David G. Stern

Ludwig Wittgenstein was trained as a scientist and an engineer. He received a diploma in mechanical engineering from the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Berlin, in 1906, after which he did several years of research on aeronautics before turning to the full-time study of logic and philosophy. Hertz, Boltzmann, Mach, Weininger, and William James, all important influences on Wittgenstein, are authors whose work was both philosophical and scientific. The relationship between everyday life, science, and philosophy, is a central concern throughout the course of his writing. He regarded philosophy, properly conducted, as an autonomous activity, a matter of clarifying our understanding of language, or investigating grammar. Wittgenstein thought philosophy should state the obvious as a way of disabusing us of the desire to formulate philosophical theories of meaning, knowledge, language, or science, and was deeply opposed to the naturalist view that philosophy is a form of science. In his later work, Wittgenstein rejected systematic approaches to understanding language and knowledge. Wittgenstein’s answer to the Socratic question about the nature of knowledge is that it has no nature, no essence, and so it is a mistake to think one can give a single systematic answer:If I was asked what knowledge is, I would list items of knowledge and add “and suchlike.” There is no common element to be found in all of them, because there isn’t one

The model of memory as a store, from which records can be retrieved, is taken for granted by many contemporary researchers. On this view, memories are stored by memory traces, which represent the original event and provide a causal link between that episode and one's ability to remember it. I argue that this seemingly plausible model leads to an unacceptable conception of the relationship between mind and brain, and that a non‐representational, connectionist, model offers a promising alternative. I also offer a new reading of Wittgenstein's paradoxical remarks about thought and brain processes: as a critique of the cognitivist thesis that information stored in the brain has a linguistic structure and a particular location. On this reading, Wittgenstein's criticism foreshadows some of the most promising contemporary work on connectionist models of neural functioning.

This paper examines a number of river images which have been attributed to Heraclitus, the ways they are used by Plato and Wittgenstein, and the connection between these uses of imagery and the metaphilosophical issues about the nature and limits of philosophy which they lead to. After indicating some of the connections between Heraclitus’, Plato’s and Wittgenstein’s use of river images, I give a preliminary reading of three crucial fragments from the Heraclitean corpus, associating each with a different river image. Each of these images implies an overall conception of the nature of change and continuity and of the relationship between language and world. I then turn to the use of these images by Plato and Wittgenstein, and explore the relationship between their uses of river imagery and their conceptions of philosophy. To put it slightly differently, this paper is about Plato’s and Wittgenstein’s use of certain Heraclitean ideas.

Wittgenstein's middle period work has been brought into the current debate on rule following and representation by Kripke and the Hintikkas. In my dissertation, I argue that approaches which aim at a consistent reconstruction of Wittgenstein's argument, while valuable in their own right, fail to do justice to his focus on the conflicting intuitions that lie behind philosophical theory building. For this hidden and ambiguous side to his thought is the turning point in his philosophical development. ;One can summarise my findings as follows: In 1929, Wittgenstein recognised that the analysis of colour propositions forced him to give up the Tractarian doctrine that analysis must end in logically independent elementary propositions. From this point, his work branched out in two main directions. On the one hand, he worked on 'philosophical grammar': analyses of the rules we follow in talking about such matters as colour, visual experience, intention, time, memory and the philosophical subject. Here, the picture theory provided the basis for an account of how the mind represents the world. On the other hand, he also thought of language as a 'secondary' system, to be contrasted with direct apprehension of the 'primary' phenomena. This view, which is set out most fully in several chapters of an unpublished typescript , led to a seemingly inexpressible solipsism on which 'all is in flux.' The attempt to reconcile the two conceptions of the pictorial analogy--language as a system of representational conventions and experience as a direct presentation of the phenomena--ultimately led him to see the dangers in that analogy and thus to his later notion of a 'philosophical picture.'.