The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy
Stephen Mulhall
Abstract
This book critically evaluates the claims of the theological movement known as ‘Grammatical Thomism’ (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods as well as Aquinas’ theological project. The major obstacle to this claim of Wittgensteinian legitimacy is that Grammatical Thomism makes a recognition of the nonsensicality of religious language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas ‘nonsense’ is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein’s work. This book argues tha ... More
This book critically evaluates the claims of the theological movement known as ‘Grammatical Thomism’ (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods as well as Aquinas’ theological project. The major obstacle to this claim of Wittgensteinian legitimacy is that Grammatical Thomism makes a recognition of the nonsensicality of religious language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas ‘nonsense’ is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein’s work. This book argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, then a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances. And once this alignment between Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension—in that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology calls ‘perfections’ and ‘transcendentals’: concepts such as Being, Truth, and Unity or Oneness.
Keywords:
Wittgenstein,
Diamond,
Cavell,
Grammatical Thomism,
nonsense,
transcendentals
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198755326 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198755326.001.0001 |
