Work Of Wittgenstein Research Articles

Rhees on the Unity of Language

AbstractRush Rhees held Wittgenstein's work in high esteem but considered it in need of deepening. He was critical of Wittgenstein's idea that the builders' game might be the whole language of a tribe and that human language could be thought of as simply a range of language games. Rhees thought that Wittgenstein failed to do justice to the unity of language. The idea of the unity of language appears to have both an anthropological and an ethical aspect. The latter is illustrated with the help of a Hemingway story.

Peter Winch on Political Authority and Political Culture

AbstractPeter Winch, in his political philosophy, wanted to rethink the concepts of political authority, legitimacy and political culture, with a starting point in Wittgensteinian ideas. This essay brings together Winch's thoughts on political authority. Developing insights from Wittgenstein's work on certainty, Winch emphasised the unstated background behind any normative stand concerning authority. Ideas of legitimacy and civil society are formed within historically specific political cultures. In the 1990s, Winch was increasingly inclined to emphasise disagreement, which was related to his developing views on understanding, logic and reasoning. This development is traced, in part, on the basis of unpublished lecture notes.

Nauseating Flux: Iris Murdoch on Sartre and Heraclitus

AbstractI observe Iris Murdoch's distinctive use of the word ‘flux’ in discussion of Sartre's Nausea and show that her usage is persuasive and revolutionary, first as Sartre exegesis, second as Heraclitus exegesis, and throughout as a contribution to the philosophy of language. Murdoch's usage of ‘flux’ frames a comparison of Sartre's Roquentin with other figures who have had similarly flowing experience but without nausea. Roquentin's plight is shown to be ‘a philosopher's plight’ precipitated by a defective theory of descriptive success. I then show how the Heraclitean fragments would support Murdoch's treatment of flux and on close analysis contradict the established view exemplified in the work of Wittgenstein and Jonathan Barnes. Flux is not a variety of change, and the river image ‘cannot be analysed into non‐metaphorical components without a loss of substance’.

Wittgenstein in Exile (review)

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein in Exile Joachim Schulte (bio) James C. Klagge . Wittgenstein in Exile. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2011. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0262015349, $25.00. Various parts of the eleven chapters of Klagge's book have been published before, mostly in somewhat remote collections of papers or journals. But the availability of these much-revised and rearranged texts in book form is not the only reason for welcoming this publication. Another and more important reason is the fact that the questions raised by the book will stimulate readers to think about aspects of Wittgenstein and his work that are too often neglected. It is an additional virtue of Klagge's work that the material put at our disposal is rich enough to allow readers to assess a great number of arguments that could be adduced for very different, and perhaps incompatible, readings of Wittgenstein. As Klagge points out, there is a kind of consensus about the importance of Wittgenstein's work: professional philosophers and popular writers agree that he counts, if not as the single most important, then as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. He is generally regarded as one of the leading representatives of "early" or "classical" analytic philosophy (as practiced by Frege, Moore, and Russell) and as the founding-father of a later strand in analytic philosophy, often associated with a movement called Ordinary-Language Philosophy. But quite apart form his success in the eyes of posterity, many of the contemporaries that knew him in Cambridge or Vienna were impressed by the striking forcefulness of his personality. One of the many tributes cited by Klagge is John Maynard Keynes's remark (in a letter to his wife) apropos of Wittgenstein's return to England in 1929: "God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train." What also contributes to the high esteem in which Wittgenstein is generally held is the fact that some of his remarks and certain characteristic terms invented by him have caught on and are quoted or employed in the most unlikely contexts. The last sentence of his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ("What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence"), and [End Page 399] his later statement to the effect that his aim in philosophy is "to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle," function as conversational signature tunes, and many people who would be hard put to explain what they mean by these terms like to speak of "language-games" or "forms of life." Moreover, certain photographs showing Wittgenstein's impressive face are reproduced again and again, and a few stories about his life form part of the canon of our symbolic legends revealing what a true philosopher is supposed to be like. One of the most obvious features that distinguish Klagge's book from many comparable publications is the cover photograph. It is not one of the stern standard portraits but shows Wittgenstein in the middle of his life (1921), wearing an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves, rowing a boat across a lake. His face is turned in the way of someone looking at new shores, trying to figure out what they may hold in store for him. Of course, this effect is reinforced by the title printed underneath the picture, which functions as a kind of caption: "Wittgenstein in Exile." As the cover of a book this is superb, and the ideas suggested by it can be seen to go some way towards explaining important aspects of Wittgenstein the man as well as Wittgenstein the author of his writings. But two things need to be added straightaway. The first point is that the sense in which the scene pictured by Klagge's cover photograph can be regarded as "exile" is a very attenuated one. The Norwegian lake Wittgenstein is crossing is, as it were, "his" lake: just above it (but not visible in the picture) is the cabin he had built for himself before the First World War, and the present of the picture was the first time he was actually living in this spot, which he had chosen for himself because of its stunning...

