For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

Zettel, an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

Selections from the notebooks of the distinguished philosopher discuss subjects such as music, religion, thinking, science, architecture, and civilization.

Offering clear and reliable guidance to the ideas of philosophers from antiquity to the present day and to the major philosophical systems around the globe, he Oxford Companion to Philosophy is the definitive philosophical reference work for readers at all levels. For ten years the original volume has served as a stimulating introduction for general readers and as an indispensable guide for students and scholars. A distinguished international assembly of 249 philosophers contributed almost 2,000 entries, and many of these have (...) now been considerably revised and updated in this major new edition; to these are added over 300 brand-new pieces on a fascinating range of current topics such as animal consciousness, cloning, corporate responsibility, the family, globalization, terrorism . Here is, indeed, a world of thought, with entries on idealism and empiricism, epicureanism and stoicism, passion and emotion, deism and pantheism. The contributors represent a veritable who's who of modern philosophy, including such eminent figures as Isaiah Berlin, Sissela Bok, Ronald Dworkin, John Searle, Michael Walzer, and W. V. Quine. We meet the great thinkers--from Aristotle and Plato, to Augustine and Aquinas, to Descartes and Kant, to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, right up to contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Luce Iragaray, and Noam Chomsky. There are short entries on key concepts such as personal identity and the mind-body problem, major doctrines from utilitarianism to Marxism, schools of thought such as the Heidelberg School or the Vienna Circle, and contentious public issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and welfare. In addition, the book offers short explanations of philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Almost every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading, and the book includes both a chronological chart of the history of philosophy and a gallery of portraits of eighty eminent philosophers. An indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy will appeal to everyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding. (shrink)

Since the first publication of Insight and Illusion in l972, a wealth of Wittgenstein's writings have become accessible. Accordingly, in this edition Professor Hacker has rewritten six of his eleven original chapters and revised the others to incorporate the new abundant material. Insight and Illusion now fully clarifies the historical backgrounds of Wittgenstein's highly different masterpieces, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and traces the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. Hacker explains all of Wittgenstein's writings in detail, focusing on his critique of (...) metaphysics, his famous "private language argument," and his account of self-consciousness. (shrink)

An essential resource for students of Wittgenstein, this collection contains faithful, in some cases expanded and corrected, versions of many important pieces never before available in a single volume, including Notes for the 'Philosophical Lecture', published here for the first time. Fifteen selections, with bi-lingual versions of those originally written in German, span the development of Wittgenstein's thought, his range of interests, and his methods of philosophical investigation. Short introductions, an index, and an updated version of Georg Henrik von Wright's (...) The Wittgenstein Papers situate the selections within the broader context of the Wittgenstein corpus and the history of its publication. (shrink)

Explores the stable core of Wittgenstein's philosophy as developed from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

This paper corrects a mistake in John McDowell’s influential reading of Wittgenstein’s attack on the idea of private sensations. McDowell rightly identifies a primary target of Wittgenstein’s attack to be the Myth of the Given. But he also suggests that Wittgenstein, in the ferocity of his battles with this myth, sometimes goes into overkill, which manifests itself in seemingly behavioristic denials about sensations. But this criticism of Wittgenstein is a mistake. The mistake is made over two important but notoriously difficult (...) sections in the so-called Private Language Argument, namely §304 and §293 of the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein, maximally charitably read, commits no overkill in these two sections. This correction strengthens McDowell’s overall reading, but it is only a first step toward fully bringing out the deep but obscurely expressed insights in §304 and §293, the full treatment of which must await another occasion. (shrink)

Offers an original reading of Wittgenstein's views on such topics as radical scepticism, the first- and third-person asymmetry of mental talk, Cartesianism, and rule-following.

Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defence of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.

