan Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Corrigan, Daniel Patrick, "Wittgenstein and Religion." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2006. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses/13 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Philosophy at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WITTGENSTEIN AND RELIGION by DANIEL CORRIGAN Under the Direction of Robert L. Arrington ABSTRACT This thesis considers the implications of Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophy for the issue of religious belief, as well as the relation of religion to Wittgenstein’s thought. In the first chapter I provide an overview of the Tractatus and discuss the place of religion within the Tractarian framework. I then provide an overview of Philosophical Investigations . In the second chapter I consider interpretations by Norman Malcolm and Peter Winch of Wittgenstein’s comment that he could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view, as well as Kai Nielsen’s famous critique of ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism.’ The third and final chapter takes up the issue of construing religious belief as a distinctive language-game. I consider arguments from D. Z. Phillips and criticisms of Phillips from Mark Addis and Gareth Moore. INDEX WORDS: Wittgenstein, Religion, Language-games WITTGENSTEIN AND RELIGION by DANIEL CORRIGAN A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2006 Copyright by Daniel Patrick Corrigan 2006 WITTGENSTEIN AND RELIGION by DANIEL CORRIGAN Major Professor: Robert L. -
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Religion As a Form of Life
24.3.2008 [385-406] LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: RELIGION AS A FORM OF LIFE 1 Roy Voragen Department of Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, Indonesia ABSTRACT While Wittgenstein is not famous for his writings on religion, it is certainly possible to interpret his work in such a way that it can be applied to religion. As Wittgenstein's work is generally divided in early and late work, this paper provides two interpretation regarding religion. His early work – Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus – can be considered a form of negative theology. His later work – Philosophical Investigations – offers an anthropologic method, i.e. the language game, that can be applied to religion. Key Words: Religion Negative theology The mystical Form of life Language game Science Truth. udwig Wittgenstein (Vienna, Austria 26 April 1889 – Cambridge, LUnited Kingdom 29 April 1951) is a well-known philosopher for his work on logics, philosophy of mathematics, the mind and language. He has influenced contemporary philosophy – analytical philosophy, pragmatism as well as postmodernism – and also the social sciences. Many consider him an idiosyncratic genius, as for example Bertrand Russell. Russell wrote the introduction to the only book that was published during Wittgenstein's life: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Actually, Wittgenstein disagreed with Russell's 385 MELINTAS 24.3.2008 interpretation, but this was the only way to get the book published; due to its complicated subject matter many publishers refused the manuscript. Wittgenstein started writing notes for this book during World War I, when he was a volunteer soldier for the Austro-Hungarian army (he received several medals for showing courage at the eastern front).