Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)
Born in Vienna, Austria, Ludwig Wittgenstein was the youngest of eight children born into a wealthy family. He was trained as an engineer in Berlin, but later became interested in philosophy through the works of the acclaimed British philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1912 and studied there until he enlisted in the Austrian army at the start of World War I. Although Wittgenstein's philosophical writings were heavily concerned with ethics, his place within the academic study of religion comes from other aspects of his work. His influence on the study of religion has mostly been due to his work on classification. He is responsible for questioning the ways in which human beings order their worlds and, in so doing, casting doubt on monothetic systems of classification. Wittgenstein argued that any essentialist notion of classification was fundamentally flawed. For him, the idea that collections of objects are related through sharing a common trait (essence) was nonsensical. Instead, he advanced the thesis that there are infinite spectrums of relations among like objects and that these varied relations are what cause objects to be grouped together. He concluded that it is precisely this "family resemblance" between objects that properly unifies systems of classification.
Major Works
Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921; the only book published
during his lifetime)
Philosophical Investigations (1963; Wittgenstein's later works,
considered by some to be his most influential)
Culture and Value (1980; a collection of notes written throughout
Wittgenstein's life)
Quotation
"People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that
we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the
Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be
so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing
us into asking the same questions. As long as there continues to be a
verb 'to be' that looks as if it functions in the same way as 'to eat'
and 'to drink,' as long as we still have the adjectives 'identical,' 'true,'
'false'' 'possible,' as long as we continue to talk of a river of time,
of an expanse of space, etc. etc., people will keep stumbling over the
same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which
no explanation seems capable of clearing up."
Select Web Resources on Wittgenstein
Ludwig
Wittgenstein: Lectures on Philosophy
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Secondary Literature on Wittgenstein and Religion
Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Cape, 1990.
Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent
Natives, & Unbounded Categories. E. J. Brill, 1993 (discussion of
Wittgenstein's work found throughout the text).
Brian Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer, and Religion. Palgrave, 1998.
Brian Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion.
Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Henry Le Roy Finch, "Wittgenstein, Ludwig," The Encyclopedia
of Religion, 2nd edition. vol. 14, pp. 9781-9782. Macmillan Reference
USA, 2005.