ABSTRACT I argue that some of the central doctrines of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be seen as addressing the twin problems of semantic unity and...

The author of the article focuses on the matter of Wittgenstein's philosophy reception in France. The reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy was quite late and led to different, sometimes opposite interpretations of his thought, even among French analytical philosophers. Applying a sociological approach to the problem of reception, the author identifies factors that hindered the penetration of the ideas of analytical philosophy in France, including the powerful institutionalization of philosophy in France with its inherent traditionalism and conservatism, fully expressed national character (...) of French philosophy, as well as the extremely polemical character of French analytical philosophy, the transformation of the choice of this tradition of philosophizing into an ethical and political choice. These factors are illustrated by an analysis of Wittgenstein's conflicting interpretation of Jacques Bouveresse and Sandra Laugier. If the first creates an image of Wittgenstein as Anti-Husserl, blaming the phenomenologist for ignoring ordinary language, the second proposes a phenomenological reading of Wittgenstein's ideas using the philosophy of ordinary language. The article shows how opposing interpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy reproduce the internal conflicts of the French philosophical field. (shrink)

The author disagrees with reductionist attitude to Wittgenstein’s philosophy as philosophy of language. Basing on researches in contemporary French philosophy, the author reveals anthropological dimension of Wittgenstein’s reflections both in the main themes of his philosophizing and in his philosophical method as such. Wittgenstein strives to clarify what we already know, trying to avoid explanation, generalization and uniformity. The research shows that clarification, übersichtliche Darstellung acquires in anthropology special meaning of description and helps to overcome explicative anthropological approach and description (...) of human action in terms of binary oppositions of nature/culture and instrumentality/rituality. The article shows practical results of “grammatical analysis” applied to the concepts of humanity, speech and thinking: this analysis discovers circularity of theoretical definitions of human being and opens the way of “immediate understanding” of humanity prior to any theoretical thinking. The article shows the role of Wittgenstein’s concepts of “ritual instinct” and “ceremonial animal”, which help to understand human activity as manifestations of “ritual instinct”, and ritual action as inseparable unity of natural reactions and conscious intentionality despite the debates between intellectualism and expressivism. (shrink)

Abstract: This article considers the conceptual connections between self-consciousness, objectivity, and time. The model of conceptual analysis employed examines the necessary conditions of the meaningfulness of expressions in language. In the course of this analysis two distinct options for the explanation of self-consciousness are identified and examined. According to the first (Strawsonian) view, self-consciousness is based upon the distinction between the self and other subjects of consciousness; according to the second (Kantian) view, self-consciousness is based upon the distinction between the (...) self and the world. The first option is rejected, and a variation of the second option is adopted. According to it, in self-consciousness one is conscious of oneself as a temporally extended point of view (consciousness) over an objective and temporal realm of reality. (shrink)

Supporters of the A-theory of time sometimes refer to an alleged experience of the passage of time in support of their theory. In this paper I argue that it is an illusion that we experience the passage of time, for such an experience is impossible. My argument relies on the general assertion that experience is contingent, in the sense that if it is possible to experience the passage of time, it is also possible to experience that time does not pass. (...) Having established this claim, I argue that it is impossible to experience that time does not pass, and hence that it is impossible to experience the passage of time. (shrink)

Does Wittgenstein have a method? There are two challenges to an affirmative answer. One is put forth by Schulte, who claims that Wittgenstein’s method is little more than a skill, and thus not a method in any ambitious sense of that word. Another is Conant’s view that the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein entertains not one method, but a variety of methods. I tackle these challenges by questioning what I take to be their presupposed conceptions of ‘method’ and conclude that (...) we can indeed speak of Wittgenstein’s method in an interesting sense. Thereby, the concept of method will be elucidated and the sense in which Wittgenstein’s philosophy has a method clarified. (shrink)

This paper briefly discusses the relations between logic and metalogic in history. Metalogic is understood as a reflection on logic in its various senses, particularly sensu stricto (formal, mathematical) and sensu largo (formal logic plus semantic plus methodology of science). It is shown that metalogic in its contemporary understanding arose after mathematical logic had become a mature discipline. Special passage is devoted to metalogic in Poland. The last part of the paper discussed so-called logocentric predicament.

Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims—claims about how things must, or could or could not be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterize what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical (...) writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy. (shrink)

The problem to be discussed here concerns ontology so far as it may not be formed by scientific theory. In brief terms, the problem arises in the following way. On the one hand, the world surely consists of whatever is there, irrespective of whether human beings are around or not, and irrespective especially of whether human beings have constructed any scientific theories depicting the nature of the world; on the other hand, scientific theories are subject to the limitation that we (...) can never verify them or prove them to be true, so that the ontology prescribed by scientific theory is not firmly established but is only what is attributed to the world by a fallible scientific theory at any given time. The problem could also be put in terms of ‘conceptual networks’ or in terms of language-systems. (shrink)

Although declarations of the death of God seem to be provocations announcing the end of the era of theology, this announcement is actually central to the Christian revelation in its most classic forms, as well as to its reworkings in contemporary religious thought. Indeed provocative new possibilities for thinking theologically open up precisely in the wake of the death of God. Already Hegel envisaged a revolutionary new realization of divinity emerging in and with the secular world through its establishment of (...) a total order of immanence. However, in postmodern times this comprehensive order aspired to by modern secularism implodes or cracks open towards the wholly Other. A hitherto repressed demand for the absolute difference of the religious, or for “transcendence”, returns with a vengeance. This difference is what could not be stated in terms of the Hegelian System, for reasons that poststructuralist writers particularly have insisted on: all representations of God are indeed dead. Yet this does not mean that they cannot still be powerful, but only that they cannot assign God any stable identity. Nietzsche’s sense of foreboding concerning the death of God is coupled with his intimations of the demise of representation and “grammar” as epistemologically bankrupt, but also with his vision of a positive potential for creating value in the wake of this collapse of all linguistically articulated culture. He points the way towards the emergence of a post-secular religious thinking of what exceeds thought and representation. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to experimentally investigate whether folk conceptions of explanation are psychologistic. In particular, are people more likely to classify speech acts as explanations when they cause understanding in their recipient? The empirical evidence that we present suggests this is so. Using the side-effect effect as a marker of mental state ascriptions, we argue that lay judgments of explanatory status are mediated by judgments of a speaker’s and/or audience’s mental states. First, we show that attributions of (...) both understanding and explanation exhibit a side-effect effect. Next, we show that when the speaker’s and audience’s level of understanding is stipulated, the explanation side-effect effect goes away entirely. These results not only extend the side-effect effect to attributions of understanding, they also suggest that attributions of explanation exhibit a side-effect effect because they depend upon attributions of understanding, supporting the idea that folk conceptions of explanation are psychologistic. (shrink)

The paper argues that an internal debate within Wittgensteinian philosophy leads to issues associated rather with the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Rush Rhees's identification of the limitations of the notion of a “language game” to illuminate the relation between language and reality leads to his discussion of what is involved in the “reality” of language: “anything that is said has sense-if living has sense, not otherwise.” But what is it for living to have sense? Peter Winch provides an interpretation (...) and application of Rhees's argument in his discussion of the “reality” of Zande witchcraft and magic in “Understanding a Primitive Society”. There he argues that such sense is provided by a language game concerned with the ineradicable contingency of human life, such as (he claims) Zande witchcraft to be. I argue, however, that Winch's account fails to answer the question why Zande witchcraft can find no application within our lives. I suggest that answering this requires us to raise the question of why Zande witchcraft “fits” with their other practices but cannot with ours, a question of “sense” which cannot be answered by reference to another language game. I use Joseph Epes Brown's account of Native American cultures (in Epes Brown 2001) as an exemplification of a form of coherence that constitutes what we may call a “world”. I then discuss what is involved in this, relating this coherence to a relation to the temporal, which provides an internal connection between the senses of the “real” embodied in the different linguistic practices of these cultures. I relate this to the later Heidegger's account of the “History of Being”, of the historical worlds of Western culture and increasingly of the planet. I conclude with an indication of concerns and issues this approach raises, ones characteristic of “Continental” rather than Wittgensteinian philosophy. (shrink)

