Concept
Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough
Overview
Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (German: Bemerkungen über Frazers "The Golden Bough") is a collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts on James George Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. The commentary was initially published in 1967, with an English edition in 1979. Wittgenstein wrote the text in the summer of 1931. It represented his earliest efforts to compose what became the Philosophical Investigations (1953). An important theme of the Remarks, and one which Wittgenstein later explored more fully, is the conception of metaphysics as a "kind of magic".
The text was edited by Rush Rhees, who published it separately from Wittgenstein's other work, in a possible attempt to avoid alienating Wittgenstein's readership, in light of the sympathy shown to primitive thought and practices. In the Remarks, Wittgenstein describes Frazer as more savage than those he studied, and is exceptionally critical of Frazer's interpretations of primitive mythology, Christianity, and epistemology.
The remarks were later included in full in an anthology of Wittgenstein's miscellaneous work called Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951. The editors claim that Rush Rhees omitted a number of remarks from the bilingual book edition of the Remarks, and include in their anthology some remarks they believe Rhees may have erroneously excluded.
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Innumerable instances might be given, and analyzed in the same manner, of what are vulgarly called errors of sense. There are none of them properly errors of sense; they are erroneous inferences from sense.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough is.
Therefore the power by which in other animals is called the natural estimative, in man is called the "cogitative," which by some sort of collation discovers these intentions. Wherefore it is also called the "particular reason," to which medical men assign a certain particular organ, namely, the middle part of the head: for it compares individual intentions, just as the intellectual reason compares universal…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough is.
whose substantial doors, Cross-barr'd, and bolted fast, fear no assault, In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles; So clomb this first grand thief into God's fold; So since into his church lewd hirelings climb." Sec. 26. The habitual use of sentences in which all or most of the descriptive and limiting elements precede those described and limited, gives rise to what is called the inverted style: a title which is…
Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style
States what Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough is.
Philosophers who discussed Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Fideism.
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