Work Of Wittgenstein Research Articles

Space and Vision in Language

Space and Vision in Language Christopher C. Robinson (bio) Review of: Nana Last, Wittgenstein's House: Language, Space, & Architecture. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two of the core texts of philosophy's linguistic turn in the twentieth century: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus, revered as the Bible of Logical Positivism, was written by a young Wittgenstein between his studies at Cambridge and his time in the trenches of the Italian front in World War I; the posthumously published Investigations engendered the heterogeneous school of ordinary language philosophy and served as an important influence on practitioners of postmodern philosophy. That the later work was written in part as a corrective for the narrow conception of language and the metaphysical excesses of the earlier work raises the question of what led to the older Wittgenstein's philosophical transformation. In Wittgenstein's House: Language, Space, & Architecture, Nana Last has produced an important study of this turn in Wittgenstein's view of language. Last sheds light on the architectural experiences that led Wittgenstein from an account of language emanating from a putatively panoramic perspective based on knowledge of logical form to an interior view of language, where the spaces that compose what Wittgenstein called "the city of language" unfold before the philosopher as he walks its streets. That is, the experience of planning and building his sister's house led Wittgenstein to a new way of seeing and describing lexical reality. As Last shows, this way of seeing is consonant with the spatial imagination of the architect. The opening chapters focus on the complex relationship and transformations that occur between the Tractatus and the Investigations. As Last observes, Wittgenstein was interested in far more than simply repudiating his early work. The break from the Tractatus entails a significant and therapeutic alteration of the philosopher's relation to language-from outside to inside. This transformation is carried out through an array of new spatial metaphors for describing the internal dynamics that constitute linguistic practices as well as the perceptual vantages that permit access to those dynamics. The new spatiality advanced in the Investigations leads ineluctably to more expansive views of language by challenging and ultimately supplanting "the attenuated and restrictive spatiality definitive of the Tractatus" (10). Last's argument vividly engages the discipline of architecture to stage this critical encounter between the rigid sense of space in the early work and the fluidity of space and perception in the later work. The Investigations could spring from the early work thanks to the liberating spatial analogies provided by architecture. As Last shows in this rich comparative study, this immanent critique of the Tractatus can be appreciated only if we move about the overlapping boundaries between architecture and philosophy in Wittgenstein's work. Last's approach, however, raises the question of where interdisciplinarity takes place. How is successful communication across disciplines possible? Last uses Wittgenstein's house to offer an evocative account not only of the way the spatiality of architecture transformed his early attenuated vision of philosophy by shattering the insularity of the enterprise, but also of the way it alters Wittgenstein's philosophizing. The work of the philosopher was no longer conceived as the product of a fixed perceptual vantage above language and all other forms of knowledge; rather, for the later Wittgenstein, philosophical seeing becomes a dynamic effect of playful, meandering travel through linguistic spaces called language-games. Ordinary language, conceived now by Wittgenstein the architect as the fluid medium of practices, invites interdisciplinarity. The resulting common ground for a philosophical architecture or an architectural philosophy is replete with conceptual tension; such friction ignites creativity while militating against transcendent and fixed claims to knowledge and authority. Last begins with the vertical spatiality that informs the logical analysis of the Tractatus. This putative view from above allows the philosopher to see the logical distinction in language between the sensical realm of sayable and showable propositions and the nonsensical realm of religious and ethical utterances, which may resemble logical propositions in form but are actually meaningless. With this circumscribed view of what counts as philosophical language, the Tractatus is best understood as a work in the tradition of the Vienna...

Linguagem, estética e ensino: notas para estudo

Wittgenstein é conhecido principalmente por suas contribuições no estudo da lógica e da filosofia da linguagem. Sobre esses temas, mais recentemente, há estudos que exploram suas idéias para a análise da linguagem em educação. O que se pretende com este artigo é explorar a linha de estudos a respeito da análise de tal linguagem em sua articulação com o ensino em matéria de arte. É importante destacar, no entanto, que a estética não ocupa um lugar especial no conjunto da obra de Wittgenstein. Assim, o que se tem em vista é mostrar, igualmente, como a estética se articula com a linguagem, segundo o filósofo austríaco, e, conseqüentemente, que problemas aparecem no ensino em matéria de arte – em documentos como o dos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais (PCNs).

