In this article I present a summary of Bertrand Russell's protracted attempts to solve the problem of the unity of the proposition, and explain the significance of the problem for Russell's philosophy. Unlike many other accounts which take the problem to be confined to Russell's early theories of propositional content, I argue that the problem (or variants of it) is a recurring theme throughout the whole of Russell's career.

Climate change and the destruction of the earth is the most urgent issue of our time. We are hurtling towards the end of civilisation as we know it. With an unflinching honest approach, Rupert Read asks us to face up to the fate of the planet. This is a book for anyone who wants their philosophy to deal with reality and their climate concern to be more than a displacement activity. -/- As people come together to mourn the loss of (...) the planet, we have the opportunity to create a grounded, hopeful response. This meaningful hopefulness looks to the new communities created around climate activism. Together, our collective mourning enables us to become human in ways previously unknown. -/- Why Climate Breakdown Matters is a practical guide on how to be a radical, responsible climate activist. (shrink)

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the issues (...) which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s N-operator is a ‘primitive sign’ which shows every complex proposition is the result of the truth-functional combination of a finite number of component propositions, and thus provid...

This article reflects on the received view of the rupture which constitutes the beginning of a critical, ethical, political and legal opening, the understanding of which inhabits the cry of, and response to, injustice. It takes the very critique that feeds into, and is distorted by, practical reasoning, as its point of departure. Grasping this rupture as the complementary relation between deconstruction and radical alterity, would entail unreflectively accepting a certain kind of truthfulness—truthfulness as [in]correctness, manifesting in a relationship that (...) involves rootless and controlling movement of making and unmaking of world. In closely reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger on the level of seeing, showing and saying, truthfulness is shown to contain an essential tension between, on the one hand, the Socratic, metaphysically-bound notion of beingness, correctness and meaning-steering and, on the other hand, the pre-Socratic notion of unconcealment (a-lethia), which, pointing even earlier than pre-Socratics into aboriginality, involves attentive letting of gliding in the inexpressible saying of language. While steering is about generating new possibilities of expressibility, gliding is about poetic dwelling, or enduring inexpressibility as a constitutive part of saying. Although aletheia is taken to be the key influence on rootless post-foundational thinking, it is argued that unconcealment involves letting and enduring the presencing inexpressibility of place and home-coming, that is, worlding-rootedness; thus showing Heidegger’s originary politics as the district of the uncanny to be about worlding that attentively lets the presencing inexpressibility of earth be as place. In reading Heidegger’s views on humanism, beginning and language, the argument links inexpressibility—essentially and historically—to the grasping of the belongingness together of world, earth and place, viewing this belongingness as key to both the saying of art and of mortals dwelling together temporally, spatially, materially in a manner always strange to, and nearer than, the steering/controlling of beingness, time, space and place that the very gesture and emergence of critique is captive of and is not capable of attuning to and capturing. Art always estranges the metaphysical cycle of correctness which preserves pain and suffering—a cycle that inhabits a double bind of responding to violence and injustice generated by the violence of metaphysics with metaphysical violence and justice. In showing essential strife within truthfulness itself, Heidegger points to even greater and earlier problematic than the pre-Socratics—to the painful core of inexpressibility between the ontology of steering time, spaces and material—steering places—and the gliding temporality, spatiality and materiality of ontology of place. (shrink)

It is possible to pursue philosophy with a clarificatory end in mind. Doing philosophy in this mode neither reduces to simply engaging in therapy or theorizing. This paper defends the possibility of this distinctive kind of philosophical activity and gives an account of its product—non-theoretical insights—in an attempt to show that there exists a third, ‘live’ option for understanding what philosophy has to offer. It responds to criticisms leveled at elucidatory philosophy by defenders of extreme therapeutic readings and clearly demonstrates (...) that in rejecting the latter one cannot assume Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy was theoretically based by default. (shrink)

Nietzsche is often said to have started out as a Schopenhauerian metaphysician of some kind before leaving Schopenhauer behind him, and, by the end of his sane life, metaphysics too. His first and last thoughts about tragedy, however, sit uneasily with this narrative. The late thoughts are simply too close to the early ones for the story to accommodate them—not for their Schopenhauerianism, but for the strongly metaphysical flavour that they appear to share. The argument of the present paper is (...) that the appearance is veridical, and that attempts to explain away the metaphysical flavour of the later remarks cannot succeed. The paper concludes with a brief diagnosis of why Nietzsche's final thoughts about tragedy, in Twilight of the Idols, so unignorably recall the ones expressed in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. (shrink)

I aim to present a solution to the apparent paradox of the Tractatus by means of a minimalist reading grounded in the idea that the correct logical symbolism alone “finally solves” in essentials the philosophical problems. I argue that although the sentences of the Tractatus are nonsensical, rules presented in its symbolism are not. The symbolism itself expresses only a priori rules of logic through schematic variables that do not say anything. I argue that this reading correctly expresses the ladder (...) structure of the book, and that it can account for Wittgenstein's critique of the Tractatus in Some Remarks on Logical Form. (shrink)

This book attempts to explicate and expand upon Frank Ramsey's notion of the realistic spirit. In so doing, it provides a systematic reading of his work, and demonstrates the extent of Ramsey's genius as evinced by both his responses to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , and the impact he had on Wittgenstein's later philosophical insights.

The work of Hubert Dreyfus interweaves productively ideas from, among others, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. A central element in Dreyfus' hugely influential interpretation of the former is the proposal that, if we are to—in some sense—'make sense' of intentionality, then we must recognize what Dreyfus calls the 'background'. Though Dreyfus has, over the years, put the notion of the 'background' to a variety of philosophical uses,1 considerations familiar from the literature inspired by Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following have played an important role (...) in motivating the case for believing that we need to recognize the 'background' and thus also in identifying precisely what it is about the intentional that supposedly needs to be 'made sense of'. Dreyfus argues that what he calls 'representationalism' will land us with an unstoppable 'regress of rules'. In this paper, I first argue that there are actually two different arguments that Dreyfus invokes; I then go on to evaluate quite how, in the light of the problems that those arguments reveal, our position might be thought to be improved by our recognizing the 'background'. Given that various philosophical positions designed to deal with these problems have emerged within the Wittgensteinian literature, an obvious question to ask is whether the position that Dreyfus would have us adopt is essentially one of those positions. If it isn't, then how does it differ? There is surely a variety of ways in which such a comparison might be carried out and what I offer is only one. I argue that if, through a recognition of the 'background', we are thought to have acquired solutions to those problems, then it's not at all clear that the supposed solutions that emerge work. So I explore instead the possibility that that recognition forms part of an attempt to 'dissolve' those problems. In order to bring some clarity to that possibility I consider a number of different ways in which Dreyfus' proposals might be interpreted by drawing on ideas set out by John McDowell (and I suggest that his view of one of the 'regress' arguments is anticipated by Heidegger himself). I then identify and assess some of the consequences of adopting such McDowellian readings. My sense is that Dreyfus is on the side of the angels, so to speak. But if what is right in his proposals is to become clear, and if he is to be spared some obvious objections that those proposals may elicit, we need to be clear about just what kind of contribution those proposals are meant to make. In pursuing that clarity, I am attempting to follow through on the comparison of Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian ideas that Dreyfus and his supporters have initiated: what has yet to be clarified is how and why recognizing the 'background' will allow us to 'cope better' with the puzzles in the rule-following literature that they have cited in making a case for the need to recognize the 'background'. Ultimately, I will argue that assessing this matter may require a yet broader comparison of Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian themes, one which raises questions about what we take 'doing ontology' and 'doing phenomenology' to be. (shrink)