The following contribution aims at presenting a reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as a kind of idealism within the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. The goal is to argue that Wittgenstein’s position shares substantial theoretical and methodological grounds with Hegel’s idealism. The main concepts pertaining to the later Wittgenstein’s position are analyzed and understood as a form of idealism. After defending the reading against anti-idealist interpretations we argue that the kind of idealism presented clashes with central tenets of the Kantian position. (...) These points of departure are then shown to cover in a substantial manner the same kind of criticism Hegel raised against Kant. In the last section, an interpretation of central concepts of the Hegelian position is offered in order to dissolve any fundamental incompatibility with Wittgenstein’s idealism. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Wittgenstein attempted to clarify ethics through a procedure that, by analogy with “transcendental arguments”, I call “transcendental thought experiment”. Specifically, after offering a brief perspectival account of both transcendental arguments and transcendental thought experiments, I focus on a thought experiment proposed by Wittgenstein in his 1929 'Lecture on Ethics', arguing that it deserves the title of “transcendental”.

In his early essay, “Must We Mean What We Say”, Cavell argues that the claims of ordinary language philosophers regarding “what we say when” are not empirical generalizations about a given group of speakers but are rather to be understood as measuring the limits of what counts as a coherent act of thinking and speaking. Cavell’s charge against the skeptic about the external world is that he seeks to think and speak beyond these limits. In this paper I compare Cavell’s (...) response to the skeptic to Davidson’s. Both base their responses on a broadly Kantian approach that appeals to the conditions under which thinking or speaking about objects is possible. On this approach the skeptic isn’t giving a false answer to an intelligible question, but rather, the question to which the skeptic is giving an answer is shown to be in some way unintelligible. But while Davidson’s critique of the skeptic is based on the conditions of ascribing meaning to one’s words, and contents to one’s beliefs, Cavell’s critique is based on the failure of the skeptic to mean the words he uses in the way that he needs. This difference expresses an underlying disagreement about the meaning of “meaning”: for Davidson the world comes into view through the meaning of our words and concepts, through the contents of our beliefs; for Cavell, the world comes into view through the agreement in “criteria” that are a condition of applying words and concepts to the world. This difference illuminates what Cavell calls “the truth of skepticism”: the idea that “my relation to the world and to others in general is not one of knowing”. (shrink)

Part 1 of this paper sketches Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism in general. Part 2 explores his opposition to scientism in philosophy focusing, in particular, on philosophy of mind; how must philosophy of mind proceed if it is to avoid the kind of scientism that Wittgenstein complains about? Part 3 examines a central anti-scientistic strand in Wittgenstein’s Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology volume II: his treatment of the ‘uncertainty’ of the relation between ‘outer’ behaviour and ‘inner’ experiences and mental (...) states. (shrink)

Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and (...) the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

O objetivo desta publicação é incentivar a produção filosófica de excelência por parte de pesquisadores notadamente influenciados pela filosofia de Wittgenstein e cujos temas possam suscitar um debate aprofundado. Além de desafiar o empreendimento filosófico contemporâneo, os temas aqui apresentados abordam questões que muitas vezes estão além daquelas consideradas por Wittgenstein em seu tempo. O leitor encontrará neste volume questões relacionadas ao ceticismo semântico e epistêmico, ao relativismo ético, às leituras literárias de Wittgenstein, ao problema das outras mentes e percepção (...) de aspectos, a intersubjetividade e o caráter contrassensual do Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, e, também, relacionadas ao Paradoxo de Moore. (shrink)

The chapter discusses Quentin Meillassoux's recent interpretation and critique of Heidegger's philosophical position, which he describes as "strong correlationism." It emphasizes the fact that Meillassoux situates Heidegger in the post-Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism that he defines in terms of a focus on the correlation between being and thinking. It is argued that Meillassoux's "speculative" attempt to overcome the Kantian philosophical framework in the name of absolute contingency should be understood as a further development and dialectical overcoming of its ultimate (...) contemporary form, the Heideggerian philosophy of finitude. (shrink)