Wittgenstein's therapies: From rules to hinges

Recently Wittgenstein's claim to be primarily engaged in a kind of therapy for the problems that trouble people in the grip of a certain picture of how things must be has been strongly emphasized. The form the therapy takes is to display various kinds of grammatical errors in the pathological practice. In Wittgenstein's late work, On Certainty, the role of the concept of rule as the ground of a practice is extended to include a different kind of grounding in “hinges”. I argue that there is a therapeutic role for the work of bringing to light the “hinges” that hold fast when the door of philosophy turns. I contrast examples of Wittgensteinian therapy where the cure is achieved by a display of grammatical rules, to cases in which the cure depends on emphasizing the role of a hinge or hinges in pathological confusions of thought in psychology.

Wittgenstein, Contextualism, and Nonsense

What nonsense might be, and whatWittgenstein thought that nonsense might be, are two of the central questions in the current debate between those-such as Cora Diamond, James Conant and Michael Kremer-who favour a approach to Wittgenstein's work, and those-such as P. M. S. Hacker and Hans-Johann Glock-who instead favour a more approach. What answer we give to these questions will determine the nature and force of his criticisms of traditional philosophy, and so the very shape Wittgenstein's work has for us, as well as, to some extent, what the lesson of the Tractatus might be. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed defence of the austere view of nonsense, that lies at the heart of the resolute approach, against a range of influential criticisms developed by Hans-Johann Glock and which focus on Wittgenstein's contextualism. In so doing, I hope also to shed some light on the kind of view the austere view is, as well as how it might relate to certain other crucial aspects of Wittgenstein's thought.

Wittgenstein’s Turnabout

We are all familiar with the distinction between the early and the later Wittgenstein, along with the many different interpretations of its significance. I have long been of the opinion that the crucial factor giving rise to the turnabout in Wittgenstein's thinking concerning the nature and function of language was his time spent teaching middle school children in the villages outside of his home city of Vienna. In what follows I shall delineate the rationale that has led me to this conclusion, together with some specific points of connection between his experience as a school teacher and the main facets of his later philosophy. The backdrop for the following reflections is provided by the obvious differences between the metaphors and concrete images found in Wittgenstein's early work, on the one hand, and those in his later work, on the other. Speaking more specifically, the root metaphors that dominate the Philosophical Investigations are decidedly distinct from those controlling the perspective on language expressed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I Quite obviously the dominant and common element in the major metaphors in the Tractatus is spatiality. Beginning with the notion of and pictures on down through the correlative concepts of limit, network, and outside', spatial relationships are always at the forefront. This central characteristic provides the point of integration for understanding the Tractatus as a whole, and yet to my its importance has gone largely unmentioned in the literature on the work. There are qualities and limitations inherent within these spatial metaphors which need unpacking. To be more specific, the root metaphor in the Tractatus is not simply spatiality, but is what might be called space. That is to say, the point of view is invariably that of how things would be seen to relate to one another by an outside observer. This theme is particularly well focused in the picture theory of meaning with its emphasis on the mirroring of the common logical form between facts and propositions. Moreover, Wittgenstein's treatment of logical space is in terms of points in relation to one another as seen by an observer, rather than from the perspective of the points themselves. In other words, the stress is not on being at a point but on visualizing a point's position in space in relation to other points, all of which are located outside of the viewer. It is, of course, hardly surprising to encounter this visual-spatial metaphor at this juncture of the history of Western philosophy. It has played a major role in the thought of many thinkers, from Plato's cave through Descartes' clear and distinct ideas to Russell's knowledge by acquaintance. It can be argued that this bias in favor of vision as the primary metaphor in delineating the nature and structure of has led to a distortion of human cognitive experience. The Tractatus in this way serves as the clear-cut culmination of this long tradition, as well as the focus point of the modern philosophical position known as atomism. Yet another important characteristic of this visual space metaphor is its static quality. Throughout Wittgenstein's discussion of there is not the slightest indication of there being any movement, change, or interaction among its constituents. Everything has its place, whether in the realm of the actual or in the realm of the possible, and the logical form of this place is reflected in the language about it, never in the act of speaking itself but only in static propositions. It is a world of cold, crystalline purity structured by a logic which can deal only with being (how things are), not with becoming (how things change). The comprehensive scope and integrating power of this spatial model are obvious, but even Wittgenstein came to feel that the price for these advantages is too high because it results in a distorted view of both the world and language. …

