The purpose of this essay is to make the case for a heterodox reading of Leibniz’s The Monadology (published 1720) through the lens of Professor John Wheeler’s hypothesis of the one-electron universe (proposed in 1940). My conjecture is this: That there exists in the knowable universe only one monad; that this monad traverses time in both directions, eventually criss-crossing the entire past and future history of the universe; and that this singular monad interacts with itself countless times, thereby filling the (...) universe with simultaneous appearances of itself. In the course of this article I will consider the possibility that our solitary monad is synonymous with Leibniz’s God, or if the monad in question is rather a created substance that is alone with God, a notion that gains some traction thanks to Leibniz’s admiration for the solipsism of Saint Teresa of Avila. I will also consider whether the one-monad hypothesis is consistent with Leibniz’s own views on harmony, simplicity and perfection. (shrink)

This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...) do justice to some widely held realist intuitions about classical genetics. This result is at loggerheads with the explicit goals usually associated with partial theories of reference, which is to defend a realist semantics for scientific terms. Thirdly, I show that, contrary to received wisdom and perhaps contrary to physics and chemistry, neither reference fixism nor partial reference are necessary in order to hold on to scientific realism about biology. I pinpoint the reasons for this in the nature of biological kinds, which do not even remotely resemble natural kinds (i.e., Lockean real essences) as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

Though perhaps a dubious honor, Dharmakīrti is the first philosopher in any tradition to explicitly recognize the epistemological threat of solipsism, devoting an entire essay to the problem—The Justification of Other Minds. This essay revisits Ratnakīrti’s Doing Away with Other Beings as a diagnosis of Dharmakīrti’s attempt to reconstruct the very idea of other beings, with particular attention to Ratnakīrti’s sensitivity to the conceptual preconditions for a genuine threat of solipsism. Along with the diagnosis of the conditions for the emergence (...) of a problem of genuine solipsism, this essay takes as its focus Ratnakīrti’s criticism of attempts to meet with the problem. In particular, I shall stress an insight Ratnakīrti adduces in the course of his diagnosis. Attempts to meet the problem of solipsism head on, Ratnakīrti shows us, obscure what the preconditions for a genuine problem reveal: the fact of our possessing two incommensurable conceptions of mind, one of which is intrinsically and entirely first-personal—in a sense to be clarified in the course of this essay—and the other not. I conclude this essay with an inconclusive sketch of the difficulties that remain when considering what Ratnakīrti would have us conclude from his own diagnosis. (shrink)

In the penultimate remark of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein declares that anyone who understands him judges the book to be nonsense. The immediate reaction to this paradoxical statement is to reject the insights of the book that this assessment is based on; that is, to reject the book’s theories of logic and language. Commentators have tried to save the book’s fundamental philosophical ideas by blocking this immediate response. In this thesis I characterise and explore different attempts to do so. I (...) discuss attempts of Russell, Carnap, Max Black, Malcolm, Hacker’s Ineffability interpretation and Conant’s Therapeutic interpretation. I argue that the Therapeutic reading is the most promising attempt in its main ideas. Nonetheless, current versions of the Therapeutic readings do not seem successful. I borrow ideas from Grice’s pragmatic theory of conversation and Davidson’s account of metaphor to explain how the book is to be read therapeutically. I argue that the book is a long conversation between Wittgenstein and his audience which eventually turns out to be a pointless series of remarks. The book, however, works metaphorically in such a way that it affects its readers and helps them to divest themselves of the inclination to do philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of the metaphysical subject sheds new light on subjective qualities of experience. In this article I draw first of all on the interpretations provided by Michael Kremer and James Conant. Subsequently, I conclude that “what is it like” means primarily “what is it like to see myself as the metaphysical subject”.

ABSTRACTIn 1931 Wittgenstein wrote: ‘the limit of language manifests itself in the impossibility of describing the fact that corresponds to a sentence without simply repeating the sentence’. Here, Wittgenstein claims, ‘we are involved … with the Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy’. This paper shows how this remark fits with Wittgenstein's early account of the substance of the world, his account of logic, and ultimately his view of philosophy. By contrast to the currently influential resolute reading of the Tractatus, (...) the paper argues that the early Wittgenstein did not aim at destroying the idea of a limit of language, but that the notion lies at the very heart of Wittgenstein's early view. In doing so, the paper employs and defends the Kantian interpretation of Wittgenstein's early philosophy. (shrink)

If we read the Tractatus logico-philosophicus according to the decimal numbering of its propositions, we may understand, finally, the section about the self and the limits of language and world. Proposition 5.64 follows 5.63 (not 5.634); 5.634 follows 5.633 (not 5.6331); and so on. Thus, it becomes clear that the picture of the visual field (TLP 5.6331) cannot be what scholars have always quoted and discussed, i.e. a draft of an eye inside its field of sight. Actually, Wittgenstein’s original drafts (...) depict (to criticise it) the ordinary way of representing the visual field. Following him, the field of vision is ‘without limits’; it does not have a form that implies the existence of an eye, as far as the phenomenological experience does not have a form that implies the existence of an ‘I’. As a result, the current reproductions of the 5.6331 image must be rectified, and all references to this similitude should be radically amended. (shrink)

The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, (...) the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written. (shrink)

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, (...) but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject severed from intersubjectivity, and affected not only by the grief of bereavement, which can be defined in Heideggarian terms as anxiety for the ontic negation of a being (i.e., death), but by loss, which I assert is the ontological ground for how Dasein encounters the nothing in anxiety proper. (shrink)