Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief

Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (German: Vorlesungen und Gespräche über Ästhetik, Psychoanalyse und religiösen Glauben) is a series of notes transcribed by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor from assorted lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and published in 1967.^[1] The lectures, at which Casimir Lewy was present, contain Wittgenstein's thoughts about aesthetics and religion, alongside a critique of psychoanalysis. Wittgensteinian fideism originates from the remarks in the Lectures.

Lectures on Religious Belief

In his Lectures on Religious Belief (Vorlesungen über den religiösen Glauben), Wittgenstein argues, among other things, that superficial grammatical similarities in the forms of both religious and factual statements mislead us into believing that they are fundamentally identical states of "belief." This grammatical similarity, Wittgenstein argues, is merely a parallel expression of drastically different processes. "The expression of belief", Wittgenstein notes, "may play an absolutely minor role."^[2]

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