This paper answers a philosophical challenge that emerges when we problematize the seemingly trivial "fact" that, on the one hand, through our senses we are presented with a realm that is not of our own making; while, on the other hand, various perceivers are acquainted with diverse presentations of this realm, depending on their perspective and cognitive machinery. The challenge is dubbed here the problem of presentations. The paper draws on the idea of situation-dependent properties proposed by Susanna Schellenberg. However, (...) the paper takes the notion of situation more seriously and introduces a number of basic notions borrowed from situated cognition—a cluster of ideas that have recently emerged in the philosophy of mind. These make it possible to introduce the perceiver in such a way as not to endanger the objective character of situation-dependent properties. Thought of this way, situation-dependent properties are in turn described as the building blocks of presentations. (shrink)

Traditional moral theory usually has either of two emphases: virtuous moral character or principles for distributing duties or goods. “Zone morality” introduces a third: families and businesses are systems created by the causal reciprocities of their members. These relations embody the duties and permissions of a system's moral code. Core systems satisfy basic interests and needs; we move easily among them, hardly noticing that moral demands vary from system to system. Moral conflicts arise because of discord within or among systems (...) but also because morality has three competing sites: personal attitudes and practices (benevolence or hostility), the moral codes of systems, and regulative principles that enhance social cohesion. A strong church or central government reduces conflict by imposing its rules. A democracy responds by encouraging persons and systems to participate in forums where claims are made; it promises fairness by requiring that all satisfy its legal procedures. (shrink)

We often read Plato’s cave allegory for its trajectory: out of darkness into light. The back of the cave—where imagination projects fantasies onto shadows—is a place to flee. This part of the allegory reduces reality testing to thought or imagining, ignoring action and the people or things engaged. Yet thinkers prominent in our time—Immanuel Kant and W. V. O. Quine—suppose that our experience of the world is that of the cave’s prisoners: we too mistake fantasies for reality. This is an (...) odd stance when practical life and science—beliefs informed by action and experiment—are better tests of reality than their arguments for world‐making. (shrink)

Metaphysics is the inquiry having categorial form as its aim. Once all but defunct, metaphysics has now revived, though without disciplinary focus. Nine points of entry dominate current studies, each separate from and largely oblivious to the others. This essay characterizes the nine, expressing its preference for a discipline grounded in the empirical sciences while pursuing issues they ignore.

A comprehensive account of human kindness.

Explores language and mysticism, Buddhism and Zen, Christianity, comparative religion, psychedelics, and psychology and psychotherapy. Gold Winner for Philosophy, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards To commemorate the 2015 centenary of the birth of Alan Watts (1915–1973), Peter J. Columbus and Donadrian L. Rice have assembled a much-needed collection of Watts’s scholarly essays and lectures. Compiled from professional journals, monographs, scholarly books, conferences, and symposia proceedings, the volume sheds valuable light on the developmental arc of Watts’s thinking about (...) language and mysticism, Buddhism and Zen, Christianity, comparative religion, psychedelics, and psychology and psychotherapy. This definitive collection challenges Watts’s reputation as a “popularizer” or “philosophical entertainer,” revealing his concerns to be much more expansive and transdisciplinary than is suggested by the parochial “Zen Buddhist” label commonly affixed to his writings. The editors’ authoritative introduction elucidates contemporary perspectives on Watts’s life and work, and supports a bold rethinking of his contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion. Peter J. Columbus is Administrator of the Shantigar Foundation in Rowe, Massachusetts. Donadrian L. Rice is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia. Together they are the coeditors of Alan Watts—Here and Now: Contributions to Psychology, Philosophy, and Religion, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or (...) instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions. (shrink)

