This chapter contains sections titled: Meaning as Use Language Games Mind and Matter Mathematics and Other Sciences Science, Myth, and Religion Seeing Aspects World Pictures The Inner and the Outer A Field of Diversity Further reading.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance, it immediately convinced many of its readers and captured the imagination of all. Its chief influence, at first, was on the Logical Positivists of the 1920s and 1930s, but many other philosophers were stimulated by its philosophy of language, finding attractive, even if ultimately unsatisfactory, its view that propositions (...) were pictures of reality. Perhaps most of all, its own author, after his return to philosophy in the late 1920s, was fascinated by its vision of an inexpressible, crystalline world of logical relationships. C.K. Ogden's translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has a unique provenance. As revealed in Letters of C.K. Ogden and in correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement , Wittgenstein, Ramsey and Moore all worked with Ogden on the translation, which had Wittgenstein's complete approval. The very name Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was of Ogden's devising; and there is very strong feeling among philosophers that, among the differing translations of this work, Ogden's is the definitive text - and Wittgenstein's version of the English equivalent of his Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. (shrink)

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object . Consequently Wittgenstein's "atomic propositions" could not be (...) logically independent of one another. ;Initially he thought he could replace the "logically perfect language" of the TLP with a "phenomenological language" in which experiential propositions about various "spaces" would form systems. The system described by a phenomenological language would be independent of the one described by ordinary "physicalistic" language; the physical "world" was known only by inference from the phenomenological. But he soon realized there was a fundamental error in this conception: phenomenology has to describe the same world as physics or it fails to provide a foundation for it. This suggests that there is only one world, and one language with two different modes of expression. Wittgenstein's now comes to his fundamental insight: ordinary language is biased towards the description of physical objects and their relations, but it is our only method of expressing phenomenological or abstract concepts. Failure to recognize this difficulty leads to the misapplication of physicalistic concepts, i.e., to grammatical errors. ;This insight had the following impact: the task of philosophy is not to invent logical or phenomenological languages, but to understand the grammar of ordinary language; the notion of a language of pure experience was itself connected with a false, physicalistic idea of the soul as an observer of a private world; the conception of analysis that had guided philosophy since Frege was based on a misused metaphor taken from the grammar of physics: the analysis of an object into its parts or chemical constituents. These ideas reach their ultimate expression in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Thus his "later" work actually begins with these 1929--30 manuscripts. (shrink)

Discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is currently dominated by two opposing interpretations of the work: a metaphysical or realist reading and the 'resolute' reading of Diamond and Conant. Marie McGinn's principal aim in this book is to develop an alternative interpretative line, which rejects the idea, central to the metaphysical reading, that Wittgenstein sets out to ground the logic of our language in features of an independently constituted reality, but which allows that he aims to provide positive philosophical insights (...) into how language functions. McGinn takes as a guiding principle the idea that we should see Wittgenstein's early work as an attempt to eschew philosophical theory and to allow language itself to reveal how it functions. By this account, the aim of the work is to elucidate what language itself makes clear, namely, what is essential to its capacity to express thoughts that are true or false. However, the early Wittgenstein undertakes this descriptive project in the grip of a set of preconceptions concerning the essence of language that determine both how he conceives the problem and the approach he takes to the task of clarification. Nevertheless, the Tractatus contains philosophical insights, achieved despite his early preconceptions, that form the foundation of his later philosophy. -/- The anti-metaphysical interpretation that is presented includes a novel reading of the problematic opening sections of the Tractatus, in which the apparently metaphysical status of Wittgenstein's remarks is shown to be an illusion. The book includes a discussion of the philosophical background to the Tractatus, a comprehensive interpretation of Wittgenstein's early views of logic and language, and an interpretation of the remarks on solipsism. The final chapter is a discussion of the relation between the early and the later philosophy that articulates the fundamental shift in Wittgenstein's approach to the task of understanding how language functions and reveal the still more fundamental continuity in his conception of his philosophical task. (shrink)

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, (...) but from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "[ Philosophical Remarks ] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind . He modifies the Tractatus 's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."--Robert Hoffman, Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."--Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to examine and explicate a definition given in Philosophical Investigations. The definition of the meaning of a word is that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Hallett understands this as a definition in the strict sense of the word. In Chapter I, the author looks to the Tractatus for its treatment of the picture theory of meaning and the Bedeutung/sinn distinction. The conclusion which he pulls from the early (...) work is that, for Wittgenstein, meaning was already in a proposition by way of the meaning of names. Yet, only in the use or application, i.e., in a proposition with sense is meaning revealed. Although the Tractatus is far from saying that meaning is use, certain guiding themes are elaborated and carried into later works; namely, the search for meaning, the impossibility of meaning outside use, and meaning as revealed by use. Chapter II, III, and especially IV bear the brunt of establishing Hallett’s thesis that Wittgenstein presented a significant and sound definition. He begins by showing what Wittgenstein proved meaning not to be: meaning is not images, objects, mental referents, nor feelings. All of these theories have convincing confirmation in certain respects, yet analysis, i.e., observation of the actual working of language, shows each to be too narrow. In making his transition to the true definition, the author shows Wittgenstein elaborating the theses that meaning is to be found in the system or context of language. These are elaborated only to be cast aside as were the previous suggestions. The pattern elicited from these examinations is that meaning is use and, hence, defined as such. To explicate the definition, Hallett presents and examines seven characteristics of use: complexity, regularity and utility, abstraction, openness, vagueness, variety, and family resemblances. The book concludes with a consideration of the major objections to Wittgenstein’s definition. There are too many objections presented to be handled justly. For the most part, the argument is superficial, usually presuming a familiarity with the issue, and with but an indication of how the objection could be handled. The strength of the book is that it gives an organization to Wittgenstein’s later thinking, especially by way of the above-mentioned seven characteristics. In identifying and elucidating them, Hallett does Wittgenstein students a great service. Its chief weakness, although pale in regard to the overall worth, is that the main thesis is not firmly established. To say that a precise and complete definition is given is contrary to what is maintained throughout the Investigations, and perhaps a serious misreading of the German word, erklaren, as the precise English phrase, "to define." There are extensive notes and an adequate index.—W. A. F. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 281-282 [Access article in PDF] Matthew B. Ostrow. Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 175. Paper, $20.00. This contribution to the new readings of the early Wittgenstein presents in detail how one might read the Tractatus as a sustained attack on Frege's and Russell's philosophical and logical conceptions while at (...) the same time presuming Wittgenstein to have always been in some sense a "late Wittgensteinian," that is, already embarked on the therapeutic task of setting down "the way of release" from philosophical confusion and "ensnarement of thought" (1). Taking seriously the passage in the Tractatus (6.54) in which Wittgenstein assesses his "elucidations" as "nonsensical," Ostrow places himself among those readers who infer that straightforward theory-making was not Wittgenstein's aim, but differs from them in his original and challenging account of how the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense.Wittgenstein, Ostrow contends, employed such (apparent) doctrines as the picture theory, the showing doctrine, the notion of tautology, and so forth dialectically, that is, as self-detonating attempts to expose philosophical nonsense in situ which were not themselves intended to be argued pro or con as philosophical assertions or theories. Wittgenstein's purpose in speaking in the Tractatus in avowedly though not patently nonsensical ways is, the author argues, to encourage us instead to see philosophical nonsensicality as "given in and through" the process of making such philosophical assertions, and in seeing how they "change their character, how they undermine their initial presentation as straightforward truth claims" (12). Thus the "central notions" and propositions in the Tractatus, according to Ostrow, "only have their life in relation to the philosophical temptations that the book aims to eradicate" (43).Such a reading involves the author (and his readers) in a task that is both detailed and delicate. Ostrow's work is detailed because he reads Wittgenstein as engaged in a systematic attempt to expose philosophical theories as nonsense case-by-particular-case, that is, by "working through philosophy from the inside, without making appeal to any kind of fixed criteria of sense and nonsense" (99). It is for this reason that Wittgenstein's articulation of the many structures in the Tractatus is necessary, and Ostrow's work, which he views as largely descriptive, must trace the same path.Ostrow's task is a delicate one because he must explore the themes in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (pictures, significant propositions, logical propositions, etc.) without appearing to contradict his position that the Tractatus offers no general doctrines meant to be taken as they stand. Thus, for instance, when Ostrow argues that for Wittgenstein pictorial form is constituted by a picture's application to reality and not an independent entity, he must remind the reader that he is not attributing to Wittgenstein a doctrine of "constitution of form" offered up as a philosophical alternative. Just as we are not to make pictorial form and its emergence in the Tractatus into a substantive theory in its own right but rather see it as having a role only in Wittgenstein's battle to expose such shibboleths (44), so too for all other parts of the Tractarian structure. Thus Wittgenstein's apparent explanation of the [End Page 281] possibility of depiction in terms of isomorphism is said to aim at showing that as an explanation, "talk of an isomorphism is empty" (39); Wittgenstein's show/say distinction is taken as a foil used to expose the logician's desire to get at essence (42), and so forth. Even the notion of tautology is, according to Ostrow, "as dialectical a move as any other," not one "put forth as a self-standing claim, an attempt to offer an overarching characterization of truth" (105).This book engages in its daunting task very ably and in fluid, confident prose. The author is clearly aware of the various challenges he is likely to meet and suggests ways of doing battle with them. To cite one case, Ostrow examines Wittgenstein's later comments on his... (shrink)

In the preface to this book Stephen Toulmin recalls how Wittgenstein's later work appeared to his English students "as unique and extraordinary as the Tractatus had appeared to Moore." "Meanwhile," he recalls, "for our own part, we struck Wittgenstein as intolerably stupid, and he was sometimes in despair about getting us to grasp what he was talking about." Toulmin suggests that this "mutual incomprehension" was due to a "culture clash: the clash between a Viennese thinker whose whole mind (...) had been formed in a post-Kantian environment, and an audience of students who came to him with attitudes and preoccupations shaped by the neo-Humean empiricism of Moore, Russell and their associates." Engel's book is meant primarily to show that Wittgenstein's thought grows out of the Kantian philosophy, but not that it is simply derived from Kant. Rather, according to Engel, Wittgenstein was the first to see the full value of the insights of Kant and Schopenhauer. Engel bases his argument on the Blue Book. According to Engel the argument of the Blue Book comprehends two divergent theories of the origin of metaphysics. These two theories are represented in Engel's book by Ayer and Lazerowitz. For Ayer metaphysics is grounded in the inherently deceptive character of language; and the way to overcome metaphysics is but to be attentive to language. Lazerowitz, on the other hand, attempts to explain why it is that language is deceptive. Lazerowitz's argument as presented by Engel requires as a premise the proposition that the deceptions of language are not that intrinsically difficult to see through, or that metaphysical arguments are obviously "innovations." And therefore the origin of metaphysics must be sought outside of the structure of language. Lazerowitz locates the root of metaphysics in the passions, specifically, in fear--in the fear of change which is ultimately the fear of death. Engel sees each of these positions as in its way legitimate but essentially partial. Wittgenstein's thought is thus more profound than that which is derived from it. It is precisely this awareness of the necessity for both kinds of explanation that Wittgenstein, according to Engel, inherited from the tradition of Kantian metaphysics: in the first Critique's seeking both to account for the impossibility of metaphysics while, at the same time, arguing for the necessity of metaphysics as a natural disposition or arguing for the necessity of a "will to metaphysics." While Engel's argument is not as clear or thorough as it ought to be, his thesis, that Wittgenstein's work is not simply a "repudiation of our philosophical tradition, but rather is its proper twentieth-century continuation," is--in the main--convincing. The book is worth reading.--J. W. S. (shrink)

