David G. Stern

This is an original, ambitious, and provocative book. It argues that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can best be understood as a response to two problems that animate post-Kantian idealism and romanticism, drawing primarily on the work of Fichte, Schiller, Schlegel, Hegel, Wordsworth, and Goethe. The first is the metaphilosophical problem of the “critique of critique,” the question of what basis can there possibly be for critical philosophy if Kant’s own appeal to the categories proves unacceptable. The second is the ethical problem of expressive freedom, the question of the relationship between Willkür, volitional freedom, or the power to choose between alternatives, and Wille, rational freedom, that is, free choice informed by rational norms or laws. Eldridge argues that the romantic response to these problems is simultaneously philosophical and literary: to argue that the desperately needed solution must remain beyond our grasp, and to enact this tragic drama of aspiration and its disappointment in writing that continually aspires to yet fails to reach its goal.

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Taking Wittgenstein at his Word: A Textual StudyDavid SternRobert J. Fogelin. Taking Wittgenstein at his Word: A Textual Study. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2009. Pp. xviii + 181. Cloth, $35.00.This is an excellent book, which should be read widely. It is a short, lucid, and accessible introduction to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, written by a leading expert. It is the ideal sequel to Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language on a short list of required readings for a course on Wittgenstein. Part 1 concerns rule following and the conceivability of a private language, while part 2 discusses three topics in his philosophy of mathematics: the status of mathematical expressions, Wittgenstein’s treatment of Cantor on transfinite cardinals, and his approach to logical consistency. There is very little discussion of the secondary literature on any of these topics. Instead, apart from a few prefatory methodological [End Page 147] passages, almost all of the book is devoted to extensive quotations from Wittgenstein’s writing and to close reading of what he says there.Fogelin’s chief aim, to take Wittgenstein at his word, is in a sense a very modest one. Wittgenstein insisted throughout his career that he was not presenting philosophical theses, and that philosophy should not be a matter of defending theses. Indeed, Fogelin explicitly acknowledges that in taking Wittgenstein at his word, he is not presenting “a novel—hitherto unrecognized—way of understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” (xii–xiii). Nevertheless, most interpreters have read Wittgenstein as failing to follow his own methodological precepts, and their interpretations have focused on the theses that they attribute to him. Instead, Fogelin lets “Wittgenstein speak for himself” (xi), not only quoting at length from his writings, but also from Wittgenstein’s “self-commentaries” (xi), passages where Wittgenstein helps us appreciate the philosophical significance he assigns to his words. Crucially, these quotations are held together by a close reading that provides a lucid and perceptive statement of what Wittgenstein is saying there and why, highlighting the intimate connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and his treatment of key topics in the philosophy of language and mathematics.A leading theme in Fogelin’s book is what he calls Wittgenstein’s “defactoist” approach to rule following. While he does not define this neologism, he does say that it involves “the rejection of appeals to rational processes where philosophers typically have attempted to find or supply them” (41). Furthermore, Fogelin connects it with the central role Wittgenstein gives to natural responses and training, the fact that the kind of training a creature can undergo depends on its natural or instinctive responses and Wittgenstein’s “rejection of the idea that training is merely an external device intended to induce in the trainee a grasp of the correctness, the legitimacy, of what he has been trained to do” (35–36).Although Fogelin never explicitly addresses the crucial question of which texts to draw on in taking Wittgenstein “at his word,” in practice he makes use of a wide range of publications from every stage of Wittgenstein’s career. The Tractatus, written during the First World War, is treated as belonging to an earlier stage of his thought, and some similarities to and differences from his later work are discussed. No such distinctions are drawn between material written in the early 1930s, editors’ reconstruction of lecture notes from the early 1930s and late 1930s, passages from the Philosophical Investigations, assembled in the mid-1940s, the different parts of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, from the mid-1930s to early 1940s, and selections from On Certainty, dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s. While Fogelin acknowledges that there was some development in Wittgenstein’s views during these years, he puts great weight on passages taken from manuscripts and student lecture notes from the 1930s. For instance, in his crucial opening chapter on rule following, he relies heavily on the words with which Wittgenstein first formulated his paradox of interpretation in the early 1930s (20–21) and on his statement of the connection between meaning and rules in his 1932 lectures (17). While these passages are attractive precisely because they...