This paper advances a novel take on Chantal Mouffe’s appropriation of the late Wittgenstein, arguing that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, at the same time, gives rise to and offers a solution to the relativism problem as it can be found in Mouffe’s radical political thought. Unlike other vindications of Wittgenstein-inspired political thought, I also show at which point Wittgenstein’s support for such an approach comes to an end. I thus acknowledge that the relativism problem – at least to some extent – stems (...) from the ambiguity of Wittgensteinian thought itself. After having outlined these challenges, I suggest turning to alternative approaches from the field of critical social philosophy. In particular, Rahel Jaeggi’s Frankfurt School account of forms of life highlights what such a non-relativist but still context-sensitive approach may look like. By virtue of this last step, this paper contributes to recent engagements by Critical Theorists with the late Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Theories of meaning developed within the analytic tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege, and within continental philosophy, starting with Husserl, can be distinguished by their disagreement about the phenomenon of collapse or failure of meaning. Our text focuses on Frege’s legacy, taken up by Rudolph Carnap, which culminated in a view of the collapse of meaning defined first by a purely syntactic conception of categorial error and second, when Tarski entered the scene, by the paradoxes created by the conflict between the (...) use of the predicate truth and the concept of proof. As positivism’s conventionalism and late model-theoretic semantics became the paradigms derived from this position, the result, in our view, was a conception of meaning success and meaning failure dominated by dependence on a technological conception. We will argue that this dependence leads to the inability to evaluate the breaks in rational parameters and crises of meaning addressed by the phenomenological and transcendental perspectives. Husserl’s critique of logic as technology is the basis for the reflexive standpoint on the phenomena of meaning failure that leads to a theoretical and eidetic ideal approach to that phenomenon. It is then suggested that this phenomenological reflective standpoint on the problem of meaning failure is the origin of the doors that lead to the divergent paths between the analytic and continental traditions. Thus, this is an article with three argumentative phases connected into a larger unity. The first phase presents Husserl’s critique of a purely extensional, syntactic, and recursive conception of logical consequence and the concept of truth; the second presents Hussel’s larger conception of meaning-failure; the third—presented in an appendix— presents a lesson on the division between continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In her recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé uses a resolute reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to highlight similarities between Wittgenstein’s work and his contemporaries Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. On the basis of this reading, she claims that Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece is a modernist work. -/- This article argues that there are profound problems with the resolute reading that she offers, and it suggests that ‘traditional’ readings of the Tractatus survive the criticisms she makes (...) of them. Nonetheless, a case can still be made that Wittgenstein’s work is a modernist one, and it is a useful exercise to compare the Tractatus with modernist works from the 1920s. -/- Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 274-296, July 2022. (NOTE: This article was mistakenly given the title 'Theologico-Philological Investigations: Is Wittgenstein's Tractatus a Modernist Work?' in the print edition of Philosophical Investigations. The online version has been corrected. (shrink)

En este trabajo nos proponemos exponer la importancia de la afectividad en la fenomenología francesa contemporánea de la mano de dos conceptos centrales del pensamiento de Henri Maldiney: lo transposible y la transpasibilidad. Además, nos esforzaremos en concretar y ahondar en esta cuestión atendiendo a la experiencia del duelo, esto es, la pérdida del otro como acontecimiento afectivo. Para ello recurriremos a algunas ideas de Claude Romano, pero también, y a modo de situación descriptiva, a los testimonios literarios de la (...) escritora y periodista Joan Didion y del escritor C.S. Lewis. La experiencia del duelo se mostrará, así, como un caso ejemplar en el que el existente es afectado por los acontecimientos. Finalmente, y como conclusión, habremos podido pensar la radical exposición o apertura de la existencia a los acontecimientos (transpasibilidad), así como la capacidad de estos para tocar y tras-tocar los horizontes del sujeto. (shrink)