Zettel is a collection of fragments which Wittgenstein cut from various of his typescripts and preserved for future use. More than half of the fragments were written in the years 1946-1948, after the completion of Part I and before the composition of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. This collection may therefore be regarded as a companion volume to the Investigations, adding to both the scope and the Unity of Wittgenstein′s chef d′oeuvre. The fragments were kept in a box and (...) were not strictly ordered. Many have marks showing changes and improvements made after they were cut from the typescripts; some have remarks added in handwriting. Editing the collection for publication was thus a task of considerable difficulty. Since Zettel was first published, further research has been carried out on the fragments and minute comparisons have been made with their typescript and manuscript sources, revealing certain inaccuracies and misinterpretations in the first editing of the work. The second edition corrects these shortcomings and includes new explanatory footnotes; a detailed index, compiled by Stephen Amdur, has also been added. (shrink)

The edition of the Nachlass from the early thirties by Michael Nedo and the completion of the "Bergen Electronic Edition" (BEE) have provided Wittgenstein scholars with all the material required to investigate the author's philosophical development starting with his auto-criticism of the "Tractatus" and leading to his later views. Wittgenstein's strategy of dictating from his notebooks and cutting up the typescripts to rearrange paragraphs into sequences of remarks is well documented in Nedo's edition and the BEE provides convenient (...) facsimile access to every page Wittgenstein wrote or edited throughout the process. Some researchers have begun to revise received opinions that were based upon the "books" previously published by the trustees. (Hrachovec 2002, 2004, Kientzler 1997, Nyiri 2002, Pichler 2004, Stern 2002) Yet, the scientific community has barely begun to discover the richness and density of the philosophical endeavor manifesting itself in this material. There has, understandably, been an interest to trace the origin of remarks, well-known from the "Philosophical Investigations", providing some background to Wittgenstein's most popular ideas. Various doctrines of what is becoming known as the "middle Wittgenstein" have been noticed, but they have themselves been perceived as more or less consolidated theories. Wittgenstein's editorial activity has been recognized as a hypertextual undertaking avant la lettre, yet there has been insufficient attention to the philosophical impact of these hypertextual strategies themselves. It is all too easy to be caught by someprovisional result captured on a printed page and to overlook the fact that some of its philosophical significance can only be recognized by considering its genesis. (shrink)

The metaphysical root of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus represents a departure from a pervasive philosophical assumption found originally in Plato's Meno. This departure is directly inspired by a critique of the Meno found in the works by Soren Kierkegaard written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. ;The central implication of Kierkegaard's influence for Tractatus interpretation is that thought---or thinking---referred to in the Tractatus of necessity extends beyond the limits of language. ;There are at present two competing interpretative (...) readings of the Tractatus in the literature. One reading---referred to as the "Standard" reading since it is propounded by almost all notable Wittgenstein scholars, e.g., Pears, Hacker, McGuinness, Anscombe, Rhees, Malcohn---has it that the "mystical" sections of the Tractatus must be, to some degree, taken seriously. The other reading---a "New" reading advocated most prominently by Winch, Diamond, and Conant---argues that the Standard reading is self-contradictory in that it maintains that the limits of language and those of thought are the same while it simultaneously maintains that there is a sort of Mystical residue left over even after the Tractatus has been "thrown away". The New reading sees Wittgenstein's point as being precisely that there is no such left-over residue and that we must accept this. ;Both readings are however incorrect in regard to Wittgenstein's view of limits in the Tractatus. While the New reading takes somewhat seriously the influence of Kierkegaard on the Tractatus, it asserts that a Kierkegaardian influence bolsters the New reading's view of the mystical as well as its view that language and thought share the same limits in the Tractatus. The opposite is in fact the case. Das Mystische corresponds to Kierkegaard's "absolutely unknown" that language---but not thought---runs up against as a limit. Wittgenstein himself alludes to this correspondence in conversation with members of the Vienna Circle in 1929. As such, if the influence of Kierkegaard is to be seen in its proper light, the problem is not with the Standard reading of Das Mystische, but rather with the view that the limits of thought and language in the Tractatus are the same. For Kierkegaard, unless thought extends beyond the limit of language there is no conceivable nexus for the subject or the divine. This is precisely his critique of Plato's Meno in Fragments. That this view is also the bedrock of the Tractatus' metaphysics is what the present thesis argues is the proper "Kierkegaardian reading" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophies, from both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, are explained and developed. Wittgenstein uses a primitive version of recursion theory to develop his attempt at a purely logical metaphysics in the Tractatus. However, due to his implicit materialist assumptions, he could not make the system completely logical, and built in a mystical division of possible worlds into the true and the false. This incoherence eventually lead him to reject logic as a method for doing metaphysics, (...) and indeed to reject metaphysics entirely. I argue that his move from the Tractatus to the Investigations was valid, but only given his materialist assumptions. If he had been willing to drop this unnecessary baggage, recursion would have played a very different role in his system, since he would then have had no need to separate static objects from processes, which he saw as purely mental. F.H. Bradley developed such a nonmaterialist metaphysics in the nineteenth century, but was crippled by a mentalism that Wittgenstein was free of. The anti-mentalism and anti-materialism that Wittgenstein considered as given were not so obvious to his predecessor, Russell, who revolted against Bradley's idealism in much the same way Wittgenstein ended up revolting against Russell's logical atomism. In my view, none of these positions was the right approach, which would require nonmentalism and nonmaterialism. But for some reason, these things (which seem to go together quite naturally to me) have been widely considered to be incompatible. Bradley was appropriately a non-materialist, but suffered from mentalism. Russell and the early Wittgenstein were appropriately nonmentalists, but suffered from materialism. The later Wittgenstein was, I would argue, still an ardent materialist and anti-mentalist, in spite of the fact that he had long since realized the contradictions to which materialism leads; he just had not recognized that it was his materialist assumptions that had lead him there, since these assumptions were so firmly engrained in his thinking as to be invisible.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:554 BOOK REVIEWS though he had carried out a radical interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's esse in his transcendental turn. Thus, Sheehan has brilliantly shown both Rahner's indebtedness to Heidegger (especially his notion of the human person as a bivalent and kinetic being; note the parallels between Rahner's cogitative sense and Heidegger's Temporalitiit, between Rahner's agent intellect and Heidegger's Existentialitiit, between Rahner 's possible intellect and Heidegger's Faktizitiit) and Rahner's (...) profound differences from Heidegger, especially in his understanding of being (see pp. 110-116; 280-291). Finally, Sheehan has provided the clearest exposition to date on Rahner's theory of " inner-worldly efficient causality " (pp. 244-255). The book would have been much more helpful if an index of topics and a bibliography had been provided. There are two omissions. On p. 135, the last line should read: " Chapter VIII concludes the study by laying out the critical difference between Rahner's effort to re-establish the science of metaphysics on a transcendental base and Heidegger's attempt to overcome metaphysics." On p. 186, line 19: "In whatever way we read the content of predicate (Aquinas: quiddities)." There are also a number of minor misprints. Strange that this book was published only in 1987, even though the research was apparently completed before 1982 (see p. 171, note 62). But its many assets will make Sheehan's work a permanent feature among the best Rahnerian studies. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. PETER c. PHAN The World and Language in Wittgenstein's Philosophy. By GORDON HUNNINGS. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989. Pp. xiv +266. $34.50. This book will not find a place among the distinguished commentaries on Wittgenstein's work. Aiming to cover the full sweep of that work, Hunnings devotes three of his eight chapters to the Tractatus, one to the" Notes on Logical Form" (1929) and Philosophical Grammar, one to the transitional material of The Blue and Brown Books, one to writings and lectures on the philosophy of mathematics, and just two to the central themes of the later philosophy. Indeed, of the book's 256 pages of text, 193 are spent before the reader finds himself dealing with Philosophical Investigations. So there is a problem of balance. For a book of this size and scope striving to cover the whole of Wittgenstein's BOOK REVIEWS 555 thought on representation and grammar, there is too much exposition of transitional detail and too little attention to the difficult but fertile work at the heart of the mature later Wittgenstein. There are now many fine expository studies of Wittgenstein's work. This is not to say that all important matters of interpretation are settled. Indeed, there are significant areas of rival interpretation and there are varying assessments of the adequacy of Wittgenstein's views. There is contention over the degree to which his work is assimilable to the philosophical tradition. These facts suggest, not that there is no profit in further investigation of his work, but that new studies-particularly ones attempting a comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein's work from the Notebooks to On Certainty-should situate themselves in a well cultivated terrain of commentary and interpretation. But Hunning's work does little to inform prospective readers of the extent to which scholarly study of Wittgenstein's work has advanced. Eschewing a bibliography, Hunnings makes it somewhat difficult for the reader to discern his command of the scholarship. In construing the Tractatus he relies on Anscombe, Stenius, Griffin, and Black-all standard sources. But in dealing with the later philosophy and the much-debated transitional period between Wittgenstein's resumption of philosophical work in the late 1920's and the period of the Investigations, Hunnings simply does not scratch the surface of the huge body of secondary writing available to serious students of Wittgenstein's work. It would be pointless to list the important commentators whose works are ignored; suffice to say that Hunnings's book is apparently unassisted by a full scholarly command of the available literature. In this regard it suffers by comparison with A. C. Grayling's Wittgenstein in the Oxford University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 196-210 [Access article in PDF] On Philosophy as Therapy:Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing Garry Hagberg IN HIS LATER PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS Wittgenstein was exquisitely sensitive to the misleading implications housed within the formulations of philosophical questions. The question with which he opened the Blue Book, "What is the meaning of a word?," the question "What is thinking?," and the question "What constitutes understanding?," each (...) put into place presumptions concerning how an answer is going to proceed: in the first, that the meaning will be an entity of some kind—likely of an ontological kind different from the acoustical or calligraphic sensory property of the word (to which we will then think the meaning attached); in the second, that thinking will be in essence a determinate mental process or event—likely one of an ontological kind different from that of speaking (to which we will then picture thinking as prior); in the third, an inner process culminating in a state that is metaphysically hidden from all things outer and that is the inner condition that lies unreachable behind what we will then call the behavior that is contingently correlated with it. It is by now no secret that each of these questions has been subjected to thorough scrutiny throughout the writings in The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Zettel, and even more extensively in the typescripts and manuscripts from which these are taken. 1 But it is still perhaps less widely realized than it might be that the very phrase "Wittgenstein's method" can easily prove as misleading as each of the above questions, and there is an aspect of irony waiting to dawn on those who reflect that the modern philosopher most concerned to maintain a philosophically relevant mindfulness about front-loaded [End Page 196] implications is perhaps too often not afforded precisely the mindfulness about his own later philosophical writings that he was most concerned to teach.The phrase "Wittgenstein's method" might well lead us to expect, in the first place, a unitary way of contending with philosophical difficulties that is employed across the board; in the second place, it might lead us to expect an acceptance of a set of perennial problems as framed by philosophers through the ages that are treated with that unitary method; and in the third place, it might lead us to expect a set of solutions to those time-honored questions providing answers formulated in a way parallel to, if different from, those worked out by Frege, Russell, Quine, or many others before and since. Indeed, such an expectation has often outlived the recognition that Wittgenstein's own writings are presented in a piecemeal way that seems not to offer any such overarching method or any such problem-accepting concisely formulated answers; some have simply assumed that, while Wittgenstein himself did not or could not provide such results, the raw material is there, and the task of interpretation, in his case, just comes to the task of argument-and-position formulation. To load a spatial metaphor into epistemology, nothing could be further from the truth. What Wittgenstein's later writings offer us is—to put the matter in a different way misleadingly briefly—a way of seeing philosophical problems that constitutes a radical departure from the approaches of Frege, Russell, Quine, and so many others. And in enacting this departure throughout his writings from the Blue Book and the Cambridge lectures of those years through to his final remarks in On Certainty, he himself, wary of too simply or too conventionally characterizing his own ways of working, appeals to the notion of therapy. This is a fitting concept for a moment in philosophy's history of radical departure and an ensuing process of radical change.It is true that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote "Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language" (4.003), and it would not be wrong to call... (shrink)

