The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to clarify Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thesis that colours possess logical structures, focusing on his ‘puzzle proposition’ that “there can be a bluish green but not a reddish green”, (2) to compare modeltheoretical and gametheoretical approaches to the colour exclusion problem. What is gained, then, is a new gametheoretical framework for the logic of ‘forbidden’ (e.g., reddish green and bluish yellow) colours. My larger aim is to discuss phenomenological principles of the demarcation of the (...) bounds of logic as formal ontology of abstract objects. (shrink)

Dirk Koppelberg is an ambitious new arrival to take notice of. His first book, "Die Aufhebung der analytischen Philosophic: Quine als Synthese von Carnap und Neurath" (Suhrkamp, 1987, pp. 416) is extremely detailed and comprehensive. In succinct 300 pages or so (plus 40 pages of notes and 30 pages of (not too successful) bibliography) he manages to touch on W. V. Quine's diverse concerns, to synthesize them, to relate them to their..

Purpose. The paper is aimed at analyzing in a comparative way the philosophical conceptions of the human, proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger as the main representatives of the analytic and continental tradition of philosophizing in the XXth century. The theoretical basis of the study is determined by Wittgenstein’s legacy in the field of logical and linguistic analysis, as well as Heidegger’s existential, hermeneutical, and phenomenological ideas. Originality. Based on the analysis of the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, (...) the initial principles of their anthropological concepts in the unity of transcendental preconditions, essential foundations, and correlations to the world in the technosphere are reconstructed. It is demonstrated that, despite the difference in the explanation of the peculiarities in the interpretation of the realm of the transcendental and basic characteristic of the inner world of human, both philosophers emphasized the understanding of the human being through the prism of language and the need for anthropologization of science and technology. Conclusions. Wittgenstein and Heidegger developed their own original considerations on the nature of human being, which fully conform to the basic theoretico-methodological principles of their philosophical conceptions. The former focused on how language reflects a human’s world and serves as a means of expressing their knowledge and aspirations. The latter, on the contrary, interpreted the world as a reflection of language that expresses itself through human. As a supporter of analytic methodology and, accordingly, of accuracy in formulations, Wittgenstein came to the concept of the unspeakable in the process of reflection on the being of human over the language. But in Heidegger’s existential discourse, which is full of metaphors and neologisms, being of human is limited by the concept of Nothing. As a consequence, it is noted that the ontological status of values is transcendental to the world according to Wittgenstein, but it is immanent to the world, according to Heidegger. It is argued that the Austrian thinker developed a linguo-psychological approach to the study of human through the prism of the mental, but the German philosopher comprehended the human on the basis of the concept of self in the ontological sphere. It has been demonstrated that both thinkers have pointed to the challenges faced by humans in the development of science and technology while emphasizing the importance of substantiating their anthropological foundations. (shrink)

This is an instructor’s manual with student exercises for the Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Language course. It is intended to assist the instructor in teaching the subject to students for whom English is a second language. -/- This manual begins with a chapter that describes the types of learning activities during this course. Next are topic chapters, each of which has four sections: a synopsis of the lecture on the topic; a lecture lesson worksheet with tasks; a seminar lesson (...) worksheet with tasks; and assignments for essay writing. At the end of the manual is a list of key definitions for the course, a list of exam questions, and answer keys for seminar tasks and lecture worksheets. (shrink)

A obra "O racional e o místico em Wittgenstein" é uma das obras do professor Urbano Zilles, da PUC-RS, que tem a finalidade de mostrar um panorama da filosofia de Ludwig Wittgenstein com leitura e análise de suas principais obras: Tractatus Lógicus-philosophicus e Investigações Filosóficas.

The paper submits surprising results of systematical investigating a formal-ethical aspect of conjoining Wittgenstein’s, Moore’s, Parmenides’, Gödel’s, and Łukasiewicz’s ideas. A critique of Wittgenstein’s critique of the natural language of ethics and of metaphysics results in submitting and elaborating a new paradigm of metaphysics as formal axiology. In result, the classical metaphysics and ethics of moral rigor are represented as two-valued algebraic systems of metaphysics and formal ethics respectively. By means of this algebraic model, all the well-known scandal-making metaphysical tenets (...) of Parmenides are produced as translations of corresponding algebraic equations from the symbolic language to the natural one. At the level of submitted discrete mathematical model of formal axiology, Parmenides’ metaphysical concepts “consistency” and “inconsistency,” “completeness” and “incompleteness” are compared with Gödel’s logic ones. Formal-axiological meanings of the words “consistency,” “incompleteness,” “being,” “nonbeing,” “movement,” “knowledge,” “belief,” etc., are considered as moral-evaluation-functions determined by one moral-evaluation-variable. Binary moral-evaluation-functions are studied as well. The functions are precisely defined by tables. Precise definitions of “formal-axiological-equivalence,” “formal-axiological-law,” and “formal-axiological contradiction” are submitted. Thus, one can either generate or examine formal-axiological equations of algebra of metaphysics by “computing” relevant compositions of moral-value-functions. Using this “moral-value-table-computation-technique,” one can arrive to a surprising conclusion that both the notorious sentence of Moore and the incompleteness sentence of Gödel are formally-axiologically inconsistent ones: Hence, they are formally-axiologically equivalent. For overcoming the negative psychological effect of such a surprising result, the author has used graphic models explicating the famous Łukasiewicz’s statement “Logic is morality of thought and speech.”. (shrink)

