Mate Penava

Building on Wittgenstein’s differentiation of science and religion as disparate discourses, the aim of this paper is to argue that, for Wittgenstein, humility constituted a key presupposition for the religious way of life. Furthermore, various Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion, like ones about wonder and gratitude, can be interpreted through the lens of humility as their presupposition. As Wittgenstein considered religious discourse as a way of life in which concepts like belief play a completely different role than they do in scientific discourse, the religious way of life would also need a way in which we achieve it, something what would parallel the methods of science. My suggestion is that changing one’s life plays such a role in Wittgenstein’s treatment of religious discourse. Furthermore, in changing one’s life, one has to have a guiding principle by which the life will be changed and the role of such a guiding principle is played by humility.

In this paper, we analyze Jaakko and Merrill Hintikka’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s arguments against epistemic privacy. The main focus of the paper is to explore their views on this issue and examine the connections between their argumentation and that of Saul Kripke to see to what extent these views coincide. The reason for comparing the said authors is that they all oppose the received view of the argument against private language, which claims that the discussion of private language begins with PI 243. In fact, these philosophers claim that Wittgenstein already discussed the issue of the impossibility of a private language in his rule–following reflections, especially in PI 201 and 202. We will also explore some drawbacks of the interpretation of Wittgenstein offered by the Hintikkas and attempt to provide an overall perspective of the viability of their position in relation to Wittgenstein’s argument against epistemic privacy.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is often connected with the ideas held by German philosophers such as Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt. Nonetheless, there is a lack of comparisons between Wittgenstein and Friedrich Schlegel, a prominent figure of the Romantic movement, in secondary literature. Notable exceptions include Zovko (2002), Cavell (2004), and Gorodeisky (2014). This chapter aims to show that there are considerable similarities between Schlegel’s ideas and those of the later Wittgenstein, with a special emphasis on their views concerning language and its inherent intersubjectivity. In both philosophers’ work, this topic is inseparable from talking about forms of life. Consequently, this notion will be examined in detail, bearing in mind that Schlegel was one of the first to use the term Lebensform. As these approaches share certain prominent features, Schlegel should be put alongside the three above-mentioned philosophers as a precursor of Wittgenstein’s ideas about the cultural nature of language.