ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author takes to be one of the best and clearest discussions of this problem that offered by Norman Malcolm in his short book Ludwig Wittgenstein a Religious Point of View. It is a significant contribution to the literature on a daunting subject. Its posthumous publication represented the results of the last philosophical project taken on by its author prior to his death in 1990. Malcolm undertakes to show that Wittgenstein's later thought does indeed represent an unstated religious viewpoint and strives to articulate clearly in just what sense that viewpoint is religious. Malcolm tries to show an analogy between this attitude and one that Wittgenstein expresses relative to language games: In the Investigations and other late writings, Wittgenstein sometimes expressed a kind of wonder at the existence of the various language-games and their contained forms of human action and reaction. Malcolm's analogy cites the role of action in both Wittgenstein's religious and philosophical thought.