In his book, Philosophy’s Cool Place, D. Z. Phillips poses a question that I would like to address in this article. He asks: “if a philosopher gives a course on the meaning of life, can he tell his students what that meaning is?” Here I modify the question and ask: if a Wittgensteinian philosopher gives a course on the meaning of life, can she tell her students what that meaning is? The orthodox position among Wittgensteinian philosophers is that it is not a philosopher’s job to engage with such questions, that the focus should be on second-order or “grammatical” questions about life’s meaning. However, I argue that the massive literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion shows that these so-called grammatical investigations are not entirely grammatical and that more often than not a conception of life’s meaning emerges in these types of investigations. Further, I argue that Wittgenstein’s engagement with what he calls the “problem of life” shows itself in two distinct ways: first, in his private reflections on the nature of religious beliefs; and second, in his steady yet quiet interest in a naturalist account of life’s meaning, culminating in his last text, On Certainty.

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维特根斯坦和绅士传统

DZ Phillips在他的《哲学的凉爽地方》一书中提出了一个我想在本文中解决的问题。他问：“如果哲学家开设一门关于生命意义的课程，他能告诉他的学生生命意义是什么吗？” 在这里，我修改问题并提出以下疑问：维特根斯坦哲学家是否开设了一门关于生命意义的课程，她能告诉她的学生生命意义是什么吗？维特根斯坦哲学家之间的正统立场是，从事这样的问题不是哲学家的工作，重点应该放在关于生命意义的二阶或“语法”问题上。然而，我认为，有关维特根斯坦宗教哲学的大量文献表明，这些所谓的语法研究并不完全是语法上的，而且在这些类型的研究中常常会出现生命意义的概念。此外，我认为维特根斯坦对他所谓的“生活问题”的参与以两种截然不同的方式表明了自己：第一，在他对宗教信仰本质的私下反思中；其次，出于对自然意义上对生命意义的解释的稳定而安静的兴趣，最后他的最后一部著作《确定性》（On当然）。