The evolution of human opacity: A Wittgensteinian critique of psychology

Anyone interested in the development of analytic philosophy will likely find Russell's Theory of Knowledge a work of great importance in itself; but anyone who, in addition, is fascinated by scholarly mystery and the psychology of philosophers will certainly regard its publication at last, nearly three-quarters of a century after Russell abandoned it unfinished—principally because of the young Wittgenstein's virulent criticisms—as an event nothing short of momentous. Theory of Knowledge may well have played as important a role in Wittgenstein's early work (from the Notebooks to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) as the Tractatus itself did in his later writings—each representing for Wittgenstein an attitude, a philosophical method, and above all a theory of propositions, against which he was driven to react. But it would be a sad irony if renewed interest in Wittgenstein's early work were to eclipse all over again the very piece of writing which helped move him to creative rebellion. Unlike the two previous volumes in the Collected Papers (numbers 1 and 12), which broaden rather than deepen our knowledge of his philosophical growth, Theory of Knowledge deserves to become a standard text in Russell studies. It contains crucial material not found elsewhere in his writings and hence it fills a gap—ironically,, a gap Russell himself created—in what we know of his thought in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, when his career at Cambridge was at its apogee.

(1991). Smedslundian Suburbs in the City of Language: The Case of Embarrassment. Psychological Inquiry: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 358-361.

How Wittgenstein sought a more effective way of reaching his audience by a poetic style of doing philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “really one should write philosophy only as one writes poetry.” In Wittgenstein's Artillery, James Klagge shows how, in search of ways to reach his audience, Wittgenstein tried a more poetic style of doing philosophy. Klagge argues that, in deploying this new philosophical “artillery”—Klagge's term for Wittgenstein's methods of influencing his readers and students—Wittgenstein moved from an esoteric mode to an evangelical mode, aiming for an effect on his audience that was noncognitive, appealing to the temperament in addition to the intellect. Wittgenstein was an artillery spotter—directing artillery fire to targets—in the Austrian army during World War I, and Klagge argues that, years later, he became a philosophical spotter, struggling to find the right artillery to accomplish his philosophical purpose. Klagge shows how Wittgenstein's work with his students influenced his style of writing philosophy and motivated him to care about the effect of his ideas on his audience. To illustrate Wittgenstein's evolving approach, Klagge draws on not only Wittgenstein's best-known works but also such lesser-known material as notebooks, dictations, lectures, and recollections of students. Klagge then goes beyond Wittgenstein to present a range of literature—biblical parables and children's stories, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—as other examples of the poetic approach. He concludes by offering his own attempts at a poetic approach to addressing philosophical issues.

This is the first of two volumes describing the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy from the Notebooks and the Tractatus to Philosophical Investigations and his other later writings. Volume I is divided into two parts: Part I surveys the whole of Wittgenstein's work, while Part II examines in detail the central ideas of his early system. Although Pears focuses on the internal organization of Wittgenstein's thought, he also investigates the origins of Wittgenstein's philosophy, relating it to the philosophies of his predecessors and contemporaries. Revealing how the details of Wittgenstein's work fit into its general pattern, Pears offers scholars, students, and non-specialists alike unusually clear insight into the philosopher's thought.

This chapter traces the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology. The Tractatus is little concerned with the subject. One can but glean what his meta-psychological commitments were from occasional asides and correspondence. They concern meaning something by words and sentences, thought and thinking, and intentionality. These commitments were presupposed by the idea that there is a semantic connection between words and world, forged by mental acts of meaning. With the collapse of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein realized that the concepts of meaning and intending, of understanding and interpreting, of thinking and imagining, had to be subjected to philosophical scrutiny. This guided his preoccupation with psychological concepts in the 1930s. The range of interest widened with the development of his private language arguments. After completion of the Investigations in 1946/7, Wittgenstein's philosophical writings are focused largely on questions in philosophy of psychology, of which a synopsis is given.

For many years Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein have been placed side by side. Little of that work has tried to explicitly compare the two. Direct comparisons can, however, be made between Weil and Wittgenstein, which can show that the ways they approached philosophy shared numerous traits and ideas. Both thinkers rejected philosophical systems, both admitted that serious philosophical work did not try to reject all contradictions internal to it, and, in fact, both sought to make facing contradictions and seeming contradictions central to their method. Both wrote of the world with a sense of mystery that surrounds human life, a sense of transcendent good. Both engaged the problems with talking about such a good that cannot be neatly fit into language. Both also saw the task of philosophy as one concerned with meaning. Both also saw philosophy as a matter of “work on oneself.” This essay will examine what it means to say that philosophy is a matter of work on oneself. To do so, I want to examine primarily two essays, one from each philosopher, essays which bear remarkable similarity to each other in the sort of problem they deal with.They are section xi of Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, and Weil's “Essay on the Concept of Reading.”

