Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege’s idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition: (...) Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs. But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use. (Blue Book, p. (shrink)

Wittgenstein is usually taken to have held that the use of a term is not mentally constrained. That is utterly wrong. A use of language unconstrained by meaning is attributed by him to "meaning-blind" or "aspect-blind" creatures, not to us. We observe meaning when an aspect dawns on us; meaning is the impression (Eindruck) of a term as fitting something; hence, unlike pain, it cannot stand alone. That is a mentalistic theory of meaning: use is determined by images (Vorstellungen) that (...) play semantic roles in virtue of their aesthetic properties. Although a term may be arbitrarily interpreted, aesthetic reasons determine which interpretation be seen as right for it. (shrink)

This work seeks to shed light on one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of twentieth-century thought.

As early as 1916, Wittgenstein states that ethics and aesthetics are one, that only through aesthetics and art can what is truly important in human life be shown. This is the first book to clarify Wittgenstein’s ideas about ethics and aesthetics, and to illustrate how those ideas apply to art history and criticism. Tilghman shows how a study of Wittgenstein illuminates not only the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also the relationship between art and our lives. The result is (...) that we can better understand the human importance of abstract as well as traditional art. Chapter 1 surveys the development of the philosophy of art that has dominated aesthetics since mid-century. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of some of the ways that the relationship between ethics and aesthetics has been considered in the philosophy of art. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss Wittgenstein’s views on ethics and aesthetics at the time he wrote Tractatus, and chapter 5 examines the question of what it is to discern the humanity in a person, as reflected in Wittgenstein’s later viewpoints found in Philosophical Investigations. Chapters 6 and 7 investigate what it is to discern the art in a work of art, and what it is to discern the humanity in a work of art. These investigations, in turn, lead to some conclusions about the importance of art in people’s lives and the failure of much recent aesthetic theory to accommodate art’s human importance. (shrink)