Ziel der Arbeit ist zu zeigen, dass sich in der theoretischen Philosophie David Humes Ansätze zu einer therapeutischen Methode finden, wie sie von Ludwig Wittgenstein angewandt und beschrieben wurde. Im ersten Teil wird Wittgensteins Konzeption der Philosophie und ihre Anwendung anhand einer genauen Textexegese dargestellt. Der zweite Teil untersucht primär die Humeschen Überlegungen zu Kausalität und Induktion, seine methodologischen Aussagen sowie seine Perzeptionstheorie und argumentiert für die These, dass Hume ebenfalls, wenn auch mit Einschränkungen, Elemente einer therapeutischen Methode und eine (...) entsprechende Konzeption der Philosophie zugeschrieben werden können. (shrink)

Although Whitehead’s particular style of philosophizing--looking at traditional philosophical problems in light of recent scientific advances--was part of a trend that began with the scientific revolutions in the early 20th century and continues today, he was marginalized in 20th century philosophy because of his outspoken defense of what he was doing as “metaphysics.” Metaphysics, for Whitehead, is a cross-disciplinary hermeneutic responsible for coherently integrating the perspectives of the special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program of such (...) a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination. (shrink)

Transcendental idealism has been conceived of in philosophy as a position that aims to secure objectivity without traditional metaphysical underpinnings. This article contrasts two forms of transcendental idealism that have been identified: one in the work of Kant, the other in the later Wittgenstein. The distinction between these two positions is clarified by means of a distinction between transcendental constraints and transcendental features. It is argued that these conceptions provide the - fundamentally different - bases of the two positions under (...) discussion. With the core of the positions identified, it is then suggested that neither form of transcendental idealism - the Kantian or the Wittgensteinian - manages to combine the twin aims of safeguarding objectivity and maintaining metaphysical parsimony. The Kantian form appears to succeed on the first score at the cost of failing on the second, while the Wittgensteinian form succeeds on the second and fails on the first. (shrink)

John McDowell espouses a certain conception of the thinking subject: as an embodied, living, finite being, with a capacity for experience that can take in the world, and stand in relations of warrant to subjects' beliefs. McDowell presents this conception of the subject as requiring a related conception of the world: as not located outside the conceptual sphere. In this latter conception, idealism and common-sense realism are supposed to coincide. But I suggest that McDowell's conception of the subject scuppers this (...) intended coincidence. The upshot is a dilemma: McDowell can retain his conception of the subject, but lose the coincidence; or he can keep the coincidence, but abandon his conception of the subject. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of Wittgenstein's view of the limits of intelligibility. In it I criticize standard analytic readings of Wittgenstein as an advocate of transcendental or behaviourist theses in epistemology; and I propose an alternative interpretation of Wittgenstein's view as a social contextualism that transcends the false dichotomy between Kantianism and psychologism. I argue that this social contextualism is strikingly similar to the social account of epistemic practices developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Through a comparison between Wittgenstein's and (...) Bourdieu's view and an analysis of the notion of habitus , I try to show how social contextualism can account for the distinction between sense and nonsense without falling into transcendental constructivism or social behaviourism. (shrink)

A rich literature has discussed what it is to respond to a reason, e.g., to believe or act on the basis of some consideration or another. In comparison, what it would be to respond to a second-order reason has been underexplored. Yet formulating an account of this is vital for maintaining the existence of second-order reasons in both the practical and epistemic domains. And indeed, there are reasons to doubt this is possible. For example, responding to second-order reasons is meant (...) to be different from simply coming to believe or act for a more richly described first-order reason but it's not clear what this would look like. This paper introduces an account of the second-order basing relation which meets these concerns. It therefore both develops our picture of second-order reasons and helps to defend their existence. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following can be considered as a part of his criticism of metaphysics: Naturalistic as well as non-naturalistic ontologies fail to present us an adequate explanation of the normative dimension of linguistic behavior. In this paper, we will reconstruct this criticism of metaphysics and show that thereby we gain an important philosophical insight: Wittgenstein's criticism implies that the normativity of language is not a phenomenon that stands in need for an explanation but rather – to the contrary – (...) has to be considered as a primitive, non-reducible condition that we have to presuppose in order to show how linguistic meaning is possible at all. In this sense, the notion of rule-following gives rise to a transcendental semantics. (shrink)

