ABSTRACT
The notes of Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1938 lectures on religious belief have had a remarkable impact, especially when one considers how cryptic, fragmented. The first exchange reconstructed by Diamond is between Wittgenstein and Lewy, or, perhaps, since the notes do not record Lewy saying anything, between Wittgenstein and an interlocutor he finds it helpful to imagine as Lewy, who happens to be present. Wittgenstein rejects the idea that there must be some such lack of knowledge, whether semantic or empirical, repairing which would enable him to 'come together' with the person who says his dead friend is alive. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had taken a view put by Diamond as follows: 'All thoughts lie in one logically interconnected space. For 'Wittgenstein's rejection of the Fregean/Tractatus conception of belief does not itself force us to drop the idea of a common human understanding or common intellectual life of mankind'.