Wherefore the Failure of Private Ostension?

§258 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is often seen as the core of his private language argument. While its role is certainly overinflated and it is a mistake to think that there is anything that could be called the private language argument, §258 is an important part of the private language sections of the Philosophical Investigations. As with so much of Wittgenstein's work, there are widely diverse interpretations of why exactly the private diarist's attempted ostensive definition fails. I argue for a version of the no-stage-setting interpretation of the failure of private ostension. On this interpretation, the reason why the diarist cannot establish a meaning for ‘S’ is that she lacks the conceptual-linguistic stage-setting needed to disambiguate the concentration of her attention (the private analogue of an ostensive definition). Thus, the problem with any subsequent use of ‘S’ is not that there is no criterion of correctness for remembering the meaning of ‘S’ correctly, or for re-identifying S correctly in the future. Rather, it is because of the initial failure to define ‘S’ that there is nothing that could count as a criterion of correctness for the future use of ‘S’; there is nothing to remember or re-identify. My argument for the no-stage-setting interpretation consists in showing how well it fits into the rest of the Philosophical Investigations and in defending it against objections from Robert J. Fogelin, Anthony Kenny, and most recently John V. Canfield. Kenny's and Canfield's objections are found to suffer from problems regarding memory scepticism.

Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games

Role-playing games are a diverse phenomenon, ranging from digital games to live action role-playing. Finding a definition that suits them all is hard, but attempts have been many. All of the definitions emphasize some aspects of role-playing games like rules, the role of players or the story. Many definitions do not describe role-playing games as such, but the activity that is role-playing. This paper looks at one of the latest attempts to define role-playing games, by Hitchens and Drachen (2009), and shows some potential problems with it. As an answer to these problems another definition is proposed, consisting of a game world, participants, shared narrative power and interaction. This definition is given only after discussing the nature of definitions in general. By drawing from the work of Wittgenstein, it is shown that definitions are by their nature bound to language in a way Wittgenstein calls language-games. Language is constantly changing, as the culture surrounding it changes. There are no final definitions for role-playing games, only definitions suited better or worse to a certain historical understanding of role-playing games. However, this does not mean that role-playing games should not be defined, as the definitions given can advance our understanding of what role-playing games are and could be. This paper takes part in the ongoing process of definition.

A “RESOLUTE” LATER WITTGENSTEIN?

Abstract: “Resolute readings” initially started life as a radical new approach to Wittgenstein's early philosophy, but are now starting to take root as a way of interpreting the later writings as well—a trend exemplified by Stephen Mulhall's Wittgenstein's Private Language (2007) as well as by Phil Hutchinson's “What's the Point of Elucidation?” (2007) and Rom Harré's “Grammatical Therapy and the Third Wittgenstein” (2008). The present article shows that there are neither good philosophical nor compelling exegetical grounds for accepting a resolute reading of the later Wittgenstein's work. It is possible to make sense of Wittgenstein's philosophical method without either ascribing to him an incoherent conception of “substantial nonsense” or espousing the resolute readers' preferred option of nonsense austerity. If the interpretation here is correct, it allows us to recognize Wittgenstein's radical break with the philosophical tradition without having to characterize his achievements in purely therapeutic fashion.

The Influence of Einstein on Wittgenstein's Philosophy

On the basis of historical and textual evidence, this paper claims that (i) after his Tractatus, Wittgenstein was actually influenced by Einstein's theory of relativity and, (ii) the similarity of Einstein's relativity theory helps to illuminate some aspects of Wittgenstein's work. These claims find support in remarkable quotations where Wittgenstein speaks approvingly of Einstein's relativity theory and in the way these quotations are embedded in Wittgenstein's texts. The profound connection between Wittgenstein and relativity theory concerns not only Wittgenstein's “verificationist” phase (more closely connected with Schlick's work), but also Wittgenstein's later philosophy centred on the theme of rule-following.