This chapter argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be read as evolving dialectically out of Wittgenstein’s own. After considering Wittgenstein as a stylistic influence on Williams, especially as regards ideals of clarity, precision, and depth, Williams’s methodological debt to Wittgenstein is examined, in particular his anthropological interest in thick concepts and their point. The chapter then turns to Williams’s explicit association, in the 1990s, with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, which he called ‘Left Wittgensteinianism’. (...) It is shown how this is not a sudden conversion, but the direct product of Williams’s longstanding critical engagement with Wittgenstein’s methodology and metaphilosophy: Williams arrives at this position by envisaging a Wittgensteinianism that thinks in concrete sociohistorical terms, embraces genuine explanation, and relinquishes its insistence on the purity of philosophy. When properly understood, moreover, this critique turns out to be continuous with Williams’s advocacy of a conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Finally, it is shown that Williams inherits from Wittgenstein a certain understanding of how philosophy can help us to live, in particular the therapeutic ambition to liberate us from distortions in our self-understanding by assembling reminders. (shrink)

The traditional understanding of Kant and Kierkegaard is that their views on the good will and inwardness, respectively, commit them to denying moral luck in an attempt to isolate an omnipotent moral subject from involvement with the external world. This leaves them vulnerable to the criticism that their ethical thought unrealistically insulates morality from anything that happens in the world. On the interpretation offered here, inwardness and the good will are not contrasted with worldly happenings, but are instead a matter (...) of worldly happenings that exhibit a particular temporal structure. Kant and Kierkegaard should not be understood as denying moral luck. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the continuity of Wittgenstein’s approach to, and conception of, philosophy. Part One examines the rule-following passages of the Philosophical Investigations. I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks can only be read as interesting and coherent if we see him, as urged by prominent commentators, resisting the possibility of a certain ‘sideways-on’ perspective. There is real difficulty, however, in ascertaining what the resulting Wittgensteinian position is: whether it is position structurally analogous with Kant’s distinction between empirical realism and transcendental idealism, (...) or whether philosophical ‘therapy’ is meant to dissolve any drive towards such idealism. I argue that both of these readings of Wittgenstein are found in the work of McDowell. Part Two argues that related issues arise in respect to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the question of realism. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein rejects the possibility of a certain ‘sideways-on’ perspective. Again, I argue, it is unclear whether Wittgenstein embraces a form of transcendental idealism or, on the contrary, ultimately reveals the idealist position to be empty. Part Three connects ‘sideways-on’ glances with the threat of idealism by introducing a philosophical ‘measure’. I argue that the measure is a useful tool in assessment of the Tractatus, and shows that Wittgenstein was no idealist, but is less useful as an assessment of the Investigations. It yields the result that Wittgenstein succumbed to idealism, but in doing so may overlook the ‘therapeutic’ nature of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. (shrink)

Discussions of objectivity often start from considerations about disagreement. We might ask why this should be so. It makes it seem as though disagreement were surprising, but there is no reason why that should be so (the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition found conflict at least as obvious a feature of the world as concord). The interest in disagreement comes about, rather, because neither agreement nor disagreement is universal. It is not that disagreement needs explanation and agreement does not, (...) but that in different contexts disagreement requires different sorts of explanation, and so does agreement. (shrink)

Although the expression “form of life” and its plural “forms of life” occur only five times in Philosophical Investigations, and generally few times in his works, it is commonly agreed that this is one of the most relevant issues in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Starting from the analysis of the contexts in which Wittgenstein makes use of this concept, the paper focuses on the different interpretations that have been given in secondary literature, and proposes a classification based on two axes of (...) debate: the monistic versus pluralistic interpretation, and the empirical versus transcendental interpretation. After placing some well-known readings in the resulting scheme, an attempt will be made to offer an evolutionary reading of Wittgenstein’s own ideas about forms of life. It will be argued that the empirical and plural view that seems characteristic of his writings in the Thirties, slowly appears to turn towards a monistic view, sometimes with transcendental tones, although within a pragmatic perspective. This turn remains nevertheless rooted in Wittgenstein’s general attitude towards philosophy intended as a conceptual inquiry with clarifying and therapeutic aims. (shrink)