Stepping from the wreckage: Geography, pragmatism and anti-representational theory

This paper draws out linkages between non-representational theory (NRT) and pragmatism. In doing so it sets NRT in a much wider, historical anti-representational movement. This should add momentum to its progress, and open up the considerable pragmatist and neo-pragmatist heritage as a resource for dealing with questions about methods, politics and ethics that NRT raises. Firstly I outline pragmatism and NRT to ground the discussion. Secondly the convergences between pragmatism, poststructuralism and the later work of Wittgenstein are considered. After that I go through a series of working principles which can underpin what is being termed anti-representational theory. These include; the primacy of life and action, pluralism, materiality/spatiality/temporality/relationality, anti-essentialism, creativity, collectivity, fallibilism, and disorder in method. I conclude by considering anti-representational knowledge production through radical incrementalism underpinned by witness and narrative.

Hertz, Wittgenstein and Philosophical Method1

AbstractThere have recently appeared claims that the influence Heinrich Hertz exerted over Wittgenstein's later work was far more abiding than previously recognised. I critically evaluate such claims by Gordon Baker and Allan Janik. I first show that Hertz was indeed concerned with the same feature, clarity, which often exercised Wittgenstein. But I then argue that Wittgenstein should not be seen as having adopted the conception of philosophical method, which Hertz deployed in The Principles of Mechanics. I show that Hertz ‘clarifies’ the concept of force only in the sense that he alters that concept, and that he is not using the sort of ‘contrastive’ methods characteristic of Wittgenstein's later works.

Bridging the Gulf between Wittgenstein's Works: A Matter of Showing

In this paper, I take three snapshots of Wittgenstein's philosophical work in order to jot a few notes on the issue of the continuity in his philosophy. I use Wittgenstein's distinction between what can be 'said' and what can only be “shown” in order to highlight Wittgenstein's continual insistence that our basic relation with reality is seamless. I propose that Wittgenstein holds, throughout his philosophical career, that our thinking does not stop short of the world. In brief, I suggest that Wittgenstein would note that our natural history is largely what the mediaevals would call second nature.

Language and Logical Pluralism: Some Aspects of a Wittgensteinian Perspective on the Nature of Logic

This essay examines the importance of some aspects of Wittgenstein's post-Tractatus work in the realm of discussions on the nature of logic. The first part considers a relationship between certain conceptions of language and certain positions on the nature of logical laws and logical pluralism. Supposing the rejection of mentalism in the field of meaning leads to a rejection of psychologism, it presents some alternatives different from psychologism, based on non mentalistic theories of meaning. One is the Platonistic Fregean approach to language and logic, the other is Carnap's formalist view on both topics. The second part concentrates on Wittgenstein's non mentalistic and non Platonistic proposals about language and his defense of the logical pluralism proposed by psychologists. It compares two periods on Wittgenstein's work after Tractatus -the periods of ‘calculus conception’ and ‘languange games conception’- and it shows how characteristic notions of Wittgenstein's later conception of language, like ‘use’, ‘language games’, and ‘forms of life’, work on the characterization of logic and specially on the kind of logical pluralism that the author seems to defend in his last period. In doing so, this essay offers an approach to some of the author's considerations about contradictions and the possibility of the existence of a calculus that includes them. This approach emphasizes on the idea of applicability (or use of a linguistic expression) introduced by the author in some of his last works, and in some examples of functional contradictions that can help to understand and complement that idea.

