Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics: New Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology, edited by Mikel Burley
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Had Wittgenstein left philosophy for good following the 1921 publication of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he would not have significantly influenced the development of ethical or religious thought.The Tractatus famously holds that "Propositions can express nothing that is higher" (6.42), whether concerning values or God.Naturally, then, many philosophers working in its wake discarded ethical and religious statements as mere nonsense (and were bewildered, as Frank Ramsey quipped in a related context, by Wittgenstein's regarding them as "important nonsense!").Of course, Wittgenstein returned to philosophy in the late 1920s, and his later work did shape subsequent ethical and religious thinking-less through his occasional lectures or manuscripts explicitly treating those topics than through its general treatment of language, which abandons the austere Tractarian "picture theory" of the proposition in favor of emphasizing language's multifarious character, practical functions, and foundation in our social and animal nature.These motifs have fueled influential, if diametrically opposed, accounts of ethical and religious discourse.Philosophers will naturally think of their metaethical import: Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations and purely descriptive metaphilosophy have been taken (e.g., by John Mc-Dowell and Sabina Lovibond) to yield a naturalism-adjacent moral realism (or, anyway, "anti-anti-realism"), while his refusal to regard similarity of surface grammar as indicative of similar function has been read (e.g., by Simon Blackburn) as congenial toward quasi-realism.Surprisingly, Wittgenstein's bearing on metaethics receives no serious attention in this volume, which is quite imbalanced between its two titular topic areas: of the eleven essays here, just three give ethical issues center-stage, while the rest focus on religious topics (or, occasionally, give the two areas equal billing).But analogous questions to these arise in those contributions pp.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".