Posted on by Michael R D James

Wittgenstein lecture by A C Grayling

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Excellent lecture on the early work and the later work and the contribution of Wittgenstein to the religious discourse debate and the refutation of 1. the reductionism of natural and social science, 2. the starting point of private episodes of consciousness

Grayling is a master of the lecture format and condenses clouds of Philosophy into drops of wisdom about a controversial figure of 20th century Philosophy.

Grayling is an analytical Philosopher and shares with this movement the animus of scepticism toward religion thus risking missing an important element of Wittgenstein’s Kantian commitment to the relation of the ethical and the religious. In a lecture entitled “Setting Prometheus free” he separates religion from the facts about us as social beings and wishes to rest his case on the totality of these facts which as lovers of Kantian practical reason acknowledge can never lead to an understanding of the spiritual value of striving to be worthy of being human, (of, in Aristotelian terms, actualising our potential in accordance with ought judgements). We all possess this organised form of consciousness we call will, thus releasing the angels within whose lives transcend not just appetites but appeal to the world as a totality of facts. Grayling complains about the reductionism of social science but engages in his own form of reductionism of the spiritual to the social world thus truncating the History of much of our most important Philosophy.

19 Replies to “Wittgenstein lecture by A C Grayling”

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