D. Z. Phillips and Wittgenstein's On Certainty

AbstractI start from Phillips' discussion of Rhees's dissatisfaction with the idea of a language‐game. Then, from a rereading of Moore, I go on to exemplify interconnected uses of the expressions “language‐game,”“recurrent procedure,”“world‐picture,”“formal procedure,”“agreement in judgment,”“genre picture” and “form of life.” The discussion is related to sense perception, our knowledge of time and space, and the picture‐theory. These topics connect with Wittgenstein's earlier treatment of the will – which changed markedly later. The subtext (in footnotes) confronts (i) the sceptical methods of Descartes and Hume with the grammatical methods of Leibniz, Kant and Wittgenstein, and (ii) the realism of Leibniz and the Tractatus with the transcendental idealism of Kant. My conclusion is that, although the method of Wittgenstein's later work remains in a sense grammatical, (i) in its new form it can free us from the conviction that the intellect can and must resolve one way or the other the conflicts that arise in the course of the latter confrontation, and that (ii), although release from such a conviction is to be seen as the aim of philosophical discourse in general, it allows philosophy to retain its overriding significance. A positive element in that lies in the respect the method demands for that in a human life which is transcendental to the activity of scientific theorising: respect, therefore, for the unique perspective of the individual historical agent.

Ideals and monisms: recent criticisms of the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge

I offer a reply to criticisms of the Strong Programme presented by Stephen Kemp who develops some new lines of argument that focus on the ‘monism’ of the programme. He says the programme should be rejected for three reasons. First, because it embodies ‘weak idealism’, that is, its supporters effectively sever the link between language and the world. Second, it challenges the reasons that scientists offer in explanation of their own beliefs. Third, it destroys the distinction between successful and unsuccessful instrumental action. Kemp is careful to produce quotations from the supporters of the programme as evidence to support his case. All three points deserve and are given a detailed response and the interpretation of the quoted material plays a significant role in the discussion. My hope is that careful exegesis will offset the numerous misinterpretations that are current in the philosophical literature. Particular attention is paid to what is said about the normative standards involved in the application of empirical concepts. The operation of these standards in the face of the negotiability of all concepts is explored and misapprehensions on the topic are corrected. The work of Wittgenstein, Popper, Kuhn and Hesse is used to illustrate these themes.

Changing the Subject

In this essay, I investigate our understanding of what counts as philosophical. Using the life and work ofWittgenstein as a test case, I take a close look at how various Wittgenstein scholars relate to work other than the principal and accepted philosophical texts (such as the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations), and suggest that there is an inconsistency in the criteria of what we can and should be taking seriously for philosophical purposes; sometimes there is inconsistency of use (one thing is said, another is done), and sometimes there is inconsistency in the form of occlusion (the scholar simply avoids the chance (or responsibility) to define terms). Guarding against advocacy for essentialism, I argue that philosophers might benefit from a more direct and explicit engagement with the criteria they use when writing about the philosophical significance of material other than dominant texts.That engagement, however, reveals that the pursuit of criteria is at odds with the spirit of Wittgenstein's philosophy. As a result, we stand in need of an alternative method of discerning what counts. I suggest that, in the context of Wittgenstein's work, such a method is a matter of approach, not criteria. Perhaps this method can extend beyond Wittgenstein's work to a general view of what counts as philosophical.

Bridging the Gulf between Wittgenstein's Works

Bridging the Gulf between Wittgenstein's Works

ACT AND POTENCY IN WITTGENSTEIN?

The philosophy of language pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein, far from being inimical to the metaphysical concerns of philosophy, can be understood as complementing and perhaps even deepening the approach to metaphysics first employed by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher Joseph Marèchal: a ‘metaphysics of knowledge’ illuminating the deeper‐than‐conceptualist movement in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The relationship of words and reality was radically reconfigured in the linguistic turn inaugurated in the work of Wittgenstein, but that work itself still presupposes what might be called the existential act of judgement, which was the foundation of Marèchal's Thomistic retrieval.

