ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein once remarked, ‘I am not a religious man: but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.’1 Though he wrote very little about either religion or ethics, it is true that a sensibility to and concern for broadly speaking ethical and religious matters is pervasive in almost all of his work. He wrote extensively about language, meaning, intentionality, mind, consciousness, the self, logic, mathematics and necessity, but woven into all these considerations, which have been central to the main historical tradition of philosophy, is a religious and ethical concern. Perhaps it is better characterized as an intense ethico-religious concern, for when he speaks of ethics it is always in a distinctively religious way. But this would be badly understood if it were taken, after the fashion of Richard Braithwaite and R.M.Hare, to be a reductive view of religion in which religion is viewed as morality touched with emotion associated with certain traditional narratives which may or may not be believed.2 Wittgenstein linked ethics and religion tightly. But, as we shall see, his thinking here was very different from that of the reductive, basically straightforwardly ethical accounts of religion of Braithwaite and Hare.
