Quiero empezar la presentación del dosier de Desacatos dedicado a Bronisław Malinowski y sus argonautas con una nota personal. Hace unos años, cuando empecé a escribir un artículo acerca del impacto ...de la antropología británica en México, hice varios descubrimientos que cambiaron de manera dramática mi opinión al respecto y tuve que admitir la vigencia del dicho de Porfirio Díaz: “pobre México, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos”.
The volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his 'new' philosophy - by concentrating on fragments in ordinary language and using few technical terms. It applies ...Wittgenstein's methodological tools to the study of multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures are in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. This volume undertakes the 'impossible task' of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's translated texts in order to construct,rather thanparaphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence. Dinda L. Gorlée, University of Helsinki, Finland.
This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the importance of music for Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and work. Wittgenstein's remarks on music are essential for understanding his philosophy: ...they are on the nature of musical understanding, the relation of music to language, the concepts of representation and expression, on melody, irony and aspect-perception, and, on the great composers belonging to the Austrian-German tradition. Biography and philosophy, this work suggests that Wittgenstein was a composer of philosophy who used the musical form as a blueprint for his own writing and thought. For Wittgenstein music is not alone, but connects and resonates with our cultural forms of life. His relation to composers, especially to Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, enables Wittgenstein to address the question of how to do philosophy and compose music in the breakdown of tradition. Unlike his conservative musical sensibility, Wittgenstein's philosophy is open to musical experiments. Reflecting on his remarks on music makes it possible to compare the therapeutic aim of his philosophical activity with that of music, and thus notice affinities between Wittgenstein and John Cage.
Disputatio could not allow the centennial of the publication of one of the most influential books in 20th Century philosophy to pass without taking notice. We are very grateful that several renowned ...scholars accepted our invitation to reflect on Wittgenstein's masterpiece of his youth and share their thoughts with us.
In PI 189, Wittgenstein's interlocutor asks, ‘But are the steps then not determined by the algebraic formula?’. Wittgenstein responds, ‘The question contains a mistake’. What is the mistake contained ...in the interlocutor's question? Wittgenstein's elaboration is neither explicit nor its intended upshot transparent. In this paper, I offer a reading on which the interlocutor's question arises from illicitly crossing different pictures of ‘determination’. I begin by working through Wittgenstein's machine analogy in PI 193, which illustrates picture‐crossing in our ways of talking about a machine. Using the lessons from this analogy, I show how the interlocutor's ‘mistake’ can be diagnosed in similar terms: their confusion about the power of a rule to determine its applications rests on mistakenly crossing a behavioural and a mathematical sense of ‘determine’—thereby concocting a mystifying picture of rule‐following.
The notion of the riddle plays a pivotal role in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. By examining the comparisons he draws between philosophical problems and riddles, this paper offers a reassessment of the ...aims and methods of the book. Solving an ordinary riddle does not consist in learning a new fact; what it requires is that we transform the way we use words. Similarly, Wittgenstein proposes to transform the way philosophers understand the nature of their problems. But since he holds that these problems are ultimately unsolvable, rather than attempting to solve the riddles of philosophy, he aims to dissolve them.
I provide a motivation for Wittgenstein's holding to the view that a necessary condition of an item's possessing a sense is its being capable of truth and capable of falsehood. I argue that ...Wittgenstein adopted the relevant view in order to defend an approach to the determination of logical truth on which the subject matter of a proposition is irrelevant to our making such a determination. This approach was itself conceived of as a remedy to that employed by Russell, and to a conception of logical truth on which the axiom of reducibility counts as logically true.
Paragraph 50 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations famously says that there is one thing of which one can neither state that it is 1 m long nor that it isn't: the standard metre in Paris. ...Consensus appears to be that (1) exegetically speaking, Wittgenstein affirms this claim, and (2) systematically, whether or not one agrees with it, the practice of using a material artefact as a measurement standard has important philosophical consequences. In this paper, in contrast, we show that (1') Wittgenstein does not affirm the standard metre claim and (2') historical facts about material length standards do not warrant deeper philosophical conclusions. References to material measurement standards in the literature gravely distort the actual metrological practices of developing and using such standards.
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