A dualism characteristic of modern philosophy is the conception of the inner and the outer as two independently intelligible domains. Wittgenstein’s attack on this dualism contains deep insights. The main insight (excavated from §304 and §293 of the Philosophical Investigations) is this: our sensory consciousness is deeply shaped by language and this shaping plays a fundamental role in the etiology of the dualism. I locate this role in the learning of a sensation-language (as described in §244), by showing that this (...) learning is, under another aspect, the incision of language, namely the infliction of cuts upon certain natural-primitive unities between the inner and the outer. These cuts, driven by powerful forces, eventually harden into an entrenched division between the inner and the outer, thereby providing a constant soil for the dualism. That this dualism is rooted in the very learning of a language is cause for ambivalence about language. (shrink)

Malcolm, Norman Wittgensteinian Themes, Essays 1978–1989.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:702 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER t99 5 appears more as an anomalous figure in the spirit of Kierkegaard than a thinker of the mainstream. For Jaspers, philosophy is a vehicle to provoke a spiritual sense of the wonder of existence rather than an autonomous vocation which strives to recast its questions in increasingly radical ways. Most typically, Jaspers's emphasis on darker aspects of the human (...) predicament--guilt, anxiety, and death as the seminal existential motifs--does not exclude a more positive vision of Existenz as revealed through transcendence. The limits do not provoke a discourse of radical finitude which skirts the edges of presence, but instead indirectly point toward a transcendent mystery, or the "encompassing" (19-2o). If there is an aspect of Jaspers's philosophy that remains inadequately addressed in either volume, it is his preoccupation with the role of tragedy in the post-war era? In light of the premier importance that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all grant to tragedy, Jaspers's passionate treatment of this topic in the context of the catastrophe of Western Europe merits far closer attention. Does not the issue of tragedy provide indispensable dues to chart the landscape of twentieth-century thought, and to amplify the differences which prevail in the portrait of politics as displayed by such diverse philosophers as Jaspers and Heidegger, Derrida and Levinas? FRANK SCHALOW DiUard University Norman Malcolm. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? Edited with a response by Peter Winch. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, a994. Pp. xi + 14o. Norman Malcolm at the outset of this, his posthumously published last book, focuses on the question: What did Wittgenstein mean when he said to his friend M. O'C. Drury, "I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view"? It was the right question. But Malcolm then--again on the first page of his book-proceeded to place restrictions on it, which were quite foreign to the spirit of Wittgenstein 's remark and which virtually crippled it. (1) He took Wittgenstein to be speaking of not social, psychological, or presumably even personal problems, but only of philosophical ones. (2) He chose to say that in Wittgenstein's later philosophy "there is not strictly a religious point of view, but something analogous to a religious point of view" (1, Malcolm's emphases). There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein would have accepted either of these restrictions on his remark. Nor does Peter Winch accept them in his forty-page discussion, which follows Malcolm's text in this book. In the upshot Malcolm finds "four analogies between Wittgenstein's conception of the grammar of language and his view of what is paramount in a religious life" (92). In both, he says, Wittgenstein emphasizes "an end to explanation," a sense of an "illness" pervading the human situation, "an inclination to be amazed at the existence of some ' Karl Jaspers, TragedyIs Not Enough, trans. Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 31-4O,93- io5_ BOOK REVIEWS 703 thing," and "doing, acting [having.] priority over intellectual understanding and reasoning " (92). But are such "analogies" really the crux of the "religious point of view" in terms of which Wittgenstein said that he could "not help seeing every problem"? When we recall that Wittgenstein's later philosophy was a proibund attack upon what he regarded as the idolatry of science, logic, and mathematics (an idolatry of which he himself, in the Tractatt~,, was partly guilty), and that he was also bent on undermining the accompanying subjectivized and privatized view of the human mind, as well as the scientistic reading of religious beliefs and primitive religions, we may be inclined to see his philosophy as clearing the way for the simple noninstitutionalized Tolstoian faith which he himself accepted. Philosophy and religion were on the same track in his mind (and not merely related by "analogies") when he wrote: "All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one--for instance, as in the 'absence of an idol' " (MS 213, 89). Peter Winch... (shrink)