It is only two years since Immanuel Kant published his monumental Critique of Pure Reason.As part of entering into the spirit of this ‘untimely review’, I shall pretend that only the first edition of the Critique exists. This has a bearing on some claims that I shall make about differences between the content of the Prolegomena and that of the Critique. Despite its formidable difficulty, that book has already generated intense interest in the philosophical community. Those who are still struggling (...) to come to terms with its dense and subtle argumentation, or who may not even have started to read it yet but who know from the furore that it has created that it needs to be high on their ‘to read’ list, might easily despair at the prospect of having now to contend with another volume on the same broad range of subjects by the same author. This prospect is not, however, as daunting as it seems. In fact, it should afford some solace, at least if we are to believe claims that Kant makes on beh. (shrink)

The legacy of the Platonic dialogues may well lie, not in any classical idealist “doctrine of forms,” but in an inquisitive stance towards the puzzle behind any such doctrine—how thought can be about anything at all. This Platonic puzzle may, however, yield a different guise of idealism that is recognizably diagnostic: it aims to dispel our worry about thought’s objectivity as a confusion, engendered by a self-alienation of thought. These themes of diagnosis and idealism resurface in Wittgenstein, who in his (...) treatment of rules calls for an understanding of thought’s normativity from within. This is taken up by Cora Diamond, who urges philosophy to attend to thought’s real needs by exorcizing any desire for agreement with something other than itself. I argue that Wittgenstein and Diamond lead us back to Kant’s idealism, which identifies transcendental realism as the deep-seated prejudice at the root of the puzzle. (shrink)

What is the true worth of Wittgenstein's contribution to philosophy? Answers to this question are strongly divided. However, most assessments rest on certain popular misreadings of his purpose. This book challenges both "theoretical" and "therapeutic" interpretations. In their place, it seeks to establish that, from beginning to end, Wittgenstein regarded clarification as the true end of philosophy. It argues that, properly understood, his approach exemplifies rather than betrays critical philosophy and provides a viable alternative to other contemporary offerings.

Bernard Williams's essay ‘Wittgenstein and Idealism’ argues that that the conventionality of language entails the dependence of the truth of sentences and ultimately of corresponding states of affairs as truth‐makers on the existence of thinking subjects. Peter Winch and Colin Lyas try to avoid William's paradox by distinguishing between the existence conditions of a sentence and its assertion. The Winch‐Lyas solution is criticized and a stronger Winch‐Lays resistant version of Williams's paradox is proposed. A more satisfactory countercriticism is given, involving (...) an ineliminable modal fallacy occurring in the paradox inference, that arises because of the argument's invalid combination of categorical and counterfactual assumptions and conclusions. (shrink)

This paper views Bernard Williams through the lens of the pragmatist tradition. The central insight of pragmatism is that philosophy must start with human practice, in contrast to high theory or metaphysics. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most able proponents of this insight, especially when considering the topics of ethics and the law. Williams never saw himself as a pragmatist, because he took Richard Rorty’s radical relativism to be the exemplar of the position. But I shall suggest that (...) had Williams seen himself as a more objective pragmatist, along the lines of C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis, or Frank Ramsey, he might have had the resources to settle vital issues on which he wavered, issues having to do with whether there is anything objective underpinning our deliberations. (shrink)

The paper develops an account of semantic notions which occupies a middle ground between antirealism and traditional forms of realism, using some ideas from the work of John McDowell. The position is based on a contrast between two points of view from which we might attempt to characterize our linguistic practices from the cosmic exile s point of view and from the midst of language as a going concern. The contrast is drawn in terms of whether our characterization of our (...) linguistic practices is taken to result from engagement in the very same practices that we are trying to characterize. The position takes realism to be correct when understood as an account from the internal perspective, but incorrect when taken as an account from the external perspective. However, the intelligibility of the question as to what our practices would look like from the cosmic exile s point of view is presented as problematic. (shrink)