Form of Life in Wittgenstein's Later Work

Form of Life in Wittgenstein's Later Work

El lenguaje de la poesía. Una mirada a la palabra poética como superación de los límites del lenguaje filosófico: Wittgenstein y Octavio Paz

The objective of this article is to develop certain ideas about the nature of poetic discourse in the epistemological discussion of language pursued by the Vienna Circle during the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the work of Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap. It also it brings to the discussion the particular vision of language presented by Michel Foucault in his work Words and Things, while intending, through synthesis, to use the work of Octavio Paz to identify and gauge the role of the poetic word in that discussion.

Frege and Wittgenstein: The Limits of the Analytic Style

The analytic tradition in philosophy stems from the work of German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege. Bertrand Russell brough Frege's program to render language-particularly scientific language-in formal logical terms to the forefront of philosophy in the early twentieth century. The quest to clarify language and parse out genuine philosophical problems remains a cornerstone of analytic philosophy, but investigative programs involving the broad application of formal symbolic logic to language have largely been abandoned due to the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work. This article identifies the key philosophical moves that must be performed successfully in order for Frege's "conceptual notation" and other similar systems to adequately capture syntax and semantics. These moves ultimately fail as a result of the nature of linguistic meaning. The shift away from formal logical analysis of language and the emergence of the current analytic style becomes clearer when this failure is examined critically.

Education for sustainable development and normativity: a transactional analysis of moral meaning‐making and companion meanings in classroom communication

The purpose of the present article is to present and illustrate two different ways of analysing the normativity and discursivity of classroom communication during education for sustainable development (ESD). The two types of analysis can provide important knowledge for discussions of ESD in relation to morals and democracy. Both methods are based on pragmatism and the later works of Wittgenstein. The first approach was developed to examine the relationship between cultural and psychological processes in environmental ethical meaning‐making. It draws on the endeavours of sociocultural research and cultural psychology to take the individual into account, or in other words, the intra‐personal dimension of meaning‐making, which is not usually the case in the analysis of ESD. The second method relates to the normativity of ESD. Dewey refers to the apparently implicit socialisation taking place during education as ‘collateral learning’. We refer to the content included in subsidiary forms of learning as companion meaning, which either follows on automatically when teaching knowledge content, or becomes collateral learning when one learns scientific meanings. Such meanings can, for example, be concerned with the nature of knowledge and people's relations to nature.

A pragmatist approach to meaning making in children's discussions about gravity and the shape of the earth

AbstractDuring the past few decades, researchers from a cognitive science tradition and a sociocultural perspective on learning have discussed how to understand students' conceptions of the earth. In this article, some of the questions discussed in this debate are elaborated in relation to meaning making in educational settings. The aim is to illustrate how an approach built on pragmatism and Wittgenstein's works makes it possible to take the role of both situation and experiences into account within a sociocultural perspective on learning. In video‐recordings of second and fourth–fifth graders working in pairs meaning making is studied using practical epistemology analysis, i.e., what children talk about as relevant and what experiences they reactualize when answering questions. By analyzing the role of reactualization of experience, the role of reactualization and situation in making questions and problems intelligible, and the individuals' encounters with artifacts and the consequences of this in meaning making, we elucidate why it is important to consider meaning making in situ as an empirical question. It is concluded that the way questions are made intelligible will direct the meaning making and when using an artifact to answer questions, it is not the artifact in itself, but the specific use of the artifact that mediates action. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 94:689–709, 2010

Themes from G.E. Moore: New Essays in Epistemology and Ethics - Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay (eds)

