David G. Stern

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.

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.