“AM I JUST TALKING TO MYSELF?” EXTENDING WITTGENSTEIN'S ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE TO RELIGIOUS FORMS OF THOUGHT AND INWARD SPEECH
The writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have inspired countless philosophical reflections in the brief half-century since they first began circulating in English and German. In the past several decades theologians have added their own contributions, applying Wittgenstein's observations about langua...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2001
|
| In: |
Harvard theological review
Year: 2001, Volume: 94, Issue: 3, Pages: 323-351 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
|
| Summary: | The writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have inspired countless philosophical reflections in the brief half-century since they first began circulating in English and German. In the past several decades theologians have added their own contributions, applying Wittgenstein's observations about language and human behavior to talking about God and other religious concepts. Recent writers such as Fergus Kerr and D. Z. Phillips have drawn on Wittgenstein's cryptic statements to emphasize the intrinsic role of language in religious life.See especially Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and D. Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (London: St. Martin's Press, 1993). My brief summary however, in giving only a general sense of their priorities, hardly does justice to the complexity of their thought. These writers critique, though with different aims, the notion that religious language refers primarily to some metaphysical realm which is either difficult or impossible to access, whether this is the private inner self, barred from investigation, or the distant God dwelling in heaven far above us. The above-mentioned theologians take their cue from Wittgenstein's emphasis on seeing clearly the multitude of different, embodied forms of life in which language arises and takes on meaning. In the context of religious language, they stress that words about God and other religious concepts, even when they seem to refer to invisible entities, deal primarily with our current embodied reality. They insist that religious language cannot be dismissed as unverifiable metaphysics, and they critique those who use it as a means of fantasizing about hidden realms. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S001781600103704X |