Aspect-seeing, I claim, involves reflection on concepts. It involves letting oneself feel how it would be like to conceptualize something with a certain concept, without committing oneself to this conceptualization. I distinguish between two kinds of aspect-perception:1. Preparatory: allows us to develop, criticize, and shape concepts. It involves bringing a concept to an object for the purpose of examining what would be the best way to conceptualize it.2. Non-Preparatory: allows us to express the ingraspability of certain experiences. It involves bringing a concept to an object for the purpose of showing—per impossible—what it would take to properly capture one’s experience. I demonstrate the usefulness of the two kinds of aspect perception in making conceptual judgments, and in making moral and aesthetic judgments.ReferencesSara Bachelard. On Euthanasia: Blindspots in the Argument from Mercy. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19(2):131–40, 2002.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-5930.00210PMid:12747357Avner Baz. What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects? Philosophical Investigations, 23(2):97–121, 2000.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9205.00116Avner Baz. On Learning from Wittgenstein, or What Does it Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects? In W. Day Anew and V. J. Krebs, editors, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, pages 227–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511750663.013Avner Baz. Seeing Aspects and Philosophical Difficulty. In M. McGinn and O. Kuusela, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, pages 697–713. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011.http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199287505.003.0031Stanley Cavell. The Availability of Wittgensteins Later Philosophy. In his Must We Mean What We Say?, pages 44–72. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.Stanley Cavell. The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.Bob Dent. Why I Wanted to Die: Bob Dents Last Words. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 16(1):19–32, 1999.Cora Diamond. Secondary Sense. In her The Realistic Spirit, pages 225–41. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991a.Cora Diamond. The Face of Necessity. In her The Realistic Spirit, pages 243–66. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991b.Richard Eldridge. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164740Juliet Floyd. On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect-Perception, Logic, and Mathematics. In W. Day and V. J. Krebs,editors, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, pages 314–337. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.Geach, P.T. Mental Acts. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957.Immanuel Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by J.C. Meredith. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1952.John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, 1996.John McDowell. Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following. In S. Holtzman and C. M. Leich, editors, Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule, pages 141–62. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981.Stephen Mulhall. Inheritance and Originality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. New Directions, New York, 2007.David Seligman. Wittgenstein on Seeing Aspects and Experiencing Meanings. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 37(2): 205–17, 1976.http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2107192Timothy Williamson. Vagueness. Routledge, London, 1994.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge, London, 1922.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, Oxford, 3rd edition, 1958.Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Blue and Brown Books. Blackwell, Oxford, 2nd edition, 1969.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Blackwell, Oxford, 1980.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value. Blackwell, Oxford, 1998.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 30, Issue 3 p. 268-271 Book Review Joachim Schulte. Experience and expression: Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. x + 179 pp. £25 (Cloth) (Reviewed by John Hyman) First published: July 1994 https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(199407)30:3<268::AID-JHBS2300300319>3.0.CO;2-GAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume30, Issue3July 1994Pages 268-271 RelatedInformation

Since the publication of his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein's work has acquired a dubious patina of commentary which makes it appear that he was, without question, a verificationist. A. J. Ayer concludes his criticism of Wittgenstein by holding that descriptive statements need not be “directly verifiable by me.” In his reply to Ayer, R. Rhees only reinforces this view of Wittgenstein as a verificationist by holding that he thought it essential to the significant use of a word that it could be used both rightly and wrongly. If there is no distinction between correct and incorrect in what I say, then “of course … I say nothing” according to Rhees, who thinks he is speaking for Wittgenstein. Norman Malcolm also subscribes to this reading of the Philosophical Investigations. Without the idea of a verifiably correct use, he insists, there can be no idea of a language.