Readers beware! This book is other than it first seems. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s latest philosophical offering is unlike anything that we have had from him to date. Its preface warns that the Tractatus is no textbook. This is an extreme understatement; really it is a deep puzzle—one that must be handled with great care. As the first lines signal there has been a radical change in the author’s characteristic style. Gone are the ingenious, probing explorations of topics undertaken in his (...) highly fragmentary writings that have been Wittgenstein’s trademark to date. In his new book Wittgenstein abandons the interrogative that his signature vision of and approach to philosophy found in his many masterpieces—The Blue and Brown Books, The Philosophical Investigations, and On Certainty. His previous masterworks have prosecuted a continuous philosophical enterprise designed to expose, resist and reject certain deeply compelling pictures that attract, mesmerize and blind us when it comes to thinking .. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus has generated many interpretations since its publication in 1921, but over the years a consensus has developed concerning its criticisms of Russell's philosophy. In Wittgenstein's Apprenticeship with Russell, Gregory Landini draws extensively from his work on Russell's unpublished manuscripts to show that the consensus characterises Russell with positions he did not hold. Using a careful analysis of Wittgenstein's writings he traces the 'Doctrine of Showing' and the 'fundamental idea' of the Tractatus to (...) Russell's logical atomist research program, which dissolves philosophical problems by employing variables with structure. He argues that Russell and his apprentice Wittgenstein were allies in a research program that makes logical analysis and reconstruction the essence of philosophy. His sharp and controversial study will be essential reading for all who are interested in this rich period in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 134-135 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 'The Visible and the Invisible Douglas Low. Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 'The Visible and the Invisible.' Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 124. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $19.95. Low sets himself an impossible task, that of completing (...) the uncompleted work of a philosopher whose untimely decease prevented him from doing so himself. What he does succeed in providing is a systematic commentary and a rich integration of Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy. This task itself is important since it is believed by many that Merleau-Ponty's premature death prevented the completion of a book that would have altered the philosophical scene of Paris in the 1960s, and that, moreover, even in its incomplete form, speaks to pressing contemporary philosophical debates on such issues as mind/body dualism, and our relation to nature.The main focus of Low's reading is Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language, which Low appropriately situates as a mediation between a modernist philosophy of presence and a postmodern Derridean approach to language as the constant deferral of meaning. Language is not the repository for ideal essences, nor do existents have an immediate [End Page 134] coincidence or fusion with things or the world. Indeed, the strength of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is that he begins with an understanding of human action as meaningfully orientated; to move in the world is to interpretatively encounter it. As Low points out, "an ontological priority [is] granted to the body and the world upon which it opens, for together in lived experience they sustain a field of stable meanings, meanings that are then sublimated in the bodily gesture called speech" (22). Low differs from most Merleau-Ponty scholars in his assumption that there is no significant break between the earlier Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty carefully worked out his descriptions of embodied perception, and the later work that lays out the ontology. Indeed, one accomplishment of Low's book is to show how they fit together, explaining how the insights of the first work are necessary for grounding the ontology Merleau-Ponty began to work out in the later one.Low's book is divided into two sections. The first section, "The Visible and Nature," focuses on how we encounter the world, concluding with a helpful summary and assessment of Merleau-Ponty's ontology. Drawing upon the late essay "Eye and Mind," Low lays out Merleau-Ponty's ontology through his intuition that modern art, unlike the representational focus of Renaissance art, reveals our contact with the world as a "system of exchanges between the sensing and the sensible" (56). Perceiving the artwork is not an intellectual computation of a second-order representation of the world; rather, we see according to the work. It is a bodily process that reveals a reversibility between the viewer and the world. The second section, "The Invisible and Logos," focuses on how these encounters are sublimated or taken up in language. Language is, for Merleau-Ponty, first speech since it relies upon a speaker to take it up, "to sustain and modify it." Signs, gestures, and meaning are folded into one another. As embodied beings, we literally grasp meaning (89).This book would be of enormous benefit to scholars embarking on a reading of Merleau-Ponty's works, and it is one I highly recommend for that purpose. Although it is not original in its interpretations, its value lies in its gathering and integration of complex themes that provide an important introduction to Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy. The book maps out, moreover, a chronology of these themes and the specifics of where to find them; it also shows how the fragments fit together, indicating directions in which they might lead. His writing style is accessible without being simplistic. By interweaving his interpretations with long quotes from... (shrink)

Wittgenstein's critique of solipsism is explained as a development in three stages. In the first, which appeares in the Notebooks 1914-16 and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he criticizes the solipsist for not identifying his ego and, therefore, leaving the objects presented to it unidentified. He argues that this is like trying to identify the eye without using any psychological facts. In the second stage, which appeares in The Blue Book and Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sensations", he (...) assumes that the solipsist does not even try to identify his ego but merely points at the objects of which he is directly aware. The critique of this inward pointing is based on a development of the original analogy between ego and eye. The third stage is the argument against the possibility of a sensation-language without any connections with the physical world. This appeares in Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data" and in Philosophical Investigations. Here the focus is not on the ego but on the objects presented to it. However the criticism is similar: those objects and their types need criteria of identity but would not have sense i f they were not connected with the physical world. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally considered as the greatest philosopher since Immanuel Kant, and his personal life, work, and his historical moment intertwined in a fascinating, complex web. Noted scholar Edward Kanterian explores these intersections in Ludwig Wittgenstein, the newest title in the acclaimed Critical Lives series. -/- Wittgenstein’s works—from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations —are notoriously dense, and Kanterian carefully distills them here, proposing thought-provoking new interpretations. Yet the philosopher’s passions were not solely confined to (...) theoretical musings, and the book explores Wittgenstein’s immersion in art and music and his social position as a member of the sophisticated Viennese upper class at the turn of the century. His personal and professional relationships also offer insights into his thoughts, as he was friends with the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, including John Maynard Keynes, George Edward Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gilbert Royle. The philosopher was also deeply tormented by ethical and religious questions, and his internal turmoil, Kanterian argues, gives us a deeper understanding of the important conflicts and tensions of his age. Ultimately, the author contends, Wittgenstein’s life reveals insights into the ethical quandaries of our own time. -/- A readable and concise account, Ludwig Wittgenstein is an informative, accessible introduction to the one of the greatest thinkers of our age. (shrink)

The so-called "Big Typescript" is Wittgenstein's first attempt to publish in a book his collected thoughts since his return to Cambridge and to philosophical writing, thus correcting the "serious errors" (Wittgenstein) of his early work. Among the texts in Wittgenstein's estate, the "Big Typescript" is the one that, next to the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" (the "Tractatus") of 1918, appears to be the most "finished", with a table of contents structured in chapters and sections. It is, however, a (...) fragment, without either title, motto or conclusion. To Wittgenstein, it was important "that the thoughts in [the book] should progress from one subject to another in well-ordered consecutiveness." It is precisely this structure of the "Big Typescript", though ultimately rejected by Wittgenstein, which constitutes the immeasurable value of the text for the study of and as an introduction to Wittgenstein's thinking. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

"The purpose of this book is to examine and explicate a definition given in Philosophical Investigations. The definition of the meaning of a word is that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Hallet understands this as a definition in the strict sense of the word. In Chapter I, the author look to the Tractatus for its treatment of the picture theory of meaning and the Bedeutung/Sinn distinction. The conclusion which he pulls from the early (...) work is that, for Wittgenstein, meaning was already in a proposition by way of the meaning of names. Yet, only in the use or application, i.e. in a proposition with sense is meaning revealed. Although the Tractatus is far from saying that meaning is use, certain guiding themes are elaborated and carried into later works; namely, the search for meaning, the impossibility of meaning outside use, and meaning as revealed by use. Chapter II, III, and especially IV bear the brunt of establishing Hallet's thesis that Wittgenstein presented a significant and sound definition. He begins by showing what Wittgenstein proved meaning not to be: meaning is not images, objects, mental referents, nor feelings. All of these theories have convincing confirmation in certain respects, yet analysis, i.e. observation of the actual working of language, shows each to be too narrow. In making his transition to the true definition, the author shows Wittgenstein elaborating theses that meaning is to be found in the system or context of language. These are elaborated only to be cast aside as were the previous suggestions. The pattern elicited from these examinations is that meaning is use and, hence, defined as such. To explicate the definition, Hallett presents and examines seven characteristics of use: complexity, regularity and utility, abstraction, openness, vagueness, variety, and family resemblances. The book concludes with a consideration of the major objections to Wittgenstein's definition."-The Review of Metaphysics. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It influenced philosophers and artists alike and it continues to fascinate readers today. It offers rigorous arguments but clothes them in enigmatic pronouncements. Wittgenstein himself said that his book is 'strictly philosophical and simultaneously literary, and yet there is no blathering in it'. This introduction, first published in 2005, considers both the philosophical and the literary aspects of the 'Tractatus' and shows how (...) they are related. It also shows how the work fits into Wittgenstein's philosophical development and the tradition of analytic philosophy, arguing strongly for the vigour and significance of that tradition. (shrink)

The issue of whether or not there are visual arguments has been an issue in informal logic and argumentation theory at least since 1996. In recent years, books, sections of prominent conferences and special journals issues have been devoted to it, thus significantly raising the profile of the debate. In this paper I will attempt to show how the views of the later Wittgenstein, particularly his views on images and the no- tion of “picturing”, can be brought to bear (...) on the question of whether there are such things as “purely visual” arguments. I shall draw on Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Blue and Brown Books and in Philosophical Investigations in order to argue that al- though visual images may occur as elements of argumentation, broadly conceived, it is a mistake to think that there are purely visual arguments, in the sense of illative moves from premises to conclusions that are conveyed by images alone, without the support or framing of words. (shrink)

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work... are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but from what (...) I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "[Philosophical Remarks] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind. He modifies the Tractatus's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."—Robert Hoffman, Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."—Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association. (shrink)

