Faced with troubling professional decisions in his long and successful career as a psychiatrist, M. O'C. Drury turned for direction to the philosophical work of his teacher and friend, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of particular concern to Drury were the situations in which psychiatrists were expected to differentiate between instances of madness that were religious in form and instances of genuine religious experience that, for their oddity, landed believers in psychiatric consulting rooms. In this essay we consider the special orientation Wittgenstein's philosophy (...) gave Drury, for example the way in which Drury came to understand how even his search for a principle of differentiation between madness and religion was misleading and contrary to his own practice—how it involved ‘sitting back in a cool hour and attempting to solve this problem as a pure piece of theory. To be the detached, wise, external critic’ and not see himself and his own manner of life ‘as intimately involved in the settlement of this question.’. (shrink)

InThe Education of the Human Race, G. E. Lessing helps his readers understand why the propositions of the Old Testament are pseudo-propositions, or why they do not resemble the significant propositions of natural science but thetautologicalpropositions of mathematics and of logic. That is, the so-called propositions of the Old Testament do not teach readers whether what actually happens is this or that; rather what they teach us is to imagine expressions by substitution in such a way as to throw their (...) structure into relief. One of Lessing's most attentive readers was Wittgenstein. Or perhaps only Wittgenstein would have been able to grasp so immediately Lessing's insight that the tautological or pseudo-propositions of the Old Testament invite thinkingonlywhen readers use them to understand ‘what is the case’ in the pictures the propositions have – logically – constructed. Thus in this essay I use Wittgenstein's reading of Lessing to throw light on his work in theTractatus. Rather than take up the new logician's interest in completely analyzing expressions, Wittgenstein insists in theTractatusthat the expressions we use, even those that seem to be propositions or that contain assertions, are in fact designed to be elucidatorywithoutsaying anything about the nature of the subjects that figure in them. Wittgenstein's great insight was to see that the propositional signs of our language are able to bring something to mindwithoutsaying what is a representation of what. (shrink)