Love as a Contested Concept

Theorists about love typically downplay the scale of persistent and possibly intractable disagreement about love. Where they have considered such disagreements at all, they have tended to treat them as an example of the lack of clarity surrounding the concept of love, a problem which can be resolved by philosophical analysis. In doing so, they invariably slip into prescriptive mode and offer moral injunctions in the guise of conceptual analyses.This article argues for philosophical modesty. I propose that the starting point of any coherent philosophical investigation of love must be a willingness to take our disagreements seriously. These disagreements stem from profound moral differences: we disagree about love inasmuch as we disagree about how we should properly treat one another.With a series of examples drawn from philosophy, literature and real life I attempt to illustrate some of the disagreements that arise in relation to erotic love. Drawing upon the work of Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waissman and W.B. Gallie, I suggest that any robust theory of love needs to take account of its contestable nature and the integral role it plays in our moral life.

Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment (review)

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment Patrick Horn Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment, by Ranjit Chatterjee. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 207 pp. $62.95. Ranjit Chatterjee proffers the radical thesis that "Wittgenstein wished to lead his reader on slowly from the gentile to the Jewish world of thought as part of the deep solution to philosophical (or religious and ethical) problems" (p. 189). In one sense, this is a new thesis: no one has yet argued that Wittgenstein was a Jewish proselytizer. In another sense, it is not a new thesis: several authors have argued that Wittgenstein was a religious man, perhaps a religious mystic. The first difficulty with a thesis of this sort is that Wittgenstein famously told his friend M.O.C. Drury that he was not a religious man. Wittgenstein deeply respected religious ways of living. He once said, "All genuine expressions of religion are wonderful" (Rush Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, [Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981], p. 108). But he would have been the first to remind us that respect and appreciation are not the same as appropriation. Arguments for a religious Wittgenstein sound tortuous in the face of words like these, penned in 1946: "I cannot kneel to pray because it's as [End Page 155] though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft" (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 56e). Chatterjee's way of addressing this first difficulty is to argue that Wittgenstein was forced to conceal his Jewish commitment. The work thus includes a great deal of valuable material concerning the conditions in which Wittgenstein lived and worked. Chatterjee convincingly demonstrates why a Jewish intellectual in the Europe of the mid-twentieth century might go to great lengths to conceal his Jewishness. The author is also quite adept at juxtaposing a dizzying array of admittedly perplexing quotes and comments from numerous sources, contributing to the notion that Wittgenstein was a religious mystic of a sort. But the further case that Wittgenstein practiced concealment in order to advance Judaism is much more difficult to make. One difficulty accompanies any thesis of concealment. Whatever evidence counts against the thesis that Wittgenstein was devoted to a Jewish way of thinking is attributed to concealment. Thus I can imagine that Chatterjee's book might inspire devotion or incite indignation. But in that case one might wonder whether he is proffering a thesis at all. There is a second difficulty that ought to be addressed when arguing that Wittgenstein was a religious man. This is the question of what Wittgenstein may have thought of the relation between religion and philosophy. Chatterjee ignores this problem by collapsing philosophy into the religious and ethical. This is Chatterjee's postmodern move, made in a chapter dedicated to showing Wittgenstein's affinities with Levinas and Derrida: "If we define postmodernism simply as the demonstration . . . that the road to ethics goes through philosophy of language, then Wittgenstein was traveling this road and setting up signposts for his readers in the heyday of modernism" (p. 138). Philosophy is the handmaiden of religion and ethics. Thus what is distinctively philosophical in Wittgenstein's writings is never weighed against whatever religious or ethical views he may have personally embraced. It is a serious oversight. Wittgenstein once wrote: "A philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher" (Wittgenstein, Zettel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], p. 80). The philosopher's struggle with the passions is a vital theme throughout Wittgenstein's work. Chatterjee shows no attention to the ways in which Wittgenstein struggled to set aside religious and ethical passions (his own and others) in order to write philosophy that is dedicated almost exclusively to elucidation: "My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them" (Culture and Value, 2e). Since for Chatterjee the temple is a religious temple, [End Page 156] as opposed to a philosophical temple, he is unable to give an account of the tensions between philosophy and religion in Wittgenstein. There is finally...

