Lars Hertzberg

The aim of this essay is to point to some of the problems that arise in trying to clarify the distinction frequently made between literal and non-literal ways of understanding certain religious beliefs, such as the belief in the resurrection of Christ. The disagreement is sometimes taken to concern whether the words usedin the expression of belief are to be understood in a literal or a non-literal sense. It may alternatively be taken to concern whether or not religious utterances are to be understood as factual assertions. It is argued that, in either case, the application of the relevant distinction to religious expressions is problematic. It is suggested that the disagreement should be understood as one of religious attitude rather than of the interpretation of utterances.

Abstract Applied ethics is commonly carried out on the assumption that moral decisions can be handled by experts. This involves a failure to recognize that being morally serious means recognizing that one cannot hand over responsibility for certain decisions to anyone else. The idea of moral expertise is shown to be based on a misconstrual of the nature of moral discourse, one that can be overcome by following Wittgenstein's exhortation to philosophers to pay heed to the actual uses of language. The sense of a moral judgment cannot be considered in isolation from what the speaker is doing in the context of utterance. The author concludes by suggesting that this discussion can provide the basis for a new reading of Anscombe's essay ?Modern Moral Philosophy?

Rush Rhees held Wittgenstein's work in high esteem but considered it in need of deepening. He was critical of Wittgenstein's idea that the builders' game might be the whole language of a tribe and that human language could be thought of as simply a range of language games. Rhees thought that Wittgenstein failed to do justice to the unity of language. The idea of the unity of language appears to have both an anthropological and an ethical aspect. The latter is illustrated with the help of a Hemingway story

Which famous twentieth-century philosopher instigated a revolution in philosophy, arguing that the philosopher’s business is not to advance general theories about reality, but rather to help release our thinking from the intellectual cramps produced by a misunderstanding of the forms of language? Wittgenstein? Wrong! according to John W. Cook. This revolution in philosophy actually had no author. Apparently, it arose through a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s later writings. In fact, Cook implies, Wittgenstein himself was not genuinely engaged in a struggle with philosophical puzzles, but rather had an ontological theory up his sleeve: he was a conventional empiricist in the tradition of Berkeley, Ernst Mach, and Russell, though he happened to express himself so obscurely that some philosophers, believing themselves inspired by his writings, dreamed up the whole revolution by mistake, as it were. However, Cook is not arguing that the revolution should be canceled; rather he looks at Wittgenstein’s work from the standpoint of that accidental revolution, berating Wittgenstein, as it were, for not having thought to be a Wittgensteinian himself.

Most of us, at one time or another, will have been struck by a thought that we might wish to express in the following words: ‘I could have been born in a different time and place, my position in life and all my personal characteristics could have been completely different from what they are; how amazing then that it should have fallen to my lot to live my life, the only life I shall ever live, as this particular individual rather than any other.’ This thought need not derive from a sense that there is anything unusual about one's life; what it expresses, rather, may be the sense that there is something gratuitous or contingent about one's being any particular individual at all. This sense of contingency might be connected with a feeling of gratitude, perhaps of responsibility towards others less fortunate in life; or it might be bound up with envy, or pride, or self-pity, etc