Demonstrates that ethical and religious concerns inform even the most technical writings on logic and language. This text also shows that, for Wittgenstein, the need to establish clear limitations is both a logical and an ethical demand, revealing a religious view of the world in his philosophy.

Wittgenstein once said, 'I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view'. However, since he never advocated any one religion many people have wondered just what this religious point of view could be. This book answers this question by clarifying the overall nature(s) of his philosophies (the early and the later) and then by exploring the idea of a religious point of view as an analogy for a philosophy. As a result, the author reveals the concordance between the later Wittgenstein and central aspects of Hebraic thought. Although perhaps this ought not to be surprising (Wittgenstein himself described his thought as 'one hundred per cent Hebraic'), the truth of the matter has been obscured by popular supposition that Wittgenstein was anti-Semitic.

Cursory allusions to the relation between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are common in philosophical literature, but there has been little in the way of serious and comprehensive commentary on the relationship of their ideas. Genia Sch?nbaumsfeld closes this gap and offers new readings of Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's conceptions of philosophy and religious belief. Chapter one documents Kierkegaard's influence on Wittgenstein, while chapters two and three provide trenchant criticisms of two prominent attempts to compare the two thinkers, those by D. Z. Phillips and James Conant. In chapter four, Sch?nbaumsfeld develops Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's concerted criticisms of certain standard conceptions of religious belief, and defends their own positive conception against the common charges of 'irrationalism' and 'fideism'. As well as contributing to contemporary debate about how to read Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's work, A Confusion of the Spheres addresses issues which not only concern scholars of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, but anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, or the ethical aspects of philosophical practice as such.

The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Søren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 9 & 10 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.

This Element outlines Wittgenstein's early and later philosophies of logic, and explains Wittgenstein's views regarding the methodological significance of logic for philosophy. Wittgenstein's early philosophy of logic is presented as a further development of Frege's and Russell's accounts of logic, and Wittgenstein later philosophy as a response to problems with his early views, including confusions about idealization and abstraction in logic. The later Wittgenstein's novel logical methods, such as the method of language-games, are outlined, and the new kind of logical naturalism developed in his later philosophy described. I conclude by discussing the later Wittgenstein on names.

An introduction and evaluation of contemporary approaches to theology, 'Postmodern Theologies' sets out to discern movements shaping the postmodern study of religion in a unique collaborative venture born of a postgraduate seminar at Florida State University. While some might say that theology after the death of God is like biology after the end of life - a discipline without a subject - 'Postmodern Theologies' identifies four general patterns of postmodernisms in theology today: constructive theologies (with Helmut Peukert, David Ray Griffin, and David Tracy cited as examples); postmodernisms of dissolution (Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, and Edith Wyschogrod); postliberal theologies (George Lindbeck); and communal praxis (exemplified by Gustavo Gutierrez and other Latin American theologians, and James Wm. McClendon and Sharon Welch among North Americans). These theologies eschew debates on traditional religious foundations to define true religion as the result of - rather than the impetus to - living one's beliefs. As these disparate approaches to theology are not directly comparable, the final chapter of 'Postmodern Theologies' instead analyzes how each one accounts for the plurality of religions. Exploring the postmodern strategies for coping with one of the most difficult questions in any theological age offers a fascinating way to assess their inherent strengths and weaknesses.