The experience of emotion is a fundamental part of human consciousness. Think, for example, of how different our conscious lives would be without such experiences as joy, anger, fear, disgust, pity, anxiety, and embarrassment. It is uncontroversial that these experiences typically have an intentional content. Anger, for example, is normally directed at someone or something. One may feel angry at one=s stock broker for provid- ing bad advice or angry with the cleaning lady for dropping the vase. But it is (...) not un- controversial that emotional experiences are always intentional. John Searle, for exam- ple, remarks, AMany conscious states are not Intentional, e.g., a sudden sense of elation...@. Moreover, many animals experience emotions and it is natural to sup- pose that such emotions lack the sophistication of beliefs or thoughts. When a dog ex- periences delight in seeing its master after an absence of several days, the suggestion that at least part of the dog=s experience of delight is a belief that its master has returned home seems to import into the experience something that at best is associ- ated with it and perhaps is not really a state to which the dog is subject at all. And even in the case of human beings, emotional experience often does not seem to involve thought. Consider the experience of disgust, to take one obvious example.1 Nor is a sali- ent belief required. One may have a strong fear of spiders and yet not believe that spi- ders typically pose any risk to humans. But if emotional experiences need not involve beliefs or thoughts, then just how are they intentional?2. (shrink)

In the article, I try to emphasize that our way of using language affects moral decisions and attitudes. As we think as we speak and simultaneously, we act. By using chauvinistic language, first of all, we simplify our reality; secondly, we push those beings that we define in the language to the margins. I think that our language is homocentric and therefore leads us to speciesism.

This article argues that philosophers tend to employ a particular method in constructing their theories and critiquing their opponents. To substantiate this claim, the article examines the work of Nietzsche and Locke, the Empiricists and Rationalists, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, and Russell and Wittgenstein, showing how each relies on a method the article labels “revolution-through-return.” The method consists in identifying the authority behind your opponent's theory, then appealing to something “prior to” that authority, from which you then proceed to derive (...) your own theory. The article distinguishes between several senses of priority, argues that modern philosophers tend to rely on temporal priority, and discusses the questions in priority theory that need to be addressed in order evaluate and construct revolution-through-return arguments. (shrink)

This is a response to Jerry Fodor’s article, Fodor, J. (1980). "Methodological solipsism as a research strategy in cognitive psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 63-109.

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between (...) “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes toitself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful. (shrink)

At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and acoustic metaphor. They denied their cognitive truth value, but not their value for life. However, an (...) extended concept of truth, which encompasses every correspondence between experience and reality, can also find truth in religious experiences of “transparency” and “resonance”. They differ from aesthetic experience not only by the depth of transparency and resonance, but also by their cognitive interpretation. What is experienced is cognitively referred to a final reality: either to a “summum ens” in this world, or to the whole of this world or something unknown beyond of this world. This final point of reference is a unity of “being” and “value”. Religion makes experiences of the everyday transparent for both aspects of an ultimate reality und motivates to a life full of resonance with this reality. (shrink)

Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitive science, this paper argues that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitive science with respect to generality and normativity. General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of computer simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different fields of cognitive science. Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether decision making should maximize expected utility, and how norms should be established. These (...) kinds of general and normative questions make philosophical reflection an important part of progress in cognitive science. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, but rather with empirically informed reflection on a wide range of findings in cognitive science. (shrink)

According to methodological anti-exceptionalism, logic follows a scientific methodology. There has been some discussion about which methodology logic has. Authors such as Priest, Hjortland and Williamson have argued that logic can be characterized by an abductive methodology. We choose the logical theory that behaves better under a set of epistemic criteria. In this paper, I analyze some important discussions in the philosophy of logic, and I show that they presuppose different methodologies, involving different notions of evidence and different epistemic values. (...) I argue that, rather than having a specific methodology such as abductivism, logic can be characterized by methodological pluralism. This position can also be seen as the application of scientific pluralism to the realm of logic. (shrink)

