Brad J. Kallenberg

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Christian in Philosophy

Norman Malcolm, whose Memoir is an important primary source for the life of his teacher, wrote just before his own death a second brief work, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? , that provides extended evidence of Wittgensteins enduring Christian commitment. Yet Malcolm could see nothing more than analogies between his religious attitude on the one hand and his attitude to philosophical questions on the other. William Warren Bartley, III, a philosopher interested in biography, placed more stock in his own long-distance psychoanalysis of two of Wittgensteins reported dreams than he did in the concrete Christian particularity of a life that he correctly labeled an amalgam of ‘ethical activity and practical philosophy’. James C. Edwards acknowledged his subjects imitatio Christi and ‘religious sensibility’ but reduced these to a generic ethics, oddly suppressing Wittgensteins own standard Christian terminology—barely noting that he read the Christian Gospels, was converted to follow the way of Jesus, and (with some eccentricity) lived a faithful Christian life and died a Christian death. What would it be, then, to take a more fully integrated view of Wittgensteins life and work—to consider him as a Christian in philosophy?

Teaching Engineering Ethics by Conceptual Design: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis

In 1998, a lead researcher at a Midwestern university submitted as his own a document that had 64 instances of strings of 10 or more words that were identical to a consultant’s masters thesis and replicated a data chart, all of whose 16 entries were identical to three and four significant figures. He was fired because his actions were wrong. Curiously, he was completely unable to see that his actions were wrong. This phenomenon is discussed in light of recent advances in neuroscience and used to argue for a change in the standard way engineering ethics is taught. I argue that engineering ethics is better taught in the form of a design course in order to maximize “somatic” learning.