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A Rest from Reason: Wittgenstein, Drury, and the Difference Between Madness and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2010

K. L. Evans*
Affiliation:
Yeshiva University, New York

Abstract

Faced with troubling professional decisions in his long and successful career as a psychiatrist, M. O'C. Drury turned for direction to the philosophical work of his teacher and friend, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of particular concern to Drury were the situations in which psychiatrists were expected to differentiate between instances of madness that were religious in form and instances of genuine religious experience that, for their oddity, landed believers in psychiatric consulting rooms. In this essay we consider the special orientation Wittgenstein's philosophy gave Drury, for example the way in which Drury came to understand how even his search for a principle of differentiation between madness and religion was misleading and contrary to his own practice—how it involved ‘sitting back in a cool hour and attempting to solve this problem as a pure piece of theory. To be the detached, wise, external critic’ and not see himself and his own manner of life ‘as intimately involved in the settlement of this question.’

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010

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References

1 Drury, M. O'C., The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

8 Op. cit. note 1.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Spero, Moshe Halevi, ‘“A Garland for Ashes”: Regarding the Diagnosis of Religious Rituality in “Diagnosis and Treatment of a Psychotic Depressive”’, Mind, Body and Judaism: The Interaction of Jewish Law with Psychology and Biology (New York: Michael Scharf Publication Trust of Yeshiva University Press, 2004), 8098Google Scholar.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Cioffi, Frank, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958)Google Scholar.

18 Op. cit. note 1.

19 Ibid.

20 Op. cit. note 12.

21 Ibid.

22 Op. cit. note 1.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Op. cit. note 17.

28 Ibid.

29 Op. cit. note 1.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Rhees, Rush, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006)Google Scholar.

34 Op. cit. note 1.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Bernard, Claude, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (New York: Dover Publications, 1957)Google Scholar.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Op. cit. note 1.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.