This volume of 16 essays, according to the editors, is motivated by a growing sense that the time has come, fifty years after Moore's death in 1958, to reassess his contributions to philosophy in the light of what now seems to be their conceptual longevity. By 1950, they claim, most of Moore's views had been subjected to fierce criticism; and although his standing in the history of early twentieth‐century philosophy was solid and esteemed, his best arguments had been superseded by what they characterize as more ‘insightful’ positions. More recent developments in epistemology and ethics in the twenty‐first century, however, help to show that Moore's characteristic arguments and methods remain unexpectedly steadfast – bloody, perhaps, but as it turns out, unbowed. Moore's role in the history of philosophy has in some ways been obscured by the coincidence of his proximity to Russell and Wittgenstein. Principia Ethica and The Principles of Mathematics were both published in 1903. Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge for the first time in 1911 – the year Moore returned, after seven years with no permanent post in philosophy – and resurfaced to dominate the scene in 1929, ten years before Moore retired. No one could argue that Russell and Wittgenstein's work fails to merit the scholarly attention it has received, and no one would deny that their lives added engrossing detail to their intellectual biographies. The latter admittedly can hardly be said of Moore. But few philosophers today take the propositions of the Tractatus as authoritative; fewer still, if any, would claim that the logicist programme of Principia Mathematica was a success. Principia Ethica, however, is considered the locus classicus of contemporary meta‐ethics (though Moore himself would not recognize the term). Moore's epistemology (to which he turned in the 1920s and 1930s) tackled such bedrock issues such as scepticism about the external world and the nature of perception; these, along with the nature and viability of methodological common sense, form an enduring part of his reputation.

Biography and Theory Reconsidered: Second Wittgensteinian Thoughts

In an article published last year, (1) I argued that biography offered, or should offer if done properly, a paradigm example of Wittgenstein's notion of 'the understanding that consists in seeing connections' (Philosophical Investigations, Part I, paragraph 122), a type of understanding that Wittgenstein identified as his goal in philosophy and which , crucially, is non-theoretical. Biography, I maintained, is a perfect exemplar of this kind of understanding and, as such, it is fundamentally mistaken, either to search for a of biography or to read or write biography as if it were in any way a theoretical enterprise. I developed this view through a four-pronged assault: 1. a survey of the scholarly, but non-academic literature on biography from Dr Johnson to the early twentieth century, seeking to identify the forces that pulled it in the direction of theory; (2) 2. an examination of the work of those biographers who have approached their task in a consciously theoretical manner; 3. a critical engagement with the recent theoretical literature about biography; and 4. an application to biography of Wittgenstein's non-theoretical notion of philosophical understanding. I want in this present essay to respond to a difficulty in my argument that centres on the notion of 'theory' as that notion is variously understood by (a) Wittgenstein, (b) some theorists and (c) the general public. At the heart of the difficulty is the thought that Wittgenstein and I may be using the word 'theory' in an artificially and illegitimately narrow way that is not in conformity with its normal usage. This thought, as it applies to Wittgenstein (but not in connection with either my work or biography), has been explored in some depth and with no little subtlety by the late Oswald Hanfling in his article 'The Use of in Philosophy'. (3) Hanfling begins by noting a strong connection in Wittgenstein's work between his insistence that philosophy is non-theoretical and his equally fervent insistence that philosophy is not a science. Philosophical Investigations Part I, paragraph 109, which contains his famous and oft-quoted remarks about ('And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place') begins: 'It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific one', an allusion, Hanfling persuasively suggests, to Tractatus 4.111: 'Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences'. Does Wittgenstein think that saying that philosophy is not a theoretical discipline is the same thing as saying that it is not a science? Does he think, in other words, that scientific theories are the only kind? Well, it certainly seems to be true that the words he uses to characterise theories are those most commonly associated with science. As Hanfling puts it: A theory, as indicated in those passages [Philosophical Investigations [section]109, 126] is put forward with the purpose of explaining as opposed to describing, and the explaining is done by reference to something that is hidden, as opposed to lying open to view. Such theories may be hypothetical, and the problems with which they deal are empirical ones. (4) What is being described here, surely, is, first and foremost a scientific theory. When characterising Wittgenstein's use of the word 'theory' in Philosophical Investigations, however, it is worth bearing in mind that the available sample is very small. In fact, paragraph 109 is the only place in the entire book in which the word occurs. It is nonetheless a crucial word. Elsewhere in Wittgenstein's work, it is possible to find several instances of the word being used to describe what Wittgenstein is not doing. For instance: 'What we do is the opposite of theorizing. Theory blinds' (MS 133, 1946-47), 'What we are not looking for is a 'philosophical theory (MS130, 1946), and, when his discussions with the Vienna Circle touched on the subject of ethics and the attempt to understand the notion of moral value, he remarked: If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say, No, no! …

William Stern and discursive psychology

This paper examines some conceptual and methodological affinities between Stern's philosophy of psychology and discursive psychology. Stern's concept of the person as unitas multiplex finds currency in recent attempts to do justice both to the discursive domain of human life as well as its material foundation in the body. The person as embodied conscious actor is captured for instance in discursive analyses of first person pronoun use, a universal practice of both locating oneself spatio-temporally and displaying one's culturally differentiated moral qualities. We consider how contemporary research inspired by Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach and Wittgenstein's works in some ways fulfill Stern's original propositions while also highlighting the cultural specificity of personhood.