The main thesis of this book is that Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is an exemplification of Newtonian physics, whereas the later philosophy exemplifies contemporary, relativistic physics. The reader may recall Wittgenstein’s insistence, during both major periods of his thought, upon the separation of philosophy from science. However, Bolton’s unstated premise is that Wittgenstein’s thought was unconsciously determined by two different conceptions of physics. Whatever one may think of this, it leaves a question unanswered. Since both periods of Wittgenstein’s thought follow (...) the development of relativistic physics, why was he initially influenced by Newtonian physics or its expression in modern philosophy? Was this a contingent error of the youthful Wittgenstein, or an expression of historical inevitability? We find no discussion of this difficult problem in Bolton’s book. Instead, he claims, and to some extent shows, that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, crystallizes the axioms of modern philosophy, which is essentially Newtonian. At the historical level, this thesis is either wrong or uninformative. It is wrong because not all of modern philosophy can be explained on the basis of the peculiarities of modern or Newtonian physics. It is uninformative because to the extent that all modern philosophers took Newtonian physics for granted, the latter cannot account for the sharp differences between, say, John Locke and Hegel. Nevertheless, Bolton provides interesting and plausible reasons for regarding the Tractatus as an expression of that aspect of modern philosophy which may profitably be called "Newtonian." He fails to convince at least one reader that the repudiation of the Tractatus is a repudiation of modern philosophy for anyone other than Wittgenstein and his followers. On the other hand, once we discount, or even disregard, Bolton’s historical thesis, the more traditional virtues of his book come sharply into focus. Having recently reviewed the 686 page commentary by Baker and Hacker on the first third of the Investigations, as well as Wright’s 481 page essay on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, the author of this note is in a good position to appreciate the economy and lucidity of Bolton’s summary analysis of the main points in the Tractatus. As an example of my disagreement with Bolton’s interpretation, I begin with a brief citation from p. 86. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 HUME AND WITTGENSTEIN: CRITERIA VS. SKEPTICISM As far as philosophical admonitions go, there are probably few as famous as Wittgenstein's Blue Book warning: We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment : we try to find a substance for a substantive, (p. 1) Wittgenstein, of course, could have added: This is something we should have learned long ago from Hume. He could (...) have quoted the following passage from the Appendix to the Treatise: Philosophers begin to be reconcil'd to the principle, that we have no idea of external substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities. This must pave the way for a like principle with regard to the mind, that we have no notion of it, distinct from the particular perceptions. Neither causal necessitation, self, nor substances could be located by Hume no matter how hard he tried to analyse his experience of the world. For Hume, there were no experiential 'facts-of-thematter ' in virtue of which one could acknowledge, with epistemic justification, causal connectivity or necessity, the temporal extension of one's own mind, or the elusive particularity of that in which qualities are sometimes said to inhere. We know that for Hume, since he tells us, his skepticism is engendered by his inability to surrender either of the two principles, the conjunction of which he takes to be impossible. He is unable to deny that whatever is distinguishable is separable, and, as well, that there are de re connections between what is distinguishable. (T 636) What this means for Hume is that the world 'as it really is' could well be utter- 139 Iy chaotic, or, at least, structured by relations and connections which bear no resemblance to the relations and connections imposed upon our perceptions and subsequently projected onto the world. Hume, of course, is neither the disputatious sort of ersatz skeptic at whom he sneers in the opening paragraphs of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals; nor is he a fainthearted skeptic, who will, in the end, return to us everything he had only seemed to take away. We know just how unrelenting he is in his attempt to show that "the understanding never observes any real connexion among objects, and that even the union of cause and effect, when strictly examin'd, resolves itself into a customary association of ideas." (T 259-260) Although Book I of the Treatise is called "Of the Understanding," misunderstanding is not a topic that exercises Hume. Of course, it is not all that difficult to understand why this is so. 'Misunderstanding ' is, on its semantic face, inseparably concerned with language; and a concern for and about language is not something that attracts very much of Hume's explicit attention. Indeed, I am inclined to think that Hume's most important explicit comment about language is to be found in Book II, where he notes:...the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And 'tis only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually establish'd by human conventions without any promise. (T 490) 140 In Wittgensteinian terms, I think that Hume is saying, in effect, that the conventions that determine what is just with respect to property in a society are, as it were, definitive of a form of social life; that is, not agreements, contracts, or compacts — promises, as Hume refers to these — since such compacts are themselves embedded in something deeper, namely, in the human conventions that ground such compacts and contracts. Although I am going beyond what Hume says here, there is no reason to believe that we cannot identify the analogical linguistic counterparts of promises and conventions. The linguistic conventions provide the foundational matrix for the applicability of the justifying truth-making procedures. In essence, sense precedes, and determines, truth conditions. What I will argue for here is the view that it is impossible for Wittgenstein to have been a skeptic of a Humean variety; since such skepticism presupposes realism; and, whatever else Wittgenstein is, or isn't, he is not... (shrink)

This article presents an edition of unpublished notes by Sraffa on Wittgenstein’s “Blue Book”, written about 1941 and housed at Trinity College Library, Cambridge. The article includes an introduction to the relationship between Sraffa and Wittgenstein and concludes with an interpretation of various philosophical issues addressed in the notes, namely that of solipsism. Various connections between the “Blue Book” and the Philosophical Investigations are traced.

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable (...) therefore to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. (shrink)

I discuss some reservations about the exegetical power of the claim that the Tractatus is “anti-metaphysical.” The “resolute” reading has the virtue of fidelity to important and neglected features of the work, both its anti-metaphysical moves and its account of the nature of the activity of philosophy and its status. However, its proponents underestimate the barriers to maintaining a consistent fidelity to these features of the text. The image of a ladder suggests a mere instrumental means to arrive at (...) a place that can itself be characterized independently of our means of arrival; where we arrive via the process of the TLP is the conclusion of an argument, and so cannot be characterized independently of the argument that got us there. In his commitments about the process of logical analysis “within language,” he strives as much as in his statements about the world to return us to our ordinary ways of talking and making sense of what we say to one another. Given the internal relationship Wittgenstein is at pains to emphasize between language, thought, and reality, he could hardly have philosophical commitments about one of these terms (have a residual metaphysics of language) and isolate this from how he thinks about the others. In a discussion of “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” and “Chairman Mao is rare,” I argue that, pace Conant and Diamond’s claims to the contrary, logical categories are being invoked to explain why one cannot mean what one thinks one means in this phrase, and that Wittgenstein is both more anti-metaphysical in his treatment of these logical categories (in contrast with Frege) than the resolute readers consider him to be, and less successful in his treatment of how logical categories rule our judgments of sense and nonsense than they imply he is. Finally, I question the sharp boundary between logic and psychology and the “claustrophobic” feel that is created by a narrow construal of what one can make sense of in another’s words and person that underwrites their account of nonsense via a conflict between the meaning words can contain and our confused desires. Throughout, I discuss relevant passages of the Investigations that resolute readers treat as a re-expression of the themes of the Tractatus, to contrast the “anti-metaphysical” treatment these themes express in the Tractatus with the less dogmatic treatment they receive in the Investigations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 188-195 [Access article in PDF] Wittgenstein and Poetic Language B. R. Tilghman ACCORDING TO RICHARD KUHNS there are certain important parallels between symbolist poetic theory, especially that of Paul Valéry, and Wittgenstein's picture of language developed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1 It strikes me that these parallels are strained and certainly unhelpful in illuminating either what Valéry says about poetry or his (...) poetic practice. In fact, I find certain things in Valéry that are closer in spirit to Wittgenstein's view of language in the Philosophical Investigations. 2 My concern here is not to criticize Kuhns's thesis nor to provide a systematic exposition of Valéry's thoughts about poetry so much as it is to use some of what they say as stepping stones to show the relevance of Wittgenstein's work for understanding at least some of what goes on in poetry.Kuhn says that "Linguistic forms fascinated both Valéry and Wittgenstein, and the possibility that language might achieve necessity in that it produced sentences held together by bonds of absolute security and irrevocability operates in the logical forms of the Tractatus as it does in Valéry's art. A poem, Valéry believed, must be wrought with such necessity of part to part, such fastness of interior design, that the reader be compelled by his reading to recognize all the implications of the sentences." 3 I set aside trying to make sense of the idea of language achieving necessity and assume that the analogue of the "bonds of absolute security and irrevocability" in the Tractatus is that a perspicuous [End Page 188] symbolism should immediately make clear all the logical implications of any proposition. The analogy between whatever it is that counts as poetic implications and logical implication, however, seems impossibly lame. The word "implication" applied to the sentences of poetry is not a technical term as is the word when used in logic and its meaning may not be altogether clear. Nevertheless, some of what it may mean can be brought out, I believe, in terms of examples. Consider T. S. Eliot's line that "April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land...," the full sense—implications—of the words are not realized until they are seen in the context of the rest of the poem where we can understand them as making a point about the constrained and empty lives of the dwellers in the waste land. The description of the spring as cruel will help to serve as the poem develops to reveal to us the resistance of people to open themselves to human emotion and reaction. There are too many differences between this kind of thing and logical implication to make the analogy helpful.At one point Valéry says that "A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words." 4 To that statement Kuhns comments that "Valéry's idea that a poem is a machine for producing poetic states is analogous to Wittgenstein's idea that logic is a machine for making sense, that there exists a structure which is the structure of possible meanings." 5 Valéry apparently wanted a poetry in which there is something akin to a necessary connection between the images and tropes within a poem so that there is only one way to read it. Although it is by no means clear what success in such an enterprise would be, some sense can be made of the idea of a poem as a structure of meanings held together by a kind of necessity. I shall try to make this clear. A poem invites us to move in various directions as the force of some figure of speech comes home to us or various associations dawn on us. In music a certain chord progression seems to demand a resolution into the tonic as its completion. This could be described as a kind of necessity, but, of course, not a logical one. Given our... (shrink)

