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The Sociology of the Supernatural: Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics

From the book Realism - Relativism - Constructivism

  • David Bloor

Abstract

In his Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein addressed the themes of absolutism and relativism in an explicit fashion. He gave expression to a dramatic form of moral absolutism but, at the same time, developed a revealing sociological analysis of what was involved in the absolutist stance. This analysis ultimately subverted the absolutism that it had been developed to illuminate, but the exercise had fruitful consequences for Wittgenstein’s later thinking. My aim is to explore the sociological dimension of the Lecture on Ethics and indicate how it was transformed into some of the most characteristic themes of the later philosophy, e. g. the appeal to language games and the analysis of rule following. Wittgenstein’s trajectory was from an inconsistent absolutism to a consistent relativism. I shall end by drawing some conclusions about the conditions that should be satisfied by any well-formed definition of the concept of “relativism”.

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
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