Several of these essays have been printed whole in journals; others are in varying degrees new. Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological, commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals.

This is a concise and readable study of five intertwined themes at the heart of Wittgenstein's thought, written by one of his most eminent interpreters. David Pears offers penetrating investigations and lucid explications of some of the most influential and yet puzzling writings of twentieth-century philosophy. He focuses on the idea of language as a picture of the world; the phenomenon of linguistic regularity; the famous "private language argument"; logical necessity; and ego and the self.

El artículo trata de dos argumentos, los de la Circularidad y la Polaridad, que llevaron a Wittgenstein a sostener que la gramática es autónoma: que no hay hechos del mundo que justifiquen la verdad de sus reglas. Se señala que el Argumento de la Polaridad es consustancial a doctrinas centrales de la filosofía pos-tractariana de Wittgenstein y cómo la aceptación de que la gramática es autónoma le obligó a desmantelar aspectos centrales de la metafísica y la filosofía del lenguaje y (...) de la lógica del Tractatus que hacían posible ofrecer una justificación modal de la sintaxis lógica.This paper deals with two arguments, the Circularity Argument and the Polarity Arguments, that led Wittgenstein to claim that grammar is autonomous, i.e., that no rule of grammar can be justified by providing a fact as a reason to believe in its truth. It is argued that the Polarity Argument is intimately linked to central doctrines of Wittgenstein’s post-tractarian philosophy and shown how the acceptance of the autonomy of grammar forced Wittgenstein to give up the project of providing a modal justification of the rules of logical syntax. (shrink)

The book features the complete text of the Notesi in a critical edition, with a detailed discussion of the circumstances in which they were compiled, leading to ...

The philosophy of arithmetic of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is outlined and the central role played in it by the general notion of operation is pointed out. Following which, the language, the axioms and the rules of a formal theory of operations, extracted from the Tractatus, are presented and a theorem of interpretability of the equational fragment of Peano's Arithmetic into such a formal theory is proven.

Abstract: Interpretations of the Tractatus divide into what might be called a metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical approach to the work. The central issue between the two interpretative approaches has generally been characterised in terms of the question whether the Tractatus is committed to the idea of ‘things’ that cannot be said in language, and thus to the idea of a distinctive kind of nonsense: nonsense that is an attempt to say what can only be shown. In this paper, I look (...) at this dispute from a different perspective, by focusing on the treatment of the concept of internal relations. By reference to the work of Peter Hacker, Hidé Ishiguro and Cora Diamond, I show how this concept is understood quite differently in each of the two interpretative traditions. I focus particularly on how Wittgenstein's idea of the ‘internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world’ (Tractatus 4.014) might be understood within the two interpretative approaches. I offer some reasons in support of the anti-metaphysical treatment of the concept. (shrink)