There are historically three main trends in understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The first is the interpretation offered by the Vienna Circle. They read Wittgenstein as arguing that neither metaphysical nor normative propositions have any cognitive meaning, and thus are to be considered nonsense. This interpretation understands Wittgenstein as setting the limits of sense, and prescribing that nothing of substantive philosophical importance lies beyond that line. The second way of reading the Tractatus, which has became popular since the (...) 1950s, is the interpretation which most currently accept as the early Wittgenstein's view; for this reason I refer to it as the 'standard reading.' According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein did not consider metaphysical and ethical discourse as nonsense. Rather, relying upon the distinction between saying [sagen] and showing [zeigen], he meant that these truths cannot be uttered, but instead are only shown. The standard reading can perhaps be best understood in contrast with the third interpretation, dubbed the "resolute reading." The resolute reading takes seriously Wittgenstein's remark at 6.54 that "[m]y propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense [unsinnig]." According to the resolute interpretation, Wittgenstein is not advancing a series of philosophical theses in the Tractatus. Rejecting the distinction characteristic of standard readings, between propositions without sense [sinnlos] and just plain nonsense [unsinnig], these interpreters read Wittgenstein as treating ethical and metaphysical inquiry, as well as a bulk of the doctrines in the text, as nonsense. To them, Wittgenstein did not intend to put forth any theses in the the text. Instead his methodology is therapeutic, similar to the later philosophy. It In this essay I explain each interpretation, and evaluate them in terms of textual and philosophical viability. I conclude by arguing that the biases which exist in the tradition of analytic philosophy substantively temper the interpretation of historical texts, which ultimately leads to the fundamental distinction between these three interpretations. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of this. (...) class='Hi'>Wittgenstein's exile was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 461 Whitehead moved beyond classical accounts of "points" and "instants" toward a relativistic understanding of space/time. Lowe is cautious about reading too much of the later thinking into the pre-191o writings. Whitehead's interest in philosophy was satisfied mainly through his discussions with fellow members of the Cambridge Apostles who met regularly to discuss issues of a general nature. Among the Apostles McTaggart stands out as having had (...) the most important influence on Whitehead's philosophical development. McTaggart 's staunch neo-Hegelianism served as a stimulus to Whitehead but he retained an independent outlook throughout. Readers of Process and Reality will be interested in Lowe's treatment of Whitehead's flirtation with Roman Catholicism and his subsequent agnosticism during the last decade of the nineteenth century. By 19~5 he had regained his theism and found a place for it in his system. Much care is given to the collaboration with Russell on Principia Mathematica during the first decade of the new century. Lowe corrects the oft-held belief that Whitehead let Russell do most of the work on the text. By a careful study of the correspondence, Lowe shows that Whitehead continually guided the joint enterprise toward more detailed proofs and elaborations. Russell frequently remained content with truncated arguments for his fundamental logical principles. Whitehead demanded that each argument receive sufficient articulation so as to enhance the pedagogical value of the work. Russell's atomic pluralism, which insisted that all relations were external to their relata, never appealed to Whitehead. During the period of the Principia, Whitehead chose to ignore that aspect of Russell's perspective. One difficult dimension of this decade-long collaboration is Russell's alleged affair with Evelyn Whitehead. Lowe argues that this relationship was never consummated even though Evelyn was and remained one of the three great loves of Russell's life. Whitehead somehow managed to overlook what must have been an obvious threat to the integrity of his marriage. Lowe's brilliant and definitive account in this first volume of a two-volume work brings us to the Whiteheads' move from Cambridge to London. Difficulties with University officials and a need for larger horizons compelled Whitehead to emerge from the cozy atmosphere of Trinity College where he had spent thirty highly creative years working on the frontiers of mathematics and logic. The second volume will take us from the years in London to Whitehead's life at Harvard, and should, no doubt, be as rich and insightful as the first. ROBERT S. CORRINGTON The Pennsylvania State University Allan Janik. Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger. Studien zur OsterreichischenPhilosophie, Band 9. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1985. Pp. 161. Paper, $18.95. In 1973, Allan Janik and Stephan Toulmin published Wittgenstein's Vienna in which they explored the intellectual atmosphere of the city in which Wittgenstein grew to intellectual maturity. Both Toulmin, who had been a student of Wittgenstein's at 46~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~5:3 JULY 1987 Cambridge, and Janik, who was interested in Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer, suspected that Wittgenstein might more accurately be seen as a Viennese intellectual dealing with the problems pervading the late Habsburg empire than simply as the successor of Frege and Russell who comes to dominate English and American philosophy. In the section on method in Wittgenstein's Vienna, Janik and Toulmin carefully avoided claiming that their picture of Wittgenstein and Vienna explained the Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations, but they suggested that Wittgenstein is more intelligible as both a man and a thinker when viewed against his complete historical context, rather than when he is seen solely as a misfit in Cambridge in his last years. Janik has continued exploring themes connected with pre-World War I Austrian philosophy and has emphasized the connection between thinkers in this milieu with the new image of Wittgenstein which is emerging from the wealth of Wittgensteiniana now appearing. The present volume is a group of non-consecutive essays written from 1966 to 1984 in which Janik argues in favor of recognizing Austrian philosophy as something to be understood in terms of the special circumstances of the late Hapsburg empire and its demise. One of its... (shrink)

Sixty years after its first edition, there is an increasing consensus among scholars that the work posthumously published as _Philosophical Investigations _represents something that is far from a complete picture of Wittgenstein’s second book project. G.H. von Wright’s seminal research on the _Nachlass_ was an important contribution in this direction, showing that the Wittgenstein papers can reveal much more than the source of specific remarks. This book specifically explores Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical_ _Investigations_ from the different angles of its originary conceptions, including (...) the mathematical texts, shedding new light on fundamental issues in twentieth century and contemporary philosophy. Leading authorities in the field focus on newly published or hitherto unpublished sources for the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work and a Wittgenstein typescript, translated for the first time into English, is included as an appendix. (shrink)

Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash “After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!” – Friedrich Nietzsche[1] INTRODUCTION Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead!”[2] but lamented that his contemporaries remained living in the (...) shadow of God. For Nietzsche, the morality of his time was still based in the Christian tradition, even though faith in God was waning. Bioethics lives under a similar shadow: the shadow of Enlightenment Era-rationalism. Bioethics curricula focus on principles derived from Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. The allure of maintaining a moral framework that provides a rational method that can be handily applied to any situation remains strong. The principlist approach advanced by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress is taught to nearly all medical students in the United States,[3] and is essentially the canonical ethical framework of bioethics. In this model, the principle of autonomy is Kantian in nature, and the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence are utilitarian in nature.[4] Moreover, the presented framework is an approach that, when applied rationally to any healthcare scenario, will yield an outcome “considered moral.”[5] This reflects a faulty conception of philosophy that plagues much of bioethics, wherein the only contribution of philosophy pertinent to bioethics is moral philosophy elucidated by European thinkers in the Enlightenment Era. The landscape of moral philosophy has evolved significantly from the 18th century. However, the bioethical world has not kept up with the philosophical world, remaining instead in the shadow of antiquated moral thinking. Also lacking in bioethics are other disciplines of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, existentialism, and aesthetics, which are often given no consideration at all. The inclusion of both modern moral philosophy and other philosophical fields is necessary if bioethics is to survive its transition into modernity. l. The Shadow of Enlightenment Enlightenment Era philosophers such as Immanuel Kant argued that one need only employ reason to obtain knowledge; emotion bore no relevance when determining ethical behavior. Kant’s moral theories thus privileged a duty to act according to moral imperatives over feelings. Other Enlightenment Era philosophers such as John Locke developed systems that attempted to quantify human goods and human ills. This quantification potentially reduces human welfare and suffering to utility. Today, in the world of philosophy, such a “neutral analysis,” as Cora Diamond noted, is “dead or moribund.”[6] Bernard Williams remarked that such moral philosophy is “empty and boring,”[7] and G. E. M. Anscombe stated that it “no longer generally survives.”[8] And yet, just as the atheists in Nietzsche’s world dwelt in the moral code of a dead God, bioethicists still pursue a unified moral system that takes an input, applies some moral rules, and generates a moral outcome, like the four principles approach that Beauchamp and Childress laid out.[9] Some detractors of principlism take issue with their approach for not being unified enough and want to replace it with a procedural framework that is even more systematic and complicated. They argue that the resulting moral framework would be a “comprehensive decision procedure for arriving at answers”[10] that retains the “impartiality that is an essential part of morality.”[11] The shadow of rationalist morality has caused bioethical decision making to become detached and rigid when bioethics should concern itself with the humans whose lives it affects. A rational, divorced-from-emotion way of thinking ultimately fails to yield satisfactory results when decisions are made by and for emotional beings. Dr. Paul Farmer, among others, championed the idea that bioethics should be de-philosophized, as philosophy, cold and calculated, fails to adequately respond to the realities of those worst off.[12] Instead, Dr. Farmer emphasized the inclusion of the social sciences, like sociology and anthropology, in bioethics. Undoubtedly, Dr. Farmer was on the right track; bioethics should certainly engage directly with the people whom its decisions involve. If the narrow band of moral philosophy currently found in bioethics – that of stringent rationalism – were all that philosophy had to offer, I, too, would advocate for a de-philosophization. Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that to attempt to capture the complexity of moral thinking in a manner that employs reason alone and casts aside emotion is a “hopeless task,” like reconstructing a sharp image “from a blurred one.”[13] Unfortunately, bioethics is mired in the remnants of this hopeless task. To Dr. Farmer, the dominant moral framework was too restrictive and was unresponsive to the social and humanitarian needs of those whom bioethics is meant to help. As such, he wished to free bioethics from the shadow of a morality derived from rationalist thinkers. ll. Beyond Rationalism Like Nietzsche, who tried to resolve Europe’s post-religion vacuum by providing his society with a new way to live, Dr. Farmer wanted to replace the rationalist philosophy upon which bioethics was built with a “resocialization” of the field.[14] I agree with Dr. Farmer’s call for resocialization, as well as his denouncement of philosophy as it exists in bioethics. Evaluating risks and benefits along a predetermined array of moral principles is far too rigid and impersonal to guide what are often the most important decisions one will make. For Dr. Farmer, the most needed change was restoring the social element of bioethics. However, in advocating for this resocialization, Dr. Farmer casts philosophy as the antithesis of social science, noting that “few would regard philosophy … as a socializing discipline.”[15] I disagree. Rationalist moral philosophy may be lacking in socializing force, but there are other fields of philosophy that are responsive to our social reality. Rather than de-philosophizing bioethics, it makes more sense to replace the antisocial philosophies predominant in bioethics with prosocial philosophies better suited to it. Of course, the contribution of philosophy to bioethics is more than moral theories from the Enlightenment Era. There are more recent philosophical contributions from outside the field of moral philosophy that have roused bioethical interest. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, et al., argue for philosophy’s continued place in bioethics, citing Derek Parfit’s “non-identity problem,” which altered the landscape of reproductive ethics, and David Chalmers’ contributions to philosophy of consciousness, which have implications for the moral status of brain organoids.[16] Still, these are narrow applications of philosophy to highly specialized areas of bioethics, which not all bioethicists are inclined to delve into. Philosophy in bioethics should not be confined to niche applications in specialist fields but should influence all bioethical thought. Fortunately, there remains untapped a wealth of philosophical disciplines that pertains to exactly this. Philosophy of language investigates the nature of meaning and understanding in communication, which is a necessary social action. Successfully deciphering and conveying moral values in discourse is a bioethicist’s bread and butter, as is resolving disagreements and reaching agreements. Indeed, it is often the case that miscommunication lies at the root of an impasse between a doctor and a patient. An understanding of the nature of the disagreement would help resolve the conflict, as different types of disagreements require different interventions for resolution. For instance, a “substantive disagreement,”[17] in which two parties use the same terms in the same ways and have a fundamental disagreement on which outcome is more desirable, can be resolved only if one party yields to the other. On the other hand, a “merely verbal dispute,”[18] in which two parties use the same terms to represent entirely different concepts and values, requires standardization of terminological usage for its resolution. As such, no one can overstate the moral importance of successful communication in bioethics, and an exploration of language itself would prove invaluable to a bioethicist’s training. Existentialism is another subset of philosophy that acknowledges the social nature of human existence, noting that one’s being in the universe is concomitant with the existence of others sharing the same universe.[19] Thus, there is the recognition that whatever existence is, it is not complete without the existence of others. With this as a starting point, existentialists examined how to live meaningfully with others in this world. Since ethics crucially involves others, it is no surprise that existentialists pondered how to live moral lives. Existentialist conceptions of morality did not revolve around acting in accordance with a set of rules, but rather, recognized individual freedom in choosing how to act and emphasized acting authentically. In this vein, bioethicists should commit to doing what is right rather than committing to applying a set of principles. Existentialism, while part of the broader bioethics literature, is less common throughout bioethics curricula and deserves more prominence. Martin Heidegger, for instance, emphasized the difference between two types of thinking: “calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking.” Heidegger characterizes calculative thinking as a computation, wherein from some given starting conditions “definite results”[20] are determined, and contrasts this with meditative thinking, which he describes as “thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”[21] Heidegger was critical of the pervasiveness of calculative thinking, seeing it as the “ground of thoughtlessness,”[22] in which we only relate to the world in a meaningless, mechanical way. This is the emphasized type of thinking in rationalist conceptions of morality popular in bioethics; from a set of starting conditions, a series of rules are applied, and a moral outcome is calculated. Such a technique, however, discounts the personal meaning individuals place on the aspects of their lives relevant to their decision making, as well as the meaning in committing to doing what is right. Under calculative thinking, such a commitment is reduced to rote rule-following. A turn to meditative thinking would ensure that bioethical decisions comport with living meaningful lives. Even aesthetics, a discipline devoted to examining beauty and taste,[23] has a place in bioethics. Just as the viewing of a painting, the listening of a song, or the reading of a book elicits an effective response, hearing a patient’s story leaves an emotional imprint. The recounting of a traumatic moment imparts sadness, and a joyous occasion begets joy in the listener as well. As acknowledged in the field of everyday aesthetics, these aesthetic experiences often spur us to act:[24] The unsightly appearance of a polluted riverbank drives us to remove the trash; the presence of sorrow in one’s life drives us to ameliorate it. To be mindful of aesthetic experiences and allow them to affect us emotionally is paramount to the motivation of a bioethicist to serve the patient, not out of an obligation to a job description, but out of a desire to truly avail the patient of their anguish. For example, the new field of narrative medicine utilizes critical reading and literary techniques to train clinicians and bioethicists in emotional understanding and listening skills that stress the social aspects of medicine beyond rational analysis and decision making. CONCLUSION Dr. Farmer is absolutely correct; bioethics is in dire need of resocialization. It should not be the case that the justification for a moral action is essentially that “the rules say so,” or that simply by teaching such rules to medical students, the very act of making bioethical decisions that diverge from those determined by principles can be seen as an act of “bad faith … hubris or, worse, malpractice.”[25] As bioethicists are coming to realize, the rationalist philosophical traditions that bioethics was founded upon are past their expiry, and the time for change is now. Indeed, as Dr. Farmer urges, “socializing disciplines” like anthropology, history, political economy, and sociology are necessary to humanize the field of bioethics.[26] So too, however, can philosophy be a socializing discipline, if we know where to look. Bioethics should evolve. Its new goal should be to focus on meaningful human relationships, and to phase out rigid, impersonal modes of moral thinking. The limited sampling of unsatisfying moral theories from hundreds of years ago leaves many bioethics students cold, and it is easy to see why bioethicists are ready to part ways with philosophy. I believe this is a move in the wrong direction; there is a place for philosophy in the future of bioethics. Just as bioethics needs a resocialization, it is also needs of a re-philosophization. These enrichments complement one another. There is more to bioethics than mechanically determining the right course of action in a healthcare setting. Bioethics engages with the most ancient of philosophical questions: questions of what makes human existence meaningful, what makes us who we are, how we want to relate to others, how and why we feel, what our place in the world is, how we can communicate what we think, and why our moral intuitions are so compelling. We would be remiss if we did not begin to investigate additional contributions to morality from a wider range of philosophies that try to provide answers to such questions, as they offer a richness to moral thinking that cannot be gleaned from traditional bioethical approaches alone. - [1] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 109. [2] Nietzsche, 120. [3] Daniel C O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver Transplantation,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 47, no. 1 : 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhab039. [4] K. D. Clouser and B. Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15, no. 2 : 219–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/15.2.219. [5] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 97. [6] Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 : 168, https://doi.org/10.2307/468998. [7] Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Canto ed, xvii. [8] G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 : 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100037943. [9] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed, 13. [10] Clouser and Gert, 233. [11] Clouser and Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” 235. [12] Paul Farmer and Nicole Gastineau Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics: A View from Below,” Developing World Bioethics 4, no. 1 : 17–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-8731.2004.00065.x. [13] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. Joachim Schulte, trans. P. M. S. Hacker, 4th edition, 40. [14] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. [15] Farmer and Campos, 20. [16] Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby et al., “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today,” The American Journal of Bioethics: AJOB, June 30, 2021, 3–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1940355. [17] Brendan Balcerak Jackson, “Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness,” Erkenntnis 79, no. S1 : 31–54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9444-5. [18] C. S. I. Jenkins, “Merely Verbal Disputes,” Erkenntnis 79, no. 1 : 11–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9443-6. [19] Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/existentialism/; Anita Avramides, “Other Minds,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/other-minds/. [20] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, Harper Torchbooks, 46. [21] Heidegger, 46. [22] Heidegger, 45. [23] Nick Zangwill, “Aesthetic Judgment,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/aesthetic-judgment/. [24] Yuriko Saito, “Aesthetics of the Everyday,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/. [25] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 112. [26] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 129-135. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Successions of words are so agreeable. It is about this. —Gertrude Stein Nachoem Wijnberg (1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. He also a professor of cultural entrepreneurship and management at the Business School of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1989, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four novels, which, in my opinion mark a high point in Dutch contemporary literature. His novels even more than his poetry (...) are criticized for being inaccessible, which I generally take to be a compliment. It would be like saying that Fernando Pessoa is inaccessible, which he is not. Neither is Wijnberg. When we think of the combination economist-poet we are immediately reminded of the American poet Wallace Stevens, who, as the story goes, had two stacks of paper on his desk, one for contracts, one for poems. We also know that Stevens wrote on the economy and that questions of economy and insurance surface at multiple points in his poems. The following text is a very preliminary attempt to point at the intersections between poems, novels, business, and poetry in Wijnberg’s work. On the back cover of his novel De opvolging ( The Succession , 2005), Wijnberg states the following: “[This is] a novel for whomever is interested in the workings of a company as much as in the workings of a poem.” Wijnberg thus claims that the way in which a company “works” may be similar to the way in which a poem “works.” The question is the obvious one, what does this similarity consist in? De opvolging tells the story of company in which bosses and company doctors, secretaries, children, clowns, and beggars have tons of meetings, recite poems, perform plays, tell jokes, and succeed each other, climbing up and down in the company’s hierarchy. De opvolging is a novel in which the career of people follows the career of words. It resonates with Gertrude Stein's sentences, "Grammar. What is it. Who was it" (1975, 50). The words in Wijnberg's poems are like he characters in his novel. And if we keep in mind this allegorical reading of De opvolging , which is obviously only one of the possible readings, we may be able to understand some aspects of Wijnberg’s poetry. A repetition is already a pun. Look, that word is trying it again, as if it is afraid that by not doing it it would give up the hope that it will ever be able to do something. A pun is the opposite of the first word coming to the mind of someone who shouts it when he suddenly discovers something. (104) The repetition, the succession of the same word, is already a pun, a joke. The succession of the father by the son after the revolution is a joke. "Look he's trying it again!" The essence of a joke is a repetition. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” is its opposite. Poems can easily become jokes, depending on the way the words follow and repeat each other. In De opvolging , the careers of the bosses, good and bad secretaries, and company doctors easily become jokes, as they are “afraid that by not doing it [they] would give up the hope that [they] will ever be able to do something.” Not only the repetition, but also the distance and difference between the words in a poem, their cause and effect relations can be read as company relations. This becomes clear when we, for example, read the first lines of the poem “Cause, sign” from Het leven van ( The Life Of , 2009). A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate some- thing only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I would be able to say more about it. (49) Upon reading the first two lines we can already conclude that any word may be cause or sign or both. If a sign is also a cause there is no reason to discriminate it, yet to the poet they are still different. This difference only becomes expressible the moment he would have a secretary. Just like in De opvolging , the secretary introduces a distance; not in a company but in a poem. Hence the difference between “good” and “bad” secretaries in a company, where the good secretary of one boss may be the bad secretary of another one. The more we can say about the bosses of the company, or signifiers of the poem, the greater the distance we introduce between them and us. We should take serious the relation between Wijnberg’s novels and poems. Although they operate on different scales, they explain and converse with each other. Another example may be the novel Politiek en liefde ( Politics and Love , 2002), which deals with the relation, precisely, between politics and love. In the novel, Nicolai, a lieutenant in the Dutch army, is sent to Africa on a military mission. Upon leaving a receives a letter from his father. Dear son, Don’t do anything stupid before your father has advised you to do so. Your mother asked me to write a wise letter. I have been looking for wisdom for half a day and haven’t found much. If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave. What I want to say is that you have to return from Africa in good health, and before you know it the world will be your slave [....] Signed with a kiss from your father. (88) The line, “If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave,” returns as the title of poem in Het leven van: “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” (12-3), which elaborates this theme. So both in the way that these poems are structured and in their subject matter, they refer to the structures of our economy, to the ever-continuing line of CEOs succeeding each other like words, to the distance between them introduced by bureaucracy, and giving and receiving as economical and poetical acts. Poem and economy map onto each other, as in another episode from De opvolging : Edward reads two of the beggar’s poems about presents. Of a holiday nothing remains, except for memories, and if some of them are bad I’d rather forget them all; if I get a present I’d rather get something that’s useful to me for a long time. If I may choose, I choose what I can use longest, long enough to partially forget that this was the present, because it feels bad when nothing is left of it. […] Giving away becomes destruction in the stock destruction economy [ voorraadvernie -tigings-economie ], that is a gift economy [ geschenkeneconomie ], encountering for the first time an economy in which there’s selling and buying on markets. Instead of destroying supplies someone can also quickly say that they aren’t worth anything anymore; if someone wants to take them I’d gladly give him something extra. In a stock destruction economy he is someone who each day wants to work more hours than his colleagues. If around a company there is a gift economy in which someone’s rank is determined and made visible by the gifts someone can give someone else, a company will be more often character- ized by an invisible or unclear system of ranks. (152) Two poems about gifts present two different economical models, described by Wijnberg with the terms “stock destruction economy” and “gift economy.” Here we immediately recall the opposition introduced by George Bataille’s work on the concept of expenditure in The Accursed Share , where a “general economy” would surpass the stock destruction economy based on scarcity (capitalism) and become a gift economy (potlatch) and an egalitarian (communist) society. These claims are made both on the level of the poems and in their discursive explanation. They follow each other and on each other. I would like to finish this introduction to Wijnberg’s writing with a translation from his novel De joden ( The Jews , 1999), which develops the story of Hitler abdicating as chancellor of the Third Reich, appointing philosopher Martin Heidegger as his successor. In a conversation with two Russian actor-spies, sent by Stalin to figure out the situation, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the abdication scene. Maimon: You were there when Hitler resigned? Benjamin: In the room we’re right now. The desk and the chairs are new. After his resignation Hitler would like to take his furniture to his new house. Martin naturally agrees. It is a sunny day. Martin is very nervous and complains about the heat. Martin is wearing his best dark blue suit, not his professor’s robe. Hitler is wearing his uniform. We enter the room and Hitler gets up and embraces Martin. Martin is not very good at embracing. Hitler shakes his hand. Hitler’s cap is on the desk. The cap has a metal lining. Hitler has strong neck muscles. Hitler says: A man is unclean. He takes a bath. Does he make the bath water unclean? I say: a man is unclean. He steps into a river. A little further a man steps into the river; does he become unclean? Hitler nods. I say: a man is standing in music. Another man hears the music but also sees the first man moving on the beat of the music in a way that he is certain that the music would excite different feelings in him if he wouldn’t to see the first man. Hitler says: a man is clean, listens to music, is suddenly touched and he doesn’t know by what. The conversation ends in the way you know it ends. Hitler picks up his cap from the desk and puts it on Martin’s head. (73-4) Aware of the never ending debate on the question of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi regime, Wijnberg has the audacity to present the arguments of complicity in the religious terminology of cleanliness and uncleanliness, while at the same time recalling overtones of Hitler’s supposed love for Wagner, suggesting a relation between Benjamin and Hitler, and so on. The space of this introduction is to small to treat a novel like De joden , a reading of which together with passages from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political , Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit , Christopher Fynsk's Heidegger: Thought and Historicity , and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book would be extremely elucidating and potentially open new avenues in thinking Heidegger's emphasis on poetry after the fall of the Nazi empire. But at this point we will have to curb our curiosity and follow the poet himself. The themes of the relation between business and poetry, but also Chinese landscape painting, love, Indian and Japanese poetry, and Western philosophy are analyzed and assimilated in Wijnberg’s work without ever losing the clarity of expression. It may be that, according to Alain Badiou, the “Age of the Poets” is over, but its end (Paul Celan) has exactly brought a new balance between philosophy and poetry, and it is this playful, but nonetheless serious balance that makes one hope that one day Wijnberg’s complete oeuvre might become available to readers across the planet. Tiranë, Albania February 15, 2011 English translations (all of them translated by David Colmer, who is preparing an English collection of Wijnberg’s poems entitled Advanced Payment ): Poetry International Words Without Borders Green Integer Review from Het leven van ( The Life of ) THE LIFE OF KANT, OF HEGEL As if every day he takes a decision that is as good as when he’d been able to think about it all his life. The life of Kant, of Hegel, the days of the life of, select three or four of them. Tell what he has discovered during those days as if he were the last one who knew so little. Give me something that I can cancel against then I can prepare myself for it. The reward is that I may continue with what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This has nothing to do with everything remaining the same if I say that I no longer want anything else. I wouldn’t be able to say in which one and the other occur in a way that I if I knew something to cancel that one against it wouldn’t be possible now. The stars above my head and being able to say what belongs to what if I’ve let them in. FOLLOWING MY HEART WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES Observing the rules without observing the rules by going where the rules no longer apply. I could also observe the rules there by applying them to what at great distance may resemble what the rules are about. But why would I do that, not to confuse someone who is seeing me from a great distance? Behind this morning the morning prepares itself when the rules are everything I have. IF I BORROW ENOUGH MONEY THE BANK BECOMES MY SLAVE A bank lends me money, if I don’t pay it back they tell my boss that he has to pay them my salary. But they have to leave me enough to eat and sleep and an umbrella when it’s raining. They can also empty my house, the furniture isn’t worth a lot, but every little helps. Each morning I leave for work, if I don’t start early they’ll soon get someone else, no bank will lend me money when the sun is shining. My boss has given me a cat to raise as a dog. Of course I know that it won’t work out, but I’ve asked for a week—maybe the cat gets lucky, maybe I get lucky. My hands around a cup of coffee, before I leave for work, warm-empty, cold-empty, as if hidden in the mist over a lawn. What I make when there’s no work left for me, I’m ashamed to say how little it is. Once I’m outside I check it, if they watch out of the window they can see me doing it. Suppose it is so much that I’d stay counting for hours, it’s getting dark and I’m still there. They stay watching for a while once they’ve finished their work, but have to go home, I get that, sure, I could also go home and continue counting there. If it’s too little running back immediately won’t help, because nobody’s there anymore, and if I come back tomorrow I may have spent what’s missing tonight. Going somewhere where it’s warm enough to walk around without clothes during daytime, it helps me to know that something’s more there than here. For someone like me there’s work anywhere, it shouldn’t take a week to find work for me there. Three times work and a home close to work, I may choose one and try for a week whether I want to stay there. If at the end of the week I don’t want to stay I’m back on the next day, then it was a week’s holiday. RULES If that’s against a rule, it’s yet another one that I cannot observe, or only so briefly that I cannot re- member it later. Anyways the rules are only there to help me remember what I need in order to do better what I do. In that respect there’s no difference between the rules that I find in a book and the rules that I think of early in the morning. I know that because I’ve made a rule just now nothing has yet to observe it. CAUSE, SIGN A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate something only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this down myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I could to say more about it. If something is taken away from me I consider how it would be if the opposite had been taken from me. That is what causes or signifies what is farthest away from what is caused or signified by what has been taken away from me. note: For the translations of “The life of Kant, of Hegel” and “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” I was able to consult David Colmer’s wonderful translations. (shrink)