The topic of this lecture is the relation between Wittgenstein’s thought and Wittgensteinian philosophy on the one hand, psychology and psychologism on the other. It will start by clarifying how the label ‘psychologism’ should be understood in this context, opting for a neutral rather than derogatory conception. Next it discusses the relation between Frege’s anti-psychologism and that of the early Wittgenstein. The main focus will be on Wittgenstein’s denial that assertion and judgement are of logical relevance. The final sections turn to Wittgenstein’s later thought. Can it avoid the intrusion of psychology concerning the following areas: – meaning – philosophical psychology – philosophical method? Giving short shrift to psychological notions like understanding, perception, judgement and belief is impossible even in philosophy of language and epistemology, given their connections to notions like meaning and knowledge. If Wittgensteinian philosophizing were a kind of psychotherapy, it would also be wholly irresponsible to ignore psychological theories. Fortunately it isn’t. Nevertheless it is neither feasible nor desirable to insulate the clarification of philosophical problems and contested concepts against empirical considerations. I shall substantiate this claim by looking at the problem of animal minds and the role that abilities play for mental and epistemic phenomena. If conceptual analysis is to serve as an instrument of critical thinking, it had better be impure.

This article is an appreciative exegesis of Steven Burns's article “If a Lion Could Talk.” In his essay, Burns clarifies Ludwig Wittgenstein's enigmatic remark “If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand him” by locating it within the broader context of Wittgenstein's work in the philosophy of psychology. We read Burns's interpretation of the remark as opening core Wittgensteinian issues of meaning and (mis)understanding, and we situate it within the context of the work of Burns's teacher, Peter Winch. Our discussion is a close exegesis of the immediate content of the lion remark and it highlights connections to Wittgenstein's remarks on James George Frazer's The Golden Bough. We show how Burns and Winch employ Wittgenstein's methods of dissolving philosophical puzzles by drawing attention to intermediate familiar cases. We conclude with some impressionistic remarks about Socrates in a short discussion of the difficulty of the philosophical technique and activity Burns demonstrates and recommends.

Paolo Bozzi developed his «experimental phenomenology» from the Gestalt psychology tradition, particularly from Gaetano Kanizsa’s method. The distinction between «phenomenal description» and «causal explanation» of the «perception» springs up from the analysis of Bozzi’s «S-D psychophysical scheme». What Frege, who was well-known by Bozzi, deals with in paragraph 71 of The Thought theoretically mirrors what is outlined in the Scheme and could also be intended as its source. The juxtaposition between a «science of observable things» or «experimental phenomenology» – conceived as a science which is autonomous from what happens in the brain – and logics, which is set up autonomously from the thinking processes, is a programmatic element that is openly indicated by the author. Frege’s anti-psychologism and realism are both widely shared by Bozzi. The realism and the «naïve physics» Bozzi was a pioneer of lie at the basis of the so-called «New Realism». The following essay aims to localize and highlight some theoretical implications – up to their phenomenological origins – which can be detected particularly in paragraph 71 of The Thought. The present work tries to sketch out the boundaries and the autonomy of the «first person» perceptive experience and to define the scientific explanation that we can give of it. The distinction between science and experience, and the autonomy of experience from science and of the immediate experience of the content of consciousness from neuroscience, entail the impossibility of a naturalization of the phenomenological experience. In the examples taken from Frege can be found a theoretical bridge which connects the Gestalt perceptological tradition, Wittgenstein’s investigations of the philosophy of psychology, and the so called «New Realism».

In recent years Jewish philosophers and theologians from across the religious spectrum have claimed that the philosophy of the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is a crucial resource for understanding Jewish belief and practice. The majority of these thinkers are drawn to Wittgenstein's work on account of the diminished role that he ascribes to religious belief—a position that affirms the widespread view that theology has played a minimal role in Judaism. Another line of thought sees in Wittgenstein's philosophy resources that can illuminate the forms and functions of Jewish theological language and bolster the place of theological reflection within Jewish religious life. This article undertakes a critical analysis of the reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy among contemporary Jewish thinkers with the goal of delineating these alternative responses to his work. The paper concludes by arguing that the way in which Jewish thinkers appropriate Wittgenstein's philosophy will have profound consequences for the future of Jewish theology.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics has long been notorious. Part of the problem is that it has not been recognized that Wittgenstein, in fact, had two chief post-Tractatus conceptions of mathematics. I have labelled these the calculus conception and the language-game conception. The calculus conception forms a distinct middle period. The goal of my article is to provide a new framework for examining Wittgenstein's philosophies of mathematics and the evolution of his career as a whole. I posit the Hardyian Picture, modelled on the Augustinian Picture, to provide a structure for Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein's calculus period has not been properly recognized, so I give a detailed account of the tenets of that stage in Wittgenstein's career. Wittgenstein's notorious remarks on contradiction are the test case for my theory of his transition. I show that the bizarreness of those remarks is largely due to the calculus conception, but that Wittgenstein's later language-game account of mathematics keeps the rejection of the Hardyian Picture while correcting the calculus conception's mistakes.

William Stern and discursive psychology