Abstract
The development of G. H. von Wright’s work in ethics is traced from the early 1950s to the publication of The Varieties of Goodness in 1963, with special focus on the influences stemming from Wittgenstein’s later thought. In 1952, von Wright published an essay suggesting a formal analysis of the concept of value. This attempt was soon abandoned. The change of approach took place at the time von Wright started his work on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and tried to articulate the main lines of Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen in spoken and written form. This preoccupation with Wittgenstein led to a new approach to value judgments in an 1954 article, which shows strong late-Wittgensteinian influences on methodical as well as stylistic levels. Some traces of the 1954 approach are still visible in The Varieties of Goodness, while the stylistic imitations and allusions have mostly been dropped. Furthermore, von Wright’s approach in The Varieties is wider in scope, aiming at a broad overview of the phenomenon von Wright calls the “varieties of goodness”. But new conncections to the later Wittgenstein also seem to emerge: the idea of a "perspicuous presentation" of ethical concepts and the will to make philosophy relevant for "kulturens större sammanhang".
Highlights
This essay traces the development of Georg Henrik von Wright’s (1916–2003) work in the theory of values from the early 1950s to the publication of The Varieties of Goodness (1963), with special focus on the influences stemming from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) later thought
My thesis is that ethics and value theory, on which von Wright had done but little systematic work before the early 1950s, offered him fresh philosophical terrain to explore with philosophical tools and methodological ideas he had got from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially from his
Von Wright’s path to The Varieties of Goodness is followed from 1947, when he re-established his contact with Ludwig Wittgenstein, via two important stations in the early 1950s, up to the emergence of some key ideas formulated in Chapter 1 of The Varieties, which seem to have significant connections to Wittgenstein’s later work
Summary
On 31 July 1947, Georg Henrik von Wright wrote to Ludwig Wittgenstein the following dramatic lines:. During the visit he had given lectures in London, Cambridge and Oxford, and re-established contacts with colleagues and friends Among those people was Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom von Wright had come to know in early 1939 while working on his doctoral thesis at Cambridge. At the time of the 1947 encounter, von Wright was no longer the 22-year old doctoral student whom Wittgenstein had learned to know eight years earlier, but a promising 30-year-old full professor of the Swedish-speaking chair of philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He had a distinct research profile of his own, and his
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