In recent work on a priori justification, one thing about which there is considerable agreement is that the notion of truth in virtue of meaning is bankrupt and infertile. (For the sake of more readable prose, I will use ‘TVM’ as an abbreviation for ‘the notion of truth in virtue of meaning’.) Arguments against the worth of TVM can be found across the entire spectrum of views on the a priori, in the work of uncompromising rationalists (such as BonJour (1998)), (...) of centrist moderates (such as Boghossian (1997)), and of uncompromising empiricists (such as Devitt (2004)). My aim is to dispute this widespread opinion. The outline is as follows: First, §§2-3 consist of preliminary stage-setting. Then, in §4 I will argue that some of the most prevalent arguments against the worth of TVM – in particular, one which is given clear expression by Quine (1970), and is recently reinforced by Boghossian (1997) – do not engage with the core idea motivating TVM. After deflecting this charge of incoherence, the aim of §§5-8 is to work toward developing a useful conception of TVM. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

In Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus (TLP), Wittgenstein gave ethics the same semantic status as logic. This paper first investigates this claim from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s lifelong semantic framework. This reveals that ethical sentences are meaningless expressions, which can only be used to ostensively point out conditions of meaningfulness. Secondly, the paper assesses the implications of this conclusion for understanding the seven cryptic remarks on value and ethics in TLP. Using the connection between will and value in TLP and will and sentence (...) interpretation in Philosophical Investigations, it is suggested that Wittgenstein held lifelong views on value and ethics. (shrink)

Tree-Structured Readings of the Tractatus : I argue that the numbering system of the Tractatus lets us see how it was constructed, in two closely related senses of that term. First, it tells us a great deal about the genesis of the book, for the numbering system was used to assemble and rearrange a series of drafts, as recorded in MS 104. Second, it helps us understand the structure of the published book, as cryptically summarized in the opening footnote. I (...) also discuss an unpublished letter from Anscombe to von Wright from 1948 which contains the very first sketch of a tree-structured reading, and what I believe is Stenius’s response to Anscombe’s proposal. The paper critically evaluates previous work on tree-structured readings and contends that we need to read the Tractatus in both the number order used in the published book and the tree order that Wittgenstein used to draft it. It also considers some of the main ways of turning this complex branching structure into a linear, printed text, and so serves as an introduction to the three tree-structured editions of the Tractatus that accompany the original English-language publication of this paper in NWR 11 (the German text, and the translations by Ogden & Ramsey and Pears & McGuinness). (shrink)

I provide a motivation for Wittgenstein's holding to the view that a necessary condition of an item's possessing a sense is its being capable of truth and capable of falsehood. I argue that Wittgenstein adopted the relevant view in order to defend an approach to the determination of logical truth on which the subject matter of a proposition is irrelevant to our making such a determination. This approach was itself conceived of as a remedy to that employed by Russell, and (...) to a conception of logical truth on which the axiom of reducibility counts as logically true. (shrink)

In this article, I show and discuss the relevance of Wittgenstein's arguments as to the spatial structure of sight to recent issues in the philosophy of mind. The first, bearing upon the dimensionality of the manifolds at play in depiction, plays a critical role in Clark's attempt to provide an independent account ofqualiaand of their differentiative properties. The second, pertaining to the properly spatial structure formed by the data of sight, is explicitly appealed to in the debate on the realistic (...) character of any genuinely spatial scheme. I argue that if Wittgenstein rightly assumes that the simultaneous presence of sensible places in vision is a key condition for objectivity, he fails nevertheless to warrant the allegedly realistic character of the scheme employed in his own search for a phenomenological description of the visual field. (shrink)