In sections 1 through 5, I develop in detail what I call the standard theory of worlds and propositions, and I discuss a number of purported objections. The theory consists of five theses. The first two theses, presented in section 1, assert that the propositions form a Boolean algebra with respect to implication, and that the algebra is complete, respectively. In section 2, I introduce the notion of logical space: it is a field of sets that represents the propositional structure (...) and whose space consists of all and only the worlds. The next three theses, presented in sections 3, 4, and 5, respectively, guarantee the existence of logical space, and further constrain its structure. The third thesis asserts that the set of propositions true at any world is maximal consistent; the fourth thesis that any two worlds are separated by a proposition; the fifth thesis that only one proposition is false at every world. In sections 6 through 10, I turn to the problem of reduction. In sections 6 and 7, I show how the standard theory can be used to support either a reduction of worlds to propositions or a reduction of propositions to worlds. A number of proposition-based theories are developed in section 6, and compared with Adams's world-story theory. A world-based theory is developed in section?, and Stalnaker's account of the matter is discussed. Before passing judgment on the proposition based and world-based theories, I ask in sections 8 and 9 whether both worlds and propositions might be reduced to something else. In section 8, I consider reductions to linguistic entities; in section 9, reductions to unfounded sets. After rejecting the possibility of eliminating both worlds and propositions, I return in section 10 to the possibility of eliminating one in favor of the other. I conclude, somewhat tentatively, that neither worlds nor propositions should be reduced one to the other, that both worlds and propositions should be taken as basic to our ontology. (shrink)

In this paper, we will reconsider the history of dualistic idealism (i.e., the main stream of western philosophy: chiefly, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, etc.) under the quantum mechanical worldview. Recall that quantum mechanics also has the aspect of being a scientifically complete form of dualistic idealism. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that almost all unsolved problems of philosophy (i.e., dualistic idealism) can be clarified under the linguistic Copenhagen interpretation. In this paper, we will show that the expectation is completely (...) realized. (shrink)

The article will expose the problem of the nature of reality stablished in the first sections of Wittgenstein"s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, especially the aphorisms 1 to 2.063 seeking to show points of contact between the Aristotelian-Thomistic and Suarezian thought. Initially, (I) a distinction is made between metaphysics and ontology in order to understand why Wittgenstein, notorious for his anti-metaphysical thought, actually ends up producing a theory of reality. Subsequently, (II) the relationship between reality and language will be drawn from the characteristic (...) isomorphism of the Tractatus in which a structural similarity will appear with the Aristotelian-Thomistic thought. This relationship will be the basis for (III) the construction of an ontological image of reality as the condition of possibility for a meaningful language. With this outlook, the (IV) hypothesis of the influence of Francisco Suárez"s thought as the content behind this Wittgensteinian description of reality will be advanced. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca debater a posição de Charles Sanders Peirce e dos primeiros estudantes peirceanos de Lógica (Christine Ladd e O. H. Mitchell nos Studies in Logic, 1883) dentro do debate inspirador da visão da linguagem dentro da Filosofia Analítica, conhecido como “Lingua Universalis contra Calculus Ratiocinator”, cujos primórdios podem ser traçados desde a filosofia de Gottfried Leibniz. Para isso, comparamos esse campo do pensamento peirceano com o debate crucial entre a conceitografia de Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift, 1879) e a (...) lógica algébrica de George Boole (An investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the mathematical theories of Logic and Probabilities, 1854). O nosso objetivo principal é observar que esse momento da filosofia peirceana pode ser comparado com o pensamento wittgensteiniano, especialmente em sua nova vertente, chamada New Wittgenstein, que tenta superar a tradicional divisão entre Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus e Investigações Filosóficas. Pela comparação entre pensadores influenciados por C. S. Peirce e a filosofia de Ludwig Wittgenstein, pretendemos abrir caminhos na compreensão do conceito de jogo de linguagem, especialmente em sua gramática e em seus operadores simbólicos, através da observação das funções de verdade [truth functions] e as tabelas de verdade [truth tables] enquanto lógica algébrica. (shrink)