Abstract Wittgenstein's naturalism illuminates our ordinary normative practices of giving and asking for reasons and also related ‘philosophical’ conceptions of knowledge inspired by, for example, Sellars's image of the ‘space of reasons’. Some propose that the relevant naturalism motivates scepticism about the ‘space of reasons’ insofar as it allegedly renders inexplicable how the space of reasons, intentionality and normativity quite generally, can be reconciled with the space of causation or the ‘space of nature’. Sellars insists that the normativity of knowledge is constitutively tied to our capacities of providing justifications. Arguably, Wittgenstein's insights into the limits of our capacity to give reasons and provide justifications show how normativity is both pervasive and more extensive than the practices of justification as actions or occurrences in the ‘space of reasons’. I situate those insights with respect to competing accounts of Wittgenstein's naturalism and recommend a more ‘liberal’ interpretation.

Abstract The central insight of Wittgenstein's critique of psychology can be summarized fairly plainly: when we talk about ‘minds’, ‘thoughts’, ‘feelings’ and other psychological phenomena, we are not talking about states and processes inside our heads, whether those states be further imagined as physical or transcendent. Our psychological language has many functions, Wittgenstein's work implies, but we can roughly describe it as a system of tools that evolved to operate within the course of human social life, and it is the complexity of our lives that psychology all too often mistakes for a complexity of a hidden system. This essay is an attempt to invoke a Wittgensteinian shift in the reader's way of thinking about psychological language while working largely within the idiom of science. By thinking carefully about the evolution of psychological language in human prehistory, I hope to help clarify the sense and importance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology.

Abstract Einstein's acknowledgement of a serious debt to Hume should alert us to central philosophical—in the first instance, epistemological—aspects of his thinking. We see this in his emphasis on difficulties—initially raised by the discovery that light has a finite speed—in establishing the times of distant happenings. But common articulations in everyday language of the claims of Special Relativity, along with criticisms or corrections of our everyday thought and talk, reflect misconstruals of those. These misconstruals are grounded in two, related, philosophical preconceptions: Cartesian individualism and an aspiration to a view of reality that is free from the contingencies of our nature. When we acknowledge the social dimension of our thought and talk about time, and that what is called for is a proper acknowledgement of those contingencies (cf Wittgenstein), the reports of the physicists may appear in a different light.

Abstract This paper reconstructs a trajectory of theoretical influence on the concept of disposition among C.D. Broad, F.P. Ramsey and L. Wittgenstein. The central thesis is that the form of dispositionalism Wittgenstein criticizes in his post‐Tractarian philosophy—particularly in relation to belief, meaning and understanding—corresponds closely to the conception found in Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature , and Ramsey's On Truth . The argument unfolds in two parts: the first outlines the methodological framework and reconstructs the Cambridge philosophical context shared by the three thinkers; the second analyses their accounts of dispositions, distinguishing between a logical‐grammatical approach and a metaphysical reification Wittgenstein aims to avoid. The paper concludes that Wittgenstein's critique responds to a specific intellectual climate, demonstrating his engagement with contemporaneous debates and offering insights still relevant to current discussions on human behaviour, against reductive and behaviouristic accounts of human capacities and tendencies.

Abstract In “The Universalizability of Moral Judgments,” Peter Winch argues against the universalizability of first‐person moral judgments. He does so by appealing to a moral dilemma faced by Captain Vere in Melville’s short story Billy Budd . In this paper, I motivate the possibility of the kind of moral dilemma Winch proposes and show what that possibility reveals about morality’s indeterminacy and our contribution as co‐authors of morality’s requirements. Some moral dilemmas arise because agents occupy multiple morally grounded roles—roles that, from the point of view of morality writ large, do not always have a clear priority. Even for a moral theory that rests on one central principle or value, a lot of an agent’s practical life is left underdetermined. Winch’s insight is that persons can discover something important about themselves that bears on what they should do when faced with such a dilemma. By making a judgment about what to do, an agent can create a new moral obligation, and in doing so, develop an aspect of their moral identity.

Abstract This paper argues that Kripke's and Wittgenstein's respective accounts of proper names are fundamentally the same. Specifically, it is argued that Wittgenstein's later philosophy is not inconsistent with Kripke's theory in the ways that Kripke himself sometimes claimed it was; on the contrary, it contains all of the key ingredients of Kripke's main line of argument. If this is correct, a significant part of the recent history of Anglophone philosophy may have to be reevaluated. In particular, Wittgenstein's critique of the idea that words stand for things played an important role in the continuing decline of metaphysics in the middle of the twentieth century, whereas Kripke's account of rigid designation led to the revival of metaphysics during the second half of the century. It is still commonly assumed that these influential contributions—Wittgenstein's critique and Kripke's account—are in fact inconsistent with each other; however, this paper argues the opposite.

Abstract This paper aims to highlight a distinctive, projective, mode of aspect perception within Wittgenstein's philosophy that has gone underappreciated in the scholarly literature. Although it bears a family resemblance to other instances of the phenomenon Wittgenstein describes as ‘noticing an aspect’ in PI Part II §113, it is distinctive in that it involves not only ‘seeing’ a pattern but also ‘projecting’ the pattern to subsequent cases of application. One reason it is important to highlight this projective mode of aspect perception is that it plays a critical role within Wittgenstein's rule‐following considerations. Confusions arise, such as those associated with the analysis of arithmetical infinity characteristic of Russellian Platonism, when philosophers adopt metaphysical misinterpretations of this ‘projective’ mode of aspect perception. By reflecting on this mode of aspect perception in association with rule‐following, Wittgenstein aims to dispel such confusions.