Neutral monism is the view that ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are composed of, or grounded in, more basic elements of reality that are intrinsically neither mental nor material. Before adopting this view in 1918, Russell was a mind–matter dualist and a pointed critic of it. His most ‘decisive’ objection concerns whether it can provide an adequate analysis of egocentricity and our use of indexical expressions such as ‘I’, ‘this’, ‘now’, and so on. I argue that M. G. F. Martin (2024) and (...) other recent interpreters cannot make proper sense of Russell’s shifting views about egocentricity because they misascribe to his early dualism the thesis that experience is in some sense ‘diaphanous’ or ‘transparent’. Against this, I make the case that (1) Russell rejected the diaphaneity of experience as a dualist, (2) this rejection played a key role in his early objections to neutral monism, and (3) several decades later Russell takes his neutral monism to have key resources for answering his prior objections. (shrink)

In conversations with Schlick and Waismann from June and December 1930, Wittgenstein began to turn his attention to the topic of games. This topic also centrally concerned Schlick. In his earliest philosophical output, Schlick had relied on the results of evolutionary biology in setting out an account of the emergence of the human species’ ability to play [Spiel] as a prerequisite for the genesis of scientific knowledge. Throughout his subsequent works one finds fragmentary appeals to this early view, e.g. in (...) his oft misunderstood claim that play constitutes the meaning of life. Wittgenstein’s turn to the topic of games in 1930 not only happened while Professor Schlick was in the room, but was also coupled with an explicit response to Schlick’s 1930 book Fragen der Ethik. Schlick here employs the example of chess to distinguish between rules and their application – a distinction which underlies his whole attempt to naturalise ethics as a descriptive psycho-sociological discipline. This paper investigates the relation between Wittgenstein’s and Schlick’s accounts of games in light of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Schlick’s ethics. Wittgenstein’s objections can be answered by taking Schlick’s theory of play into consideration. (shrink)

Maria Rosa Antognazza's work has issued a historical challenge to the thesis that the analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) attacked by epistemologists from Gettier onwards was indeed the standard view traditionally upheld from Plato onwards. This challenge led to an ongoing reappraisal of the historical significance of intuitive knowledge, in which the knower is intimately connected to what is known. Such traditional accounts of intuition, and their accompanying claims to epistemological primacy, constituted the precise target of Moritz Schlick's (...) critique. Schlick engages with this topic throughout his oeuvre, from some of his early epistemological writings, to his anti-metaphysical stance as a leading Logical Empiricist. Schlick crucially distinguishes knowledge from mere acquaintance, denying that the latter has epistemic status. He therefore argues that the very notion of ‘intuitive knowledge’ is a contradictio in adjecto. (shrink)

The early Schlick developed an evolutionary biological account of play. He contrasted play with work. Where work encompasses all activity that is undertaken for the sake of some practical outcome, play renders what was previously a mere means into an end enjoyable in itself. Schlick thus distinguished between aesthetic, religious, scientific, and ethical game types. This paper shows that this typology underlies his later attempts to naturalize these fields, and allows us to clarify the relation between object-games and their description (...) within the scientific game. Schlick's demarcation between aesthetic and scientific games arguably prefigures the Vienna Circle's anti-metaphysical stance. (shrink)