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Category: The philosophers

THE WITTGENSTEIN PROJECT

My project is simple but demanding. I am trying to reread Wittgenstein from the beginning without, however, relying on any established interpretations. My question is whether we can look at his work with fresh eyes. Ignoring the halo of secondary writing that now surrounds that work. This does not mean that we will always end up disagreeing with previous interpreters. My plan is to re-discover their insights where they prove to be such and otherwise go my own way.

“A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.” Wittgenstein on the Road

How to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus remains a contested question. Is the
book intended to advance a theory? Is it meant to lay out an atomistic metaphysics? A theory of
truth and meaning? A logical theory? Or does it aim at showing that such theories are impossible?
How does one get from its initial assertion that the world is everything that is the case to the conclusion that one must overcome its propositions to see the world in the right way? The Tractatus
maps, in fact, Wittgenstein’s trajectory of thought through the course of the First World War.
It follows the transformations of his thinking from his initial commitment to Russell’s logical
atomism to his subsequent struggle with the question of the meaning of life. Far from advancing
a philosophical proposition or a set of such propositions the work is meant to delineate, instead,
a new kind of philosophical practice in which the constant transformation of thought, the readiness to always see things in new ways is essential.

Facts, possibilities, and the world. Three Lessons from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Abstract: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has always been and remains a puzzle and that from its first page onwards. According to its initial assertions, the totality of facts constitutes the world and the totality of states of affairs defines the space of logical possibilities. But what are facts? What are possible states of affairs? And why do we need to consider their totality? Frege and Russell were the first to grapple with these interpretational questions. The ever-growing secondary literature on the Tractatus shows how easy it is to become absorbed in its hermeneutics. More important, however, is the question what substantively philosophical lessons we can extract from Wittgenstein’s words. There are, it turns out, at least, three of them. The first is, that the concept of fact, on which Russell and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus relied so much, is philosophically brittle and that we must turn our attention, instead, to the broader notion of the factuality of the world. The second lesson is that we can and must think about the world in both factual and modal terms but that in doing so we must treat the idea of possibility, not that of necessity, as primary and we must conceive of possibilities as merely virtual, not as factual. The third is that we must consider the world as a whole, if we are to make sense of logic, science, and ethics.

Wittgenstein on the limits of language

Our attempts to deal with “the problems of philosophy” go characteristically wrong because we don’t understand “the logic of our language.” There are limits to language and these delegitimize the endeavor to advance philosophical theories. If we are to resolve our philosophical problems, we must go about it in some…

Frege on Truth and the Imperfection of Language

When Frege set out in 1919 to summarize his intellectual achievements for the historian of science Ludwig Darmstaedter, he called it distinctive of his conception of logic that it gives pre-eminence to “the content of the word ‘true.’”(Frege 1979, p. 362) This insight had come to him, in fact, only…

Wittgenstein’s World

Here is the power point file of the lecture I just gave at the World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing. Wittgenstein’s World Beijing 2

Wittgensteins Welt

Here is the text of a lecture (in German) on Wittgenstein’s conception of world delivered at the International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg/Austria in August 2017

Who am I?

On the gravestone of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke we can read one of his last poems which says: Oh rose, you pure contradiction. To be nobody’s sleep under so many eyelids.” Is there a self and if not, who am I?

Wittgenstein on the Puzzle of Privacy

“In what sense are my sensations private? – Well, only I know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. – In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word ‘to know’ as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people often know when I am in pain. – Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain.”

The Question of Truth in Early Twentieth Century Philosophy and Logic

In an essay on Plato’s doctrine of truth Martin Heidegger argued in 1929 that the Republic marks a decisive point in the evolution of our concept of truth.[1] According to him, that text jettisons an earlier Greek understanding of truth as “the unhiddenness of being,” and conceives of it, instead, as correctness. According to Heidegger, this is made evident in the allegory of the cave which depicts things in the temporal world as reflections of eternal forms and thereby speaks of truth as the similarity of something in the world to something else.

Oskar Becker and the origin of Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art”

My initial question is simple but threefold. Heidegger’s essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art” of 1936 signals an important moment in the development of his thinking. But why did he set out to examine the origin of the work of art in that essay when the topic makes no appearance in Being and Time? Let us be clear that I am asking three questions here at once. (1) Why did Heidegger come to concern himself with art at all? (2) Why did this concern with art focus on the origin of the work of art? (3) And why is there no such concern with art and its origin to be found in Being and Time?

Oskar Becker or the Reconciliation of Mathematics and Existential Philosophy

I begin with a piece of autobiography. When I first heard of symbolic logic I was a schoolboy, about fifteen years old. By chance, I had discovered a little book on the topic in some local bookstore and had found its treatment of the propositional and the predicate calculus an endlessly intriguing subject matter. It was a time when I dreamt at night of sex and truth-tables. I don’t know any more in what order.

Another Kind of Parting

Michael Friedman has written an eye-opening and ambitious monograph on three exceptional figures in twentieth century philosophy. Eye-opening, because he offers us a significantly new perspective on the split between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. Ambitious, because he combines wide-ranging historical scholarship with a bold attempt to spell out an entire philosophical agenda.

Jaakko Hintikka on Truth

In the Spring of 1967, Jaakko Hintikka published two contributions to the journal Synthese, of which he was then the editor, that have proved to be of singular importance to the further development of analytic philosophy. The first was Donald Davidson’s well known essay on “Meaning and Truth,” the second Jean van Heijenoort’s no less influential note on “Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language.” In publishing these two programmatic statements side by side Hintikka as editor of Synthese helped to propel analytic philosophy into an entirely phase of its evolution. He did not, of course, foresee this at the time nor did he anticipate that the two pieces would eventually also become crucial to his own philosophical thinking.

Martin Heidegger on metaphysics, technology, and education

  It is not easy to comment on such a splendid, richly documented, and ambitious work as Iain Thomson’s Heidegger on Ontotheology.[1] Thomson’s remarkable knowledge of the Heideggerian texts, his broad familiarity with other, related writings, and the ease with which maneuvers the most complex philosophical issues call for nothing less than an equally thorough, book-length rejoinder.

Wittgenstein on the Self

“Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it. – Someone asks ‘whose house is that?’ – The answer, by the way, might be ‘It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it.’” (PI, 398) Wittgenstein tells this story in the midst of a discussion on the self, the I, or better: on the ways we use the word “I”.

Heidegger’s Nietzsche

I am concerned here with Heidegger’s examination of Nietzsche’s thought and my question is then what this undertaking reveals (1) about Heidegger, (2) about Nietzsche, (3) about their relation, and (4) about the problems and circumstances that brought them together. To answer these questions in full is difficult. It requires us to have a grasp, first of all, of what Heidegger stands for and of the precise nature of his intellectual development from Being and Time to his later thinking.