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Fools and Heretics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Renford Bambrough
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Extract

‘Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic’ This sentence from Wittgenstein's On Certainty (OC, 611) is the source of my title. A passage in George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant might have prompted the same choice: ‘The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives’ (Orwell, 1950, 177).

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 28 , March 1990 , pp. 239 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1990

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