Abstract
This essay is a further reflection on a lecture I gave to the British Academy in 1982. The lecture was called ‘Ceasing to Exist’.1 Its argument turned on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer2 part of which recounts an incident in which a tool shed on a farm suddenly vanishes without trace or explanation of any kind. The question I asked in the lecture was whether we could understand such a narrative if it were presented as an alleged account of an actual occurrence, rather than in a fictional context. My argument was a fairly close one and any merit which the lecture has must lie, in my opinion, wholly in the details of the argument, rather than in its ‘conclusion’ as such. However, it is not my purpose to recapitulate or discuss that argument here and I must content myself with saying that it led to the conclusion that the verb ‘to cease to exist’, when used in such a contextless way, is drained of the kinds of sense it bears in its normal uses.
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Notes
Reprinted in Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987).
This book has been published in German translation (by Joachim Schulte) under the title Versuchen zu Verstehen (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1992). The British Academy lecture has given rise to some controversy in the literature and here are references for some of the most important contributions to that controversy: H.O. Mounce, Critical Notice of Trying to Make Sense in Philosophical Investigations, vol. 11, 1988; R.F. Holland, ‘Lusus Naturae’ in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars: Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (London, Macmillan, 1989);
R.F. Holland, ‘Naturalism and Preternatural Change’ in Values and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, ed. Raimond Gaita (London, Routledge 1990);
Norman Malcolm, ‘On Ceasing to Exist’ in Ibid.;
D.Z. Phillips, ‘Waiting for the Vanishing Shed’, Mid-West Studies in Philosophy, 1992, reprinted in Wittgenstein and Religion (London, Macmillan and New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1993); D.Z. Phillips, ‘Miracles and Open-Door Epistemology’, Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, 1993.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘Stories from Behind the Stove’ in A Friend of Kafka (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970).
I am thinking here of the use made by Wittgenstein of this expression in On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford. Blackwell. 1969).
R.F. Holland, ‘The Miraculous’ in Against Empiricism (Oxford, Blackwell, 1980).
‘Must you look at something in this way? No. But it is one of the most important facts of human life that such impressions sometimes force themselves on you.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘A Lecture on Freedom of the Will’ (from notes by Yorick Smythies), Philosophical Investigations, vol. 12, no. 2, April 1989.
See in this connection Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, xi and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, passim; also Simone Weil, ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading’, translated Rebecca Fine Rose and Timothy Tessin, Philosophical Investigations, vol. 13, no. 4, April 1990.
Cf. some of the essays in O.K. Bouwsma, Without Proof or Evidence, ed. Craft and Hustwit (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
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© 1995 Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr
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Winch, P. (1995). Asking Too Many Questions. In: Tessin, T., von der Ruhr, M. (eds) Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23867-5_9
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