Hannah Ginsborg argues that according to Wittgenstein, a normal human subject can recognise that a new step is correct without grasping any rule with which the step accords. I argue, on the contrary, ...that according to Wittgenstein, a normal human subject’s understanding of a series and her capacity to take new steps to be correct continuations of the series are, as Wittgenstein says of “rule” and “accord” (PI §224), “related to one another.” Neither is more fundamental than the other.
Wittgenstein came to change forever how philosophy is done, at least in the eyes of a vast majority of philosophers inspired by his teachings. He did away with the last vestiges of innocent ...speculation about metaphysics, ontology and epistemology they say, once philosophers had learned to see language as the objective background for private thought, a lesson that cannot be forgotten. As P. M. S. Hacker puts it, philosophers before Wittgenstein were spinners of wonderful webs of philosophical illusion, while Wittgenstein was the paradigmatic destroyer of these. From this point of view, it is therefore a legitimate question about the work of any philosopher offering explanations after Wittgenstein if he is providing new insights rather than spinning new illusions. All the more, if the thinker claims that his explanations are built on crucial aspects of Wittgenstein’s work: how does the new approach stand up to the many challenges the use of philosophical language faces and simultaneously beware of becoming bewitched by it?
This book argues that Wittgenstein's religious thought is misunderstood by its critics, and that their misunderstandings are a result of being oblivious of apophatic theology--the theology that ...encapsulates Wittgenstein's religious point of view.
F. R. Leavis, the leading literary critic at Cambridge from 1930 to 1960, recounts the time when his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein told him to ‘give up literary criticism!’ The remark came as a surprise ...to Leavis, and it remains somewhat puzzling to anyone who reads of the encounter, for there are few contextual clues as to why Wittgenstein would say such a thing. But there are clues in Wittgenstein's many remarks on literature, music and other art forms scattered throughout his writings. In this paper, I will present what I think Wittgenstein's concern was with the sort of literary criticism Leavis practised, contrasting it with the sort of reading, and the sort of reader, that Wittgenstein (and others) would consider a literary way of reading; the sort of reader he thought was ‘a better sort of reader’.
Some disagreements concern our most fundamental beliefs, principles, values, or worldviews, such as those about the existence of God, society and politics, or the trustworthiness of science. These ...are ‘deep disagreements’. But what exactly are deep disagreements? This paper critically overviews theories of deep disagreement. It does three things. First, it explains the differences between deep and other kinds of disagreement, including peer, persistent, and widespread disagreement. Second, it critically overviews two mainstream theories of deep disagreement, the Wittgensteinian account and the Fundamental Epistemic Principle account, before introducing a Hybrid account. Finally, it explores the notion that deep disagreements can be deeper than others.
The influence of Heinrich Hertz's The Principles of Mechanics on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus has been studied for decades, but it has never become a mainstream topic in the ...Wittgensteinian literature. This paper focusses on Tractarian notions of objects, elementary facts and elementary sentences and discusses their similarities with Hertz's concepts of mass, its constituents and their mechanistic images. As the paper demonstrates, the Hertzian context provides some fruitful interpretational leads concerning several controversial ideas endorsed by early Wittgenstein, namely propositional analysis, logical independence of elementary facts, logical independence of elementary sentences, and modalities.
This is a reply to ‘Defending Wittgenstein’, Piotr Dehnel's critique of my article, ‘Defending Wittgenstein's Remarks on Cantor from Putnam’. I first show that my position is much more in agreement ...with Felix Mühlhölzer than Dehnel takes it to be, and that his criticism of me is nothing more than a failure to recognize this. I then show how Dehnel incorrectly reads Wittgenstein as rejecting set theory as false. It is an overemphasis on and a much too narrow picture of ‘applicability’ which leads him to this view. Finally, I conclude by rejecting Dehnel's view that Wittgenstein was a finitist about mathematics.
In a notorious passage from his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that one can state of the standard metre neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long. While ...many commentators have rejected this claim, it has been commonly assumed that Wittgenstein himself endorsed it. In a recently published article, Thomas Müller not only provides a novel argument against Wittgenstein's claim about the standard metre but also claims that Wittgenstein did not actually endorse that claim. In this paper, I argue that Müller's exegetical thesis is false and that his novel argument against Wittgenstein's claim about the standard metre is unsound.
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