SOURCE: "Fools and Heretics," in Wittgenstein Centenary Essays, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 239-50.

In the following essay, which is a revised version of the J R. Jones Memorial Lecture given at the University of Swansea in 1979, Bambrough addresses issues of belief certainty, and adherence to dogma in the works of Wittgenstein.

'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 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...