In the scholarship on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of mathematics, the dominant interpretation is a theoretical one that ascribes to Wittgenstein some type of ‘ism’ such as radical verificationism or anti-realism. Essentially, he is supposed to provide a positive account of our mathematical practice based on some basic assertions. However, I claim that he should not be read in terms of any ‘ism’ but instead should be read as examining philosophical pictures in the sense of unclear conceptions. The contrast here is (...) that basic assertions that frame philosophical ‘isms’ are propositional such that they are subject to normal argumentative evaluation, while pictures in Wittgenstein’s sense are non-propositional—they lack a clear truth condition. They, therefore, need clarification rather than argumentation. In this paper, I provide a detailed analysis of Wittgenstein’s treatment of philosophical pictures with special focus on his argument on contradiction. I begin by explaining the problem with this trend of theoretical interpretation, taking Steve Gerrard’s otherwise excellent interpretation as a representative example and pointing out why it is problematic. Next, I will argue that those problems do not arise if we take Wittgenstein’s task as the clarification of philosophical pictures. I do this, first, by explaining Wittgenstein’s method using his argument concerning the Augustinian Picture in Philosophical Investigations and then pointing out that the same method can be identified in the crucial arguments in his philosophy of mathematics. Finally, in order to connect my interpretation with the current scholarship, I will explain the relation of my interpretation with those of New Wittgensteinian scholars. (shrink)

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus the identity signal is excluded from any meaningful language use, because expressions such as “a = a” and “a = b” cannot be elementary and necessary propositions at the same time. Hence, the identity is used as a operation. That use does not intended to be be meaningful, but only to indicate the intersubstitutable nature of the signs involved.

After the works of Jaako Hintikka, David Stern and, more recently, Denis Perrin, the idea that there is a wittgensteinian reflection upon the time and that it is at the origin of the abandonment of the project of a phenomenological language is nothing surprising, but we cannot consider it established yet. It seems to me that an important element in this debate is in chapter VII of the Philosophical Remarks : indeed, we find there the very first sustained discussion on (...) the possibility of a phenomenological language —a discussion obviously centred on the question of time. Without aiming to propose an “alternative” reading of Wittgenstein’ reflections on time and the phenomenological language, I would like to bring to light the importance of this chapter for this problem and also try to show that the interpretation key must be looked for in a reductio ad absurdum whose base is the impossibility to measure time. (shrink)