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.

Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures. The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures for a book to be published by Cambridge University Press. We describe the materials that make up Moore’s notes, explain their unique value, review the principal editorial challenges that these materials present, and provide a brief outline of our editorial project

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.

The title of this chapter is borrowed from John McDowell's ‘One strand in the private language argument’ (1998b). In that paper, he argues that much of what is best in Wittgenstein's discussion of private language can be seen as a development of the Kantian insight that there is no such thing as an unconceptualized experience - that even the most elementary sensation must have a conceptual aspect. On McDowell's view, a sensation is a ‘perfectly good something - an object, if you like, of concept involving awareness. What is a nothing … is the supposed pre-conceptual this that is supposed to ground our conceptualizations’ (1998b: 283). McDowell's Sellarsian objections to the notion of the Given in that paper are an insightful and illuminating development of Wittgenstein's discussion of the topic. However, McDowell's recoil from the notion of an unconceptualized experience, a conception of sensation on which it turns out to be ‘simply a nothing’ (ibid.), leads him to reject Wittgenstein's cryptic proposal that a sensation is ‘not a something, but not a nothing either’ (PI 304). Instead, McDowell embraces the opposed view on which every experience is a ‘perfectly good something’ (1998b: 283), something of one kind or another, for it must be possible to bring it under the appropriate concepts. What McDowell misses here, I believe, is that a central aim of Wittgenstein's discussion of our supposed ability to refer to inner objects is to attack the very idea of ‘pre-linguistic awareness … as a substratum on which the capacity for concept-carried awareness is constructed’ (ibid.).

Drawing on recent work on the nature of the numbering system of the _Tractatus_ and Wittgenstein’s use of that system in his composition of the _Prototractatus_, the paper sets out the rationale for the online tool called__ __ The University of Iowa Tractatus Map. The map consists of a website with a front page that links to two separate subway-style maps of the hypertextual numbering system Wittgenstein used in his _Tractatus_. One map displays the structure of the published _Tractatus_; the other lays out the structure of the _Prototractatus_. The site makes available the full text of the German and the two canonical English translations.__ __While we envisage the map as a tool that we would like a wide variety of readers to find helpful, we argue that our website amounts to a radically new edition of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of that text. In particular, we claim that our visually compelling presentation of the book’s overall structure delivers on Wittgenstein’s cryptic claim in a letter to his publisher that it is the numbers that “make the book surveyable and clear”.

No verão de 1932, Wittgenstein alegou que o artigo recentemente publicado porCarnap “Linguagem Física como Linguagem Universal da Ciência” fez uso extensivo e semmenções das idéias do próprio Wittgenstein. Em uma carta a Schlick, ele se queixou que“em breve estaria em uma situação na qual seu próprio trabalho seria considerado mera-mente como uma versão requentada ou plágio do de Carnap”. Neste artigo, examino arelação entre o artigo de Carnap, posteriormente reimpresso como A Unidade da Ciência, eo tratamento dispensado por Wittgenstein, nos primeiros sete capítulos das ObservaçõesFilosóficase outros escritos entre 1929-1932, a assuntos relacionados.

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.

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.'.