Mikel Burley - Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics: New Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology

In memory of Dewi Z. Phillips (19342006), who, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, encouraged us to seek to do conceptual justice to the world in all its variety and to recognize that doing so makes ethical demands of the inquirer.

Also available from Bloomsbury

Beauty, Wittgenstein and the End of Art, by Sonia Sedivy

Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips, by Mikel Burley

Portraits of Wittgenstein: Abridged Edition, edited by F. A. Flowers III and Ian Ground

Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics, by Mikel Burley

The Selected Writings of Maurice OConnor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry, edited by John Hayes

Mikel Burley is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, UK. His publications include Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips (Continuum, 2012), Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2016) and a volume co-edited with Niklas Forsberg and Nora Hmlinen entitled Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2012). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Expanding Philosophy of Religion: A Radical Pluralist Approach.

Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. Previously known as Timothy Chappell, she began living openly and officially as a woman in autumn 2014. She was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Edinburgh University, and has published widely on ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, ancient philosophy and philosophy of religion. Her books include Understanding Human Goods (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), Reading Platos Theaetetus (Hackett, 2005), Ethics and Experience (Acumen, 2009) and Knowing What to Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also edited or co-edited four collections of essays in ethics, most recently Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2015). From 2017 to 2020 she is a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews. Her main current research is about epiphanies, immediate and revelatory encounters with value. She lives with her family in the north-east of Scotland.

Gabriel Citron is Assistant Professor in Religion and Critical Thought at Princeton University, USA. His extensive Wittgenstein editing work includes publishing notes by Rush Rhees and Norman Malcolm in Mind and co-editing (with David Stern and Brian Rogers) Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 19301933: From the Notes of G. E. Moore (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His authored work includes articles in Philosophers Imprint, Philosophical Investigations and Faith and Philosophy.

John Milbank is Emeritus Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, UK. His many books include Theology and Social Theory (Blackwell, 1990; second edition, 2006), The Word Made Strange (Blackwell, 1997), Truth in Aquinas (co-authored with Catherine Pickstock; Routledge, 2001), Being Reconciled (Routledge, 2003), Beyond Secular Order (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (co-authored with Adrian Pabst; Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). He has also published two collections of poetry and co-authored two books with Slavoj iek and Creston Davis.

Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, University of Oxford, UK. His publications include Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 2001), On Film (Routledge, 2002; second edition, 2008; third edition, 2016), Wittgensteins Private Language (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Conversation of Humanity (University of Virginia Press, 2007), The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality (Princeton University Press, 2009), The Self and Its Shadows (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Wayne Proudfoot is Professor of Religion at Columbia University, USA, with research interests that encompass contemporary philosophy of religion, conceptions of religious experience and mysticism, classical and contemporary pragmatism and modern Protestant thought. His publications include God and the Self: Three Types of Philosophy of Religion (Associated University Presses, 1976), Religious Experience (University of California Press, 1985), an edited volume entitled William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience (Columbia University Press, 2004) and some recent articles on the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Duncan Richter is Professor of Philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute, USA. His publications include Ethics after Anscombe: Post Modern Moral Philosophy (Kluwer, 2000), Wittgenstein at His Word (Continuum, 2004), Why Be Good? A Historical Introduction to Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2007), Anscombes Moral Philosophy (Lexington, 2011) and Historical Dictionary of Wittgensteins Philosophy (Lexington, 2014; first edition, 2004). He has also published articles on philosophys relation to poetry and the emotions as well as on Wittgenstein and religion.

Genia Schnbaumsfeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK. Specializing in Wittgenstein, epistemology, Kierkegaard and philosophy of religion, her publications include Transzendentale Argumentation und Skeptizismus (Peter Lang, 2000), A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Illusion of Doubt (Oxford University Press, 2016). From 20036 she held a prestigious Hertha Firnberg research grant awarded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Michael Scott is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Religious Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-editor (with Andrew Moore) of Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives (Ashgate, 2007) and has published articles on the philosophy of language, the senses and action as well as on realism and antirealism in the philosophy of religion. His current research focuses on faith and on apophaticism in the context of religious language.

Chon Tejedor is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and Philosophy Research Fellow at Regents Park College, University of Oxford, UK. Specializing in the history of philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Hume), philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology, her publications include Starting with Wittgenstein (Bloomsbury, 2011), The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value (Routledge, 2014) and a forthcoming collection, Wittgenstein on Science, co-edited with Adrian Moore.

Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, UK, a position that he took up in 2013 after having been Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. An accomplished theologian and poet, his major theological works include