Concept
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief
Overview
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (German: Vorlesungen und Gespräche über Ästhetik, Psychoanalyse und religiösen Glauben) is a series of notes transcribed by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor from assorted lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and published in 1966. The lectures, at which Casimir Lewy was present, contain Wittgenstein's thoughts about aesthetics and religion, alongside a critique of psychoanalysis. Wittgensteinian fideism originates from the remarks in the Lectures. Eberhard Bubser, in the introduction, of the German edition states that: "Wittgenstein would surely have not approved this release [...]" ("Wittgenstein hätte diese Ausgabe bestimmt nicht gebilligt [...]").
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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There is on the part of those engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called empirical (or, to use the more English phrase, inductive) sciences. On many hands they are actually so treated: and…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief is.
We are bound to ask its origin and its function. Here is an attribute which, to say the least, has had an enormous influence—which has played a conspicuous part throughout the entire past as far back as history records, and is at present the life of numerous institutions, the stimulus to perpetual controversies, and the prompter of countless daily actions. Any Theory of Things which takes no account of this…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief is.
This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by constitutional incapacity. I was always open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many important points. The large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality, but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is…
Sigmund Freud, The problem of lay-analyses
Close in meaning to Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Fideism.