Wittgenstein, Last Judgement and German Aeroplanes. The Concept of Distance in Lectures on Religious Belief

This paper investigates different accounts of the distance between religious and nonreligious persons, postulated by Wittgenstein in his Lectures on Religious Belief: the hypothesis that religious and nonreligious language is incommensurable, the supposition about “ordinary” and “extraordinary” uses of word “belief,” and the non-cognitive approach to religious language. I argue (after Cora Diamond) that none of these accounts can be regarded as sufficient, because the text of Lectures does not contain any general theory of disagreement between believer and nonbeliever. Instead of that, Wittgenstein offers a picture of several different relationships that may occur between them.

This paper investigates different accounts of the distance between religious and nonreligious persons, postulated by Wittgenstein in his Lectures on Religious Belief: the hypothesis that religious and nonreligious language is incommensurable, the supposition about “ordinary” and “extraordinary” uses of word “belief,” and the non-cognitive approach to religious language. I argue (after Cora Diamond) that none of these accounts can be regarded as sufficient, because the text of Lectures does not contain any general theory of disagreement between believer and nonbeliever. Instead of that, Wittgenstein offers a picture of several different relationships that may occur between them.