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Wittgenstein's Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 1968
Extract
This slender volume contains notes, kept by some of those who were present, of lectures on aesthetics and religious belief, and of conversations with Rush Rhees concerning Freud. The lectures were given informally by Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1938; the conversations took place between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein neither wrote down nor saw the material here presented, but the editor reports that the versions of lecture notes by different students agree to a remarkable extent.
Despite the varying authorships and intervals of time during which these Lectures and Conversations took place, the book is a surprisingly integrated whole and not simply a miscellany. What seems to unite its three topics and their treatment is Wittgenstein's examination of the kind of evidence upon which each of the three disciplines (Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis, Religious Belief) have tended to rely—his argument being that 1) Psychoanalysis has tended to rest on insufficient evidence; 2) Aesthetics on the wrong kind of evidence; and 3) Religious Belief on the false notion that it is a matter of evidence when this is not at all the case.
- Type
- Études Critiques—Critical Notices
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , June 1968 , pp. 108 - 121
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1968
References
2 In his discussion of Aesthetics this readiness to offer not merely alternative explanations but, in addition, ones of a distinctly psychological character places him in the ironic position of objecting to psychological explanations on psychological grounds.
3 For a discussion regarding the extent to which Wittgenstein's criticisms of aesthetics are justified see Cyril Barrett, Margaret Paton and Harry Blocker, “Symposium: Wittgenstein and Problems of Objectivity in Aesthetics”, British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967), 158–174. For a less sympathetic account see Maurice Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts”, American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (July, 1965), 219–228.
4 See, for example, what Moore, G. E. reports of himself in his “Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930–33”, reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 251.Google Scholar For a more recent disclosure see, for example, Northrop's, F. S. C.Man, Nature and God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 239.Google Scholar