Ineffability

In this essay, I defend an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early view of ethics and his later view of religion that involves an austere rather than a substantial conception of nonsensicality (in the sense defined through recent controversies about how best to understand the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I argue in particular that this approach to religious discourse allows us to affirm its nonsensicality whilst making it intelligible that we should resort to nonsensical discourse in such contexts, since it is consonant with the Christian idea of a God of revelation. In so doing, I adapt Wittgenstein’s comparison of mathematical conjectures with riddles, thereby bring out an internal relation between Wittgenstein’s views, those of Aquinas, as understood by Grammatical Thomists such as Burrell, McCabe.