Preface to the Second Edition Part 1: Philosophical Bearings 1. Aims and Strategy 2. The Underlabourer Conception of Philosophy 3. Philosophy and Science 4. The Philosopher's Concern with Language 5. Conceptual and Empirical Enquiries 6. The Pivotal Role of Epistemology in Philosophy 7. Epistemology and the Understanding of Society 8. Rules: Wittgenstein's Analysis 9. Some Misunderstandings of Wittgenstein Part 2: The Nature of Meaningful Behaviour 1. Philosophy and Sociology 2. Meaningful Behaviour 3. Activities and Precepts 4. Rules and Habits 5. Reflectiveness Part 3: The Social Studies as Science 1. J.S. Mill's 'Logic of the Moral Sciences' 2. Differences in Degree and Differences in Kind 3. Motives and Causes 4. Motives, Dispositions and Reasons 5. The Investigation of Regularities 6. Understanding Social Institutions 7. Prediction in the Social Studies Part 4: The Mind and Society 1. Pareto: Logical and Non-Logical Conduct 2. Pareto: Residues and Derivations 3. Max Weber: Verstehen and Causal Explanation 4. Max Weber: Meaningful Action and Social Action Part 5: Concepts and Actions 1. The Internality of Social Relations 2. Discursive and Non-Discursive 'Ideas' 3. The Social Sciences and History 4. Concluding Remark

The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.

Belief, Change and Forms of Life

Freud and Wittgenstein

In his book, Philosophy’s Cool Place, D. Z. Phillips poses a question that I would like to address in this article. He asks: “if a philosopher gives a course on the meaning of life, can he tell his...

Wittgenstein and the genteel tradition

Experience, Explanation and Faith

Wittgenstein's remarks on religion suggest a provocative and nuanced account of what makes rituals meaningful – and why some living rituals might have little or no meaning despite their hold on congregants. Wittgenstein's view has been obscured, I argue, in part by the consistent misinterpretation of his controversial ‘scapegoat remark’, which has been taken to be a comment on the internal incoherence of the ancient Jewish scapegoat rite. In fact, Wittgenstein's point is that the scapegoat ritual is particularly easy to misinterpret, and so reflection on it helps illustrate the sort of confusion that plagues much thinking about religion and ritual.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0034412511000163

Wittgenstein on the language of rituals: the scapegoat remark reconsidered

It is well understood that Wittgenstein defends religious faith against positivistic criticisms on the grounds of its logical independence. But exactly how are we to understand the nature of that independence? Most scholars take Wittgenstein to equate language-games with belief-systems, and thus to assert that religions are logical schemes founded on their own basic beliefs and principles of inference. By contrast, I argue that on Wittgenstein’s view, to have religious faith is to hold fast to a certain picture of the world according to which one orients one’s actions and attitudes, possibly even in dogmatic defiance of contrary evidence. Commitment to such a picture is grounded in passion, not intellection, and systematic coherence is largely irrelevant.

Wittgenstein and religious dogma

Mikel Burley’s book is highly insightful and should interest readers seeking to better understand the relevance of Wittgenstein and Phillips to philosophy of religion and some of the most important contemporary debates surrounding them. However, it is a somewhat unwieldy book to describe since it lies uncomfortably on the border between a monograph and a collection of essays. Each of the six main chapters was published or presented elsewhere, and Burley says much too little in the slim introductory and concluding chapters about what unites them and why they are published together here. His most clearly stated purpose is simply “to elucidate and critically examine some of the most salient contributions of Wittgenstein and Phillips to the study of religious forms of life” (p. 4), a statement suggesting that he thinks of the book as a collection. That’s a shame, because the depth of Burley’s insights is often hard to see in the essays taken individually. Each deals with one or another extant interpretative controversy, and might easily be mistaken for little more than a competent discussion of an ongoing debate. The considerable merit of Contemplating Religious Forms of Life comes to light only when one concentrates on two prominent themes that build throughout the book. First, Burley maintains that Wittgenstein’s truly great contribution to the study of religion was his method (or family of methods) of studying religious language in context rather than in abstraction, and that no scholar has applied that method more fruitfully than D. Z. Phillips (p. 2). That method promises to breathe new life into the academic study of religion, says Burley, which is too often disconnected from the “spiritual dimensions of human life” (p. 166). Whereas most philosophy of religion tends towards abstractions and theories, Wittgenstein and Phillips urge us to reflect on the details of religious life:

Mikel Burley: Contemplating religious forms of life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips

The concept of ‘‘true religion’’ is out of vogue with philosophers today, but it was once common and important in the discipline. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hume, Spinoza, Mill, Reid, Schleiermacher, Kant and others engaged lively and interesting discussions about the grounds of religion in human nature, and the forms that ‘‘true religion’’ might take in happy and healthy human lives. They regularly used the expression ‘‘natural religion’’ to refer to faiths properly grounded in human nature, a use quite different from today’s, and they tried to map the features and possibilities of authentic faith. Hume et al. were also interested in the sort of theological and metaphysical questions that interest contemporary philosophers, but not to the exclusion of questions of the first sort. In his latest book, Gordon Graham tries to revive philosophical discussion of true religion by way of Wittgenstein. He argues that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy alerts us to religious sensibilities that are natural to human beings, but which can be stymied or fostered, much the way that our musical sensibilities can be dampened or cultivated. To neglect the development of our spiritual sensibility is to be impoverished, to some extent, as one would be impoverished by a profound insensitivity to music. Thus do ‘‘Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations ... reveal interesting dimensions of human nature that speak to the proper role of religion’’ in lives that are both personally and socially well-ordered, according to Graham (7). In fact, Graham is bitterly opposed to any and all readings of Wittgenstein that claim him as ally or adversary in debates of theistic metaphysics, that is, in philosophy of religion of the sort commonly practiced today. Graham believes that Wittgenstein has no bearing whatsoever on those debates, and he devotes about half of his book to arguments

Gordon Graham: Wittgenstein & Natural Religion

Wittgenstein’s method of doing philosophy with a therapeutic purpose has a direct bearing on current debates about the propriety of therapeutic education. Many detractors of therapeutic education worry that the practice contributes to a secular understanding of the self and of personal responsibility that is morally bankrupt and damaging to both individuals and society. They worry that therapeutic education teaches students to think of themselves as damaged and to think of their actions as rooted in their wounds rather than in autonomous choices. In that spirit, such critics of therapeutic education call for a return to a “traditional” academic curriculum, and to a view of individuals as morally capable and culpable. While such complaints might be valid for some particular therapeutic educational programs, Wittgenstein’s manner of examining and healing himself through the process of philosophical reflection demonstrates the soundness of therapeutic education, at least in principle. Wittgenstein’s example shows that the sort of open-ended examinations of self, morality, and one’s conception of the world associated with therapeutic education is essential to the development of moral depth and spiritual well-being rather than being antithetical to them. Critics of therapeutic education may be hostile to Wittgenstein’s example of moral and spiritual seeking because they are wedded to the ideas of moral and religious truth rooted in what Charles Taylor identifies as having evolved during the Reformation, whereas Wittgenstein’s own method is more in keeping with a progressive religious outlook that emerged in the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Wittgenstein and Therapeutic Education

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