This conference seeks to offer a re-evaluation of a singular text — Wittgenstein’s 1929 “Lecture on Ethics” — and of its enduring influence within post-Wittgensteinian approaches to Ethics.

The Lecture on Ethics was a unique event in Wittgenstein’s life and remains a singular text in his Nachlass. Contrary to his habitual mode of teaching, Wittgenstein prepared the text of the Lecture in advance, he wrote it in English and delivered it, uncharacteristically, in front of a philosophically untrained audience, on November 17th, 1929. In its content, the Lecture might initially seem to be an extension and clarification of the views expressed in the last paragraphs of the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein famously rejects the possibility of ethical propositions and classifies them as nonsensical. But the way the Lecture articulates Wittgenstein’s meta-ethical viewpoint involves several new and unique elements, including the distinction between the relative and the absolute sense of ethical and religious terms, the distinction between what is expressed by means of language and what is expressed by the existence of language, and the idea that what is expressed by our use of ethical terms in their absolute sense has (or seems to have) “supernatural value.”

Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics continues to play a significant role in contemporary debates in ethics and serves as one of the main sources of inspiration for the development of a unique, new approach to ethics — often called post-Wittgensteinian ethics — which seeks to offer an alternative to the traditional choice between deontological and teleological ethical approaches. The Lecture on Ethics inspires philosophers working in this tradition not only in terms of the ethical view Wittgenstein discusses in it, but also in terms of the kind of ethical intervention that the performance of the Lecture consisted in. For the Lecture does not simply reject the idea that ethics can be approached in terms of generalizable criteria of utility and duty; it inquires into the deep-seated patterns of thinking which lead us in these directions and contends that they only serve to distort our vision and to alienate us from the reality of ethical experience. Instead, the Lecture proposes to approach ethics as a deeply personal matter, an attitude which, once achieved, colors the entirety of the person’s interactions with the world and with others. Indeed, the Lecture itself consists in a series of moments that together amount to an attempt by Wittgenstein to put on display his own unique ethical sensitivity.