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Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Christian in Philosophy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

James Wm. McClendon Jr  and
Brad J. Kallenberg
James Wm. McClendon Jr
Affiliation:
Fuller Theological Seminary, 135 North Oakland Avenue, Pasadena, California 91182, USA
Brad J. Kallenberg
Affiliation:
Fuller Theological Seminary, 135 North Oakland Avenue, Pasadena, California 91182, USA
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Extract

Norman Malcolm, whose Memoir is an important primary source for the life of his teacher, wrote just before his own death a second brief work, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, that provides extended evidence of Wittgenstein's enduring Christian commitment. Yet Malcolm could see nothing more than analogies between his religious attitude on the one hand and his attitude to philosophical questions on the other. William Warren Bartley, III, a philosopher interested in biography, placed more stock in his own long-distance psychoanalysis of two of Wittgenstein's reported dreams than he did in the concrete Christian particularity of a life that he correctly labeled an amalgam of ‘ethical activity and practical philosophy’. James C. Edwards acknowledged his subject's imitatio Christi and ‘religious sensibility’ but reduced these to a generic ethics, oddly suppressing Wittgenstein's own standard Christian terminology—barely noting that he read the Christian Gospels, was converted to follow the way of Jesus, and (with some eccentricity) lived a faithful Christian life and died a Christian death. What would it be, then, to take a more fully integrated view of Wittgenstein's life and work—to consider him as a Christian in philosophy?

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , May 1998 , pp. 131 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1998

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References

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