Wittgenstein on the transcendence of ethics

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (3):304 – 324 (1997)
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Abstract

In _Notebooks 1914-1916, Wittgenstein considers two related arguments to prove the transcendence of ethics. The inferences involve the claim that the existence of ethics must be indifferent to whether or not the world is inhabited by living things, and that moral good and evil occur only because of the extraworldly metaphysical subject. I reconstruct and criticize these arguments in detail as a prelude to analyzing Wittgenstein's _Tractatus remarks about the transcendence of value, the identification of ethics and aesthetics as one, and the elimination of theoretical ethics or metaethics as meaningless pseudopropositions

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10.1080/00048409712347921

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