The article presents Dewey’s own understanding of rationality by reconstructing his criticism of idealism. For Dewey, idealism is an important and valuable expression of the modern idea that both knowledge and values are historical products of human self-determination. Thus, it rightly defends the power of thought against the uncritical claims of mere religious and social authority. Yet idealism, Dewey claims, still misconceives that human power by ultimately treating it as a merely intellectual power, thus following the philosophical tradition. For Dewey, (...) however, human thought and reasoning have to be understood in a much broader way. Dewey decenters thought by arguing that it is a natural, dependent and essentially temporal process, in which the intellectual elements only play a subordinate role. Thought, he claims, does not only have a history; furthermore, thinking only matters to human beings precisely because it is open to reflective change. Dewey’s position, thus, can be seen as an attempt to preserve the existential importance of philosophical self-reflection by binding thought to history and change in a radical way. (shrink)

The present paper argues that there is an affinity between Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is maintained, in particular, that Kuhn's notion of paradigm draws on such Wittgensteinian concepts as language games, family resemblance, rules, forms of life. It is also claimed that Kuhn's incommensurability thesis is a sequel of the theory of meaning supplied by Wittgenstein's later philosophy. As such its assessment is not fallacious, since it is not an empirical hypothesis and it does (...) not have the relativistic implications Kuhn's critics repeatedly indicated. Although concepts are indeed relative to a language game or paradigm, interparadigmatic intelligibility is preserved through the standard techniques of translation or praxis. The impossibility of radical translation which is captured by the claim of incommensurability lies with that which cannot be said but only shown. (shrink)

"Certainty" occupies an important place in Wittgenstein’s epistemology: it does not belong to the category of knowledge but constitutes its foundation. In his view, knowledge boils down to language games, and language games are based on indubitable certainties. According to Wittgenstein, scepticism is meaningless, and if there is no certainty, then even doubt would be meaningless. Wittgesntein maintains that [relative] doubt and knowledge are epistemic categories, whereas absolute doubt and certainty are non-epistemic categories. Epistemic categories are meaningful and when expressed (...) by means of statements could be either true or false. In contrast, non-epistemic categories are meaningless and when expressed by means of statements the properties of truth and falsehood do not apply to them. The aim of the present paper is two fold: 1- Providing an explanation of the status of certainty in comparison to categories such as doubt and knowledge in Wittgenstein’s thought; 2- Providing a critical assessment of Wittgenstein's approach to certainty through the prism of critical rationalism. The main arguments of the paper are as follows: 1. Although Wittgenstein considers certainty to be meaningless and therefore not on a par with epistemological categories, he regards it as an objective concept that functions as the foundation upon which all human knowledge is based; 2. Wittgenstein's efforts to show the objectivity of certainty have not been entirely successful, partly due to his reliance on a defective notion of ‘objectivity’ and partly as a result of the prominence he assigns to the category of ‘meaning’ at the expense of the category of ‘truth’. (shrink)

Although Sartre rejects a certain kind of idealism in "Truth and Existence", I argue that a commitment to a kind of transcendental idealism remains. I explore the expression of this idealism in "Truth and Existence" and how it enhances an idealist tradition which begins with Kant. More importantly, I examine Sartre's divergence from Kantian idealism and his blending of pragmatism with idealism, in a way most similar to Wittgenstein's. Unlike Wittgenstein's idealism, however, Sartre's idealism, I argue, brings him dangerously close (...) to solipsism and creates for his theory of truth a serious problem of cognitive splintering. (shrink)

One consequence of the later Wittgenstein's influential critique of epistemological foundationalism has been to convince many contemporary philosophers that the ideal of universal and necessary cognitive grounds for moral or political norms is illusory. Recent neo-Wittgensteinian accounts of practical reason attempt to formulate a conception of a post-foundational politics in which a political ethos can be legitimate, rational or just even if its informing practices and cognitive standards lack foundational justification. Against these appropriations of Wittgenstein, I argue that his account (...) challenges foundationalism only by generating epistemological relativism at both the first-order level of belief systems and at the second-order level of the comparative evaluation of first-order belief systems and their non-comparable forms of justification. The result is a polytheism of forms of reason which imperils the methodological ideal of a non-relativistic practice of moral-political criticism. (shrink)