I examine the relationship between complete analysis and clarificatory analysis and explain why Wittgenstein thought he required both in his account of how to solve the problems of philosophy. I first describe Wittgenstein’s view of how philosophical confusions arise, by explaining how it is possible to misunderstand the logic of everyday language. I argue that any method of logical analysis in the Tractatus will inevitably be circular, but explain why this does not threaten the prospect of solving philosophical problems. (...) I distinguish between complete and clarificatory analysis and argue that Wittgenstein’s ‘strictly correct’ philosophical method is clarificatory analysis. Finally I discuss the relationship between the two forms of analysis and claim that, although, at the time of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed that the possibility of complete analysis underpins clarificatory analysis, in fact this was a mistake. In the Philosophical Investigations complete analysis is rejected and clarificatory analysis is retained. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 345-363 [Access article in PDF] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A "Poem" by Ludwig Wittgenstein David Rozema In the Fall term of 1911 the 22-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein presented himself to the Cambridge philosopher of mathematics, Bertrand Russell, as a prospective student of philosophy. Wittgenstein had left off his studies as a promising young aeronautical engineer because, in the course of his engineering studies, (...) he had become obsessed with problems in the foundations of mathematics, the very problems Russell himself had tried to solve in his Principia Mathematica, a work he had completed just the year before. Wittgenstein, it seems, did not consider Russell's work to be the end of the matter, and so he had planned a book of his own on the subject. Although this work never materialized, Wittgenstein's interest in philosophy grew under his studies with Russell. And although Wittgenstein's early work in the philosophy of mathematics and logic were the initial impetus for his interest in philosophy, the events of his life soon led him back to the concerns which have always been central to the spirit of philosophy: How ought a man to live? What constitutes the good for man? What sort of life is a worthy or a beautiful one?It is likely that Wittgenstein's concern with these questions was heightened by what he saw in Russell, who followed a notoriously loose way of life outside of his academic studies. 1 If Wittgenstein ever wondered whether or not there was any connection between Russell's philosophical commitments and Russell's way of life, he never directly confronted Russell with the question. Russell was, after all, his benefactor, his mentor, and the source for his initial interest in philosophical problems. 2 Nevertheless, I maintain, Wittgenstein did confront Russell indirectly: he confronted the part of himself that was like Russell and, by attempting [End Page 345] to describe it in writing—the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—he discovered its barrenness. Insofar as such an act of writing is elucidatory of a person's soul in what and in how it pictures, it can legitimately be called a kind of poetry, for it bears the essential feature of all poetics: it serves to shape, through catharsis, the passions.Thus, though Wittgenstein neither considered the Tractatus to be a poem nor intentionally wrote it as a poem, it turned out to be a kind of poem in the sense that its form fits its content, both of which, in turn, accurately picture a specific form of life, and the passional result of this poetic construction is (and was, for Wittgenstein) a certain appropriate disdain for the form of life it pictures. This is what I suggest with regard to the Tractatus: it is most helpful and is best read as a poem. I will also try to show that this is how Wittgenstein himself came to think it should be read, which in turn helps to explain why he initially allowed and later continued to allow its publication.What does it mean to read the Tractatus as a poem picturing the form of life implicated by a philosophy like that of Russell's? In this poem Wittgenstein takes the fundamental principles of Russell's philosophy—that all words are signs that stand for objects or kinds of objects and that all meaningful propositions represent a possible arrangement of these objects—and draws out the full-blown implications of these principles. In the last section of the poem Wittgenstein shows the practical consequences of a life lived on these principles, concluding: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 3 The two-edged nature of this remark carries the force appropriate to the last line of a poem, for it is both descriptive and imagistic. It describes Wittgenstein's own thought when he realizes that, because of his Russellian philosophical commitments, he has nothing to say with regard to the good, the truth, and the beauty of life; and it is an image of the necessity that a... (shrink)

‘Tractatus, since I first read it, has been a constant source of philosophical inspiration to me’ so says Ganguly in the preface of his book Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Preliminary. This extraordinary commentary on Tractatus is unique in the sense that it has discussed all the commentaries available at that time while examining and critiquing, wherever necessary, the commentaries as well as the original with utmost passion and sincerity. His approach to the author was feasibly sympathetic and (...) sensitive, though he never fails in his duty of being a rigorous critique while examining an apparent inconsistency or weak arguments. As it is nearly impossible to deal with all the contentious topics of the Tractatus that Ganguly dealt with in a single paper, I would like to concentrate only on the fundamental claim of Ganguly that the Tractatus 6.54 cannot really get Wittgenstein out of the paradoxical situation. Hence the paper will be divided into three main sections. In the first section, the paper will deal with the palpable paradox that results from the reading of Tractatus 6.54 and the controversies involved in various interpretations of the paradox. In the second section, there will be an attempt to focus on the problem of description in the distinction between saying and showing, between thinking and imagining, between thought and reality in order to understand the annotation of T6.54 by Ganguly. In the third section, there will be an attempt on my part to interpret the paragraph Tractatus 6.54 in the light of the distinction between Sinnloss and Unsinn from a non-resolute perspective and evaluate Ganguly’s account of the paragraph in question from that perspective. (shrink)

My thesis is that the say-show distinction is the basis of Ludwig Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy in both the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the Philosophical Investigations (1953). -/- Wittgenstein said that the Investigations should be read in conjunction with the Tractatus. To understand the Tractatus we must understand the say-show distinction: the principle that "what can be shown, cannot be said". A correct interpretation of Wittgenstein's philosophy will explain the significance of the say-show distinction for (...) the Investigations. I evaluate three available readings of the say-show distinction which fail to meet this challenge. I argue that Wittgenstein's main purpose throughout his career was to replace traditional philosophy with an alternative conception of philosophy, which can only be understood through the say-show distinction. The Tractatus and the Investigations are different attempts to present the same conception of philosophy. I describe how, in both cases, they present a distinctive account of the nature of philosophical problems, the appropriate methods of philosophy, the end result of a philosophical task and the overall aim of philosophy. -/- I argue that my interpretation provides a correct view of the significant continuities and discontinuities between the Tractatus and the Investigations. The failure of the Tractatus was not a flaw in the conception of philosophy presented in it, nor a flaw in the say-show distinction. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein failed properly to implement his proposed conception of philosophy, as he remained in the grip of traditional philosophical presuppositions. The Investigations presents the same conception of philosophy, but freed from the presuppositions of the Tractatus. The say-show distinction remains the basis of Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy in the Investigations. (shrink)

