Howard Wettstein

This addition to the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series comprises the most recent volume on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to date. Here 16 philosophers explore both the challenges Wittgenstein presented to philosophy as well as the responses to those challenges from such noted thinkers as Kripke. By addressing various questions raised by Wittgenstein's work, these original essays aim to illuminate in one way or another the impact Wittgenstein's legacy has had on 20th-century philosophy.

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.