Epistemological norms and companion meanings in science classroom communication

AbstractIn this paper, we describe two central epistemological norms related to the importance of making investigations and to scientific language and its logic. These norms have been identified in empirical material consisting of 200 video‐recorded lessons in three different science classes. With regard to the learning of science and socialization, we discuss and problematize these norms in the context of science learned at school and the nature of science. A methodological approach has been developed and used to analyze and identify the role that teachers' actions play in which epistemology students adopt in their meaning making and to highlight which view of science this usage represents. The approach consists of a combination of three methodologies: practical epistemology analyses, epistemological move analyses, and analyses of companion meanings. This combination produces communication analysis of companion meanings. The theory is based on pragmatism, sociocultural approaches to learning, and the later works of Wittgenstein. The companion meanings described in the empirical material indicate that if students learn the identified norms without any explicit problematization, they will only view science as rational and inductive in character and exclude alternative views from the practice. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 93:859–874, 2009

Sebald, Wittgenstein, and the Ethics of Memory

What does W.G. Sebald mean by the doubling of his character Jacques Austerlitz with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a “poetic” philosopher who, although of Jewish ancestry, had little to say about the fate of the Jews during the Nazi period? Sebald's initiation of the reader into Austerlitz's life story through visual and verbal references to the philosopher suggests certain Wittgensteinian themes and problems. These include the relation of ethics to aesthetics and of both to memory, of propositions to truth-making, and of the verbal to the visual arts as exemplified by the eighty-one photographs included in Austerlitz. Indeed, Austerlitz and Wittgenstein mirror each other in so many ways that a reader familiar with Ray Monk's biography of the philosopher and Wittgenstein's own work might suspect that Sebald lifted specific elements from these texts into his own. But Sebald's work also conveys an unvoiced critique of Wittgenstein's neglect of Nazi politics. If Sebald's representations of the way that both propositions and images can dissimulate, that logic and science can fail and even destroy us, would have interested Wittgenstein, Austerlitz also reminds us that the ethics of memory requires the necessity not of the silence Wittgenstein invokes at the end of the Tractatus in a statement that Sebald himself quotes at the end of Vertigo, but of an ongoing journeying into new literary genres.In Sebald's work each of these relations bears upon the difficulties of representing the Holocaust and Austerlitz mediates the search for his history through photographs of landscapes and buildings. This mediation also occurs through Sebald's dialogue with Wittgenstein's skepticism and, indeed,Through its focus on architectural “monumentality,” Austerlitz brings into full articulation Sebald's “inhabitations” (Mikhail Bakhtin's word) by Wittgenstein's family resemblance, as well as his notion that ethics is a kind of metaphysics.

‘The Mind as an Object of God's Knowledge’: Another Cartesian Temptation?

AbstractIn this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge (“can God look into the human mind?”), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A great part of the latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language‐games undergo within it.

Bildung and Decline

AbstractMy point of departure is the idea that Wittgenstein's work, especially his later work with its explicit emphasis on practices, seeks to engage a reader who is likely to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unexamined commitments from a particular cultural context. I show how a substantial number of remarks by Wittgenstein in which he addresses cultural topics bring out the importance of the quite specific connections he saw between the philosophical problems with which he grappled and the historical cultural context in which those problems have arisen. Not only is a grasp of this aspect of his writing integral to a proper understanding of Wittgenstein as a thinker, bringing out these connections serves to put these remarks into a coherent conceptual framework. In assessing the relation of Wittgenstein's cultural concerns to his engagement with metaphysics, I show how his development of Spengler's thought is an important connecting link. Particularly important for this analysis will be my discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding and employment of the concept of a Betrachtungsform, as well as a few closely related concepts. I then offer an interpretation of what I believe to be the significance of the connection in his later thought between his philosophical activity and his views about the modern West.