Over fifteen years have passed since Cora Diamond and James Conant turned Wittgenstein scholarship upside down with the program of “resolute” reading, and ten years since this reading was crystallized in the major collection _The New Wittgenstein_. This approach remains at the center of the debate about Wittgenstein and his philosophy, and this book draws together the latest thinking of the world’s leading Tractatarian scholars and promising newcomers. Showcasing one piece alternately from each “camp”, _Beyond the Tractatus (...) Wars_ pairs newly commissioned pieces addressing differing views on how to understand early Wittgenstein, providing for the first time an arena in which the debate between “strong” resolutists, “mild” resolutists and “elucidatory” readers of the book can really take place. The collection includes famous “samizdat” essays by Warren Goldfarb and Roger White that are finally seeing the light of day. (shrink)

The works of Ludwig Wittgenstein are notoriously difficult to interpret because of the peculiarity of their style and content. They are fragmentary and aphoristic. They are in some respects very personal. They treat philosophical problems as things to be overcome rather than solved. Wittgenstein indicates that their point is ethical. In an age when philosophy has primarily conceived of itself as systematic, scientific and objective these features of Wittgenstein's works appear as oddities. Commentators have frequently ignored the peculiarities of (...) Wittgenstein's works and have read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations as contributing unproblematically to contemporary philosophical debates. ;If, however, we read Wittgenstein's works alongside of the confessions of Augustine and Tolstoy we can see them as contributions to a mostly forgotten genre of philosophical writing, namely, philosophical confession. In this way we can see more clearly that the aim of Wittgenstein's writing is transformation rather than philosophical doctrine and we can see the various peculiarities of his works as contributing to that conception of philosophy. Philosophical problems, for him, are the illusions of language and are therefore problems which are attached to the first-person point of view and problems of will rather than of intellect. The style of his writing is a response to the demands of this conception. ;The first chapter demonstrates that Wittgenstein read and took very seriously the works of Augustine and Tolstoy. It then brings out features of their confessions which are essential to understanding the form and content of Wittgenstein's works. The second chapter interprets the Tractatus in the light of Tolstoy's A Confession. The third chapter interprets the Investigations in the light of Augustine's Confessions. The fourth chapter suggests how we should understand the ethical dimension of Wittgenstein's works given their confessional character. In the concluding postscript, I briefly suggest how this discussion of Wittgenstein's works as confessional could be seen a contribution to a wider discussion of what sort of writing is legitimately philosophical. (shrink)

Schopenhauer was the first and greatest philosophical influence on Wittgenstein, a fact attested to by those closest to him. He began by accepting Schopenhauer's division of total reality into phenomenal and noumenal, and offered a new analysis of the phenomenal in his first book, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. The Logical Positivists, who believed that only the phenomenal existed, took this as the paradigm for their philosophy. Wittgenstein, however, moved away from it and proposed a new and different analysis in his (...) book Philosophical Investigations, and this became the most influential text in linguistic philosophy. Thus, Wittgenstein produced two different philosophies, each of which influenced a whole generation that remained largely oblivious of its Schopenhauerian origins. (shrink)

The Argument of the "Tractatus" presents a single unified interpretation of the Tractatus based on Wittgenstein's own view that the philosophy of logic is the real foundation of his philosophical system.

Influenced by the logical positivism of Moritz, and by Russell and Ramsey, Maslow's interpretation is that Wittgenstein's basic philosophy is a kind of Kantian phenomenology. In this, the first critical study of the Tractatus by an American philosopher, Maslow examines Wittgenstein's solipsism and mysticism, neglected areas of his philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let Us Be Human:Primo Levi and Ludwig WittgensteinDavide SpartiThe demolition of a man is difficult, almost as much as creating one.— Primo Levi1The modest but also remarkable ambition of Primo Levi's most important book Se questo è un uomo is "to provide material for a quiet [pacato] study of certain aspects of the human soul [animo umano]."2 More precisely, its ethical core (and its title) concerns itself with the (...) loss of our humanity, with the inexorable destruction of what is human.3 The book describes such patterns of dehumanizing through a number of mechanisms operating in the concentration camps of Auschwitz–Birkenau, where Levi was deported. By showing how the Nazis viewed the camp inmates as completely disconnected from their own lives, Levi bears witness to the Nazis' restricted willingness to grant humanity, to their denial of the internal relation which ties them to the inmates. Since the book offers insights for those who ask themselves "what is it to be human?" (and what remains of the human in extreme situations?), its main philosophical issue is whether or not something admits being seen as human.4Wittgenstein describes the attitudes we adopt in reacting to other creatures by analyzing the grammar of "seeing something as something:" only of a living human being, he famously adds, can we say: he [End Page 444] or she has a soul (see also PI, § 281).5 That the human body stands as one of the criteria for the ascription of psychological predicates—that human beings are endowed with an expressive power that neither statues nor animals possess; that human beings around us exert by their very presence a power which belongs uniquely to them—is suggested by the fact that even when we fantasize about living chairs or tables, for example in cartoons, we tend to lend human features to such animated furniture. So, according to Wittgenstein there is a conceptual connection between psychological predicates and certain kinds of human expression. But, one must add, this connection is achieved only through use, and is given only within the context of a form of life. The context of a shared form of life is needed because without it those forms of expressive behavior would not be intelligible: only if I am prepared to regard the object before me as a human being will I smile back and even talk to it. A living body is hence not enough: what is needed is a role through which such expressions are performed and have a point.In a similar vein, Levi shows the extent to which our experience of something as human depends on our relation to it—on the quality of our stance towards it. If it makes sense to speak of seeing somebody as a human being, it is because we can imagine individuals who lack or lose such a capacity or willingness. And it is precisely within the context of the concentration camp that what admits being seen as human changes drastically.In this essay I will draw lines of connection between Levi and Wittgenstein by relying on Stanley Cavell's crucial notions of avoidance and acknowledgment. After showing how such notions play a role in Wittgenstein's remarks on the so called "other mind" problem, I will turn to Levi and show how his remarks on the denial of the human in the concentration camp supplement Wittgenstein's grammatical remarks and can also be fruitfully read using the categories of avoidance and acknowledgment.6Although Wittgenstein does offer some remarks on Nazism, was personally engaged in protecting his family after the annexation of Austria, and mentions the Russian gulags in conversation with Rhees, he was never concerned with any empirical analysis of specific, let alone extreme, human situations. In light of this, it is clear that life in the concentration camp cannot be grasped and explained by simply relying on a few Wittgensteinian categories. However, the points Levi raises, as I will show in the conclusion, reveal an analogy with some of the [End Page 445] questions that worried Wittgenstein. This will also lead me to discuss a stylistic element that links the Austrian philosopher to the... (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) remains one of the most enigmatic works of twentieth century thought. In this bold and original new study, Ben Ware argues that Wittgenstein's early masterpiece is neither an analytic treatise on language and logic, nor a quasi-mystical work seeking to communicate 'ineffable' truths. Instead, we come to understand the Tractatus by grasping it in a twofold sense: first, as a dialectical work which invites the reader to overcome certain 'illusions of thought'; (...) and second as a modernist work whose anti-philosophical ambition is intimately tied to its radical aesthetic character. By placing the Tractatus in the force field of modernism, Dialectic of the Ladder clears the ground for a new and challenging exploration of the work's ethical dimension. It also casts new light upon the cultural, aesthetic and political significances of Wittgenstein's writing, revealing hitherto unacknowledged affinities with a host of philosophical and literary authors, including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Kafka. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth CenturyA. P. MartinichScott Soames. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1, The Dawn of Analysis. Pp. xix + 411. Vol. 2, The Age of Meaning. Pp. xxii + 479. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Cloth, $35.00, each volume.This two-volume work treats Anglo-American analytic philosophy from 1900 to roughly 1970. This means that the views of Michael Dummett, John Rawls and others are (...) not treated. Soames explains the omission in an epilogue to the second volume. Too much good philosophy on too many topics has been done recently—much of it using technical devices—to allow him or anyone else, to master more than a few parts. That seems right to me.The first volume consists of five parts: One: G. E. Moore on Ethics, Epistemology, and Philosophical Analysis; Two: Bertrand Russell on Logical and Linguistic Analysis; Three: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus; and Four: Logical Positivism, Emotivism, and Ethics; and Five: The Post-Positivist Perspective of the Early W. V. Quine. The great figure associated with twentieth-century analytic philosophy who is missing from Volume 1, Gottlob Frege, Soames omits, because Frege's "concerns were, on the whole, more specialized and technical than the others, and for many years this limited his influence" (1:xiii n. 1). The second volume consists of seven parts: One: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations; Two: Classics of Ordinary Language Philosophy: Truth, Goodness, the Mind, and Analysis; Three: More Classics of Ordinary Language Philosophy: The Response to Radical Skepticism; Four: Paul Grice and the End of Ordinary Language Philosophy; Five: The Philosophical Naturalism of Willard Van Orman Quine; Six: Donald Davidson on Truth and Meaning; Seven: Saul Kripke on Naming and Necessity.What does twentieth-century analytic philosophy come to? Soames thinks its "two most important achievements" are (i) the recognition that philosophical speculation must be grounded in pre-philosophical thought, and (ii) the success achieved in understanding, and separating one from another, the fundamental methodological notions of logical consequence, logical truth, necessary truth, and apriori truth" (1:xi; see also 1:298-99 and 2:252). He admirably succeeds in making the case for these judgments, although many philosophers will think that these two together do not amount to a great deal, considering all the effort expended by analytic philosophers. I think that analytic philosophy has done more; it has given philosophers many techniques for attacking conceptual problems, a great deal of information about the structure and nature of language, and has decisively refuted various theses that were once thought attractive and even obviously true. In any case, those who think that analytic philosophy, especially conceptual analysis, accomplished nothing are, I think, refuted by these volumes. In his discussion of G. E. Moore's article, "A Defense of Common Sense," Soames explains what he takes to be the first great result of analytic philosophy. Moore showed that the beliefs of common sense should often be accepted "with more confidence" than any philosophical beliefs or propositions that conflict with them, and in these cases cannot be overthrown by philosophical beliefs. For example, "The skeptic assumes that we can be certain about what knowledge is before we decide whether what we all ordinarily take to be paradigmatic cases of knowledge really are genuine" [End Page 125] (23, entire sentence is bold in the original). (Soames uses boldface type to mark all of the significant propositions discussed in the book, a nice pedagogical device.)In his discussion of Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, Soames gives the impression that linguistic interests primarily motivated Russell. I think the motivation was primarily ontological. Russell wanted to justify ridding philosophy of nonexistent entities. The doctrines of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Logical Positivism were two ways in which philosophical analysis developed. For Soames, what is most important in the Tractatus is the theory of names, and he holds, I believe, the minority belief (which I share) that properties are reducible to configurations of objects (1:206-6). What is most important in Logical Positivism is the verification theory of meaning. Strongly verifiable sentences "were supposed to be those the truth of which could, in principle, be completely established... (shrink)