Janik on Hertz and the Early Wittgenstein

Various claims have been made about the influence of Heinrich Hertz's on Wittgenstein's work. I consider some such recent claims, made by Allan Janik, to the effect that Hertz exercised a very strong influence on Wittgenstein, early and late. I suggest they are ill-founded, in virtue of misinterpretations either of Hertz, or of Wittgenstein, or of both. I try to set the record straight on issues such as the three criteria Hertz suggests for evaluating scientific 'representations' [] or 'images' [], his conception of philosophy, the nature of Hertz's project and its relation to philosophy, the extent to which he agrees and disagrees with Ernst Mach, and his influence on the .

Between Theory and Practice: A Dilemma for the Morawetz-Wittgenstein View of Law

Drawing deeply from Wittgenstein's later works, Thomas Morawetz has articulated a vision of legal decision making according to which it is not a defect, but inherent in the very nature of law, for there to be disagreement among judges regarding their legal decision-making strategies. Central to Morawetz's account is the notion of a legal grammatical proposition. This essay argues that because legal grammatical remarks lack any truth-value, they cannot play a justificatory role. This would imply that the rule of law is no more justifiable than the violent alternatives used by anarchists and religious fanatics.

Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation (review)

In this new book, Alessandra Tanesini demonstrates that feminist thought has a lot to offer to the study of Wittgenstein's philosophical work, and that -at the same time-that work can inspire feminist reflection in new directions. In Wittgenstein, Tanesini offers a highly original interpretation of several themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy. She argues that when we look at his work through feminist eyes we discover that he is not primarily concerned with providing solutions to technical problems in the philosophy of mind, mathematics, and language. Instead, his remarks on these topics are intended to offer insights about human finitude, the loneliness of the modern autonomous self, and our relations to other human beings. Thus, the modern conception of the individual emerges as the critical target of Wittgenstein's philosophical work, both early and late. This conception has also been one of the dominant concerns of contemporary feminist philosophy. In this book, Wittgenstein's insights are deployed to further feminist debates on issues such as identity, difference, the masculine character of the modern self.

Duhem, Quine, Wittgenstein and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Continuity or Self-Legitimating?

Contemporary sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is defined by its relativist trend. Its programme often calls for the support of philosophers, such as Duhem, Quine, and Wittgenstein. A critical rereading of key texts shows that the main principles of relativism are only derivable with difficulty. The thesis of the underdetermination of theory doesn't forbid that Duhem, in many places, validates a correspondence-consistency theory of truth. Thus he never says that social beliefs and interests fill the lack of underdetermination. Quine's view on the underdetermination of theory by data leads to Duhem's view. But, to take some examples, his idea of a selective revision of hypotheses, as well as the neat incompatibility between holism and conventionalism, openly challenges the principles of relativism. When reading Wittgenstein's work, which is not presented in book-form but rather as a tree, we have first to avoid aphoristic choices that credit any text-excising. This remark allows us to tackle the passages that sociological relativism is based on. According to Wittgenstein, mathematical conventions seem not to be anthropological objects. Moreover, when Wittgenstein examines the famous language-games, he only speaks of the functioning of natural language, not to be confused with scientific formal languages. We then should render the formula language-game by well-defined, explicit and compulsory rules of communication, this is a much less attractive formula for relativism. Consequently, in terms of contents, there doesn't exist a real continuity between the epistemologies of Duhem, Quine and Wittgenstein, and the recent works of the SSK. Thus we are entitled to wonder whether such references don't simply further the purpose of self-legitimising the programme.