Abstract

This slender volume contains notes, kept by some of those who were present, of lectures on aesthetics and religious belief, and of conversations with Rush Rhees concerning Freud. The lectures were given informally by Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1938; the conversations took place between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein neither wrote down nor saw the material here presented, but the editor reports that the versions of lecture notes by different students agree to a remarkable extent.Despite the varying authorships and intervals of time during which these Lectures and Conversations took place, the book is a surprisingly integrated whole and not simply a miscellany. What seems to unite its three topics and their treatment is Wittgenstein's examination of the kind of evidence upon which each of the three disciplines have tended to rely—his argument being that 1) Psychoanalysis has tended to rest on insufficient evidence; 2) Aesthetics on the wrong kind of evidence; and 3) Religious Belief on the false notion that it is a matter of evidence when this is not at all the case.