Lars Hertzberg

Which famous twentieth-century philosopher instigated a revolution in philosophy, arguing that the philosopher’s business is not to advance general theories about reality, but rather to help release our thinking from the intellectual cramps produced by a misunderstanding of the forms of language? Wittgenstein? Wrong! according to John W. Cook. This revolution in philosophy actually had no author. Apparently, it arose through a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s later writings. In fact, Cook implies, Wittgenstein himself was not genuinely engaged in a struggle with philosophical puzzles, but rather had an ontological theory up his sleeve: he was a conventional empiricist in the tradition of Berkeley, Ernst Mach, and Russell, though he happened to express himself so obscurely that some philosophers, believing themselves inspired by his writings, dreamed up the whole revolution by mistake, as it were. However, Cook is not arguing that the revolution should be canceled; rather he looks at Wittgenstein’s work from the standpoint of that accidental revolution, berating Wittgenstein, as it were, for not having thought to be a Wittgensteinian himself.

Most of us, at one time or another, will have been struck by a thought that we might wish to express in the following words: ‘I could have been born in a different time and place, my position in life and all my personal characteristics could have been completely different from what they are; how amazing then that it should have fallen to my lot to live my life, the only life I shall ever live, as this particular individual rather than any other.’ This thought need not derive from a sense that there is anything unusual about one's life; what it expresses, rather, may be the sense that there is something gratuitous or contingent about one's being any particular individual at all. This sense of contingency might be connected with a feeling of gratitude, perhaps of responsibility towards others less fortunate in life; or it might be bound up with envy, or pride, or self-pity, etc

In his essay “Analytic Philosophy and Metaphysics,” Frederick Stoutland argues that an unspoken metaphysical spirit underlies much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, in spite of the fact that the word “metaphysics” has had a pejorative ring. The metaphysical habit of mind results in an activity which at best is an unproductive diversion, at worst a dialectical illusion, making claims which only appear to be truth-evaluable. I agree with Stoutland’s diagnosis, which is inspired by Wittgenstein, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Cora Diamond, but argue that there is a bifurcation in the metaphysical temptation which Stoutland overlooks. One form is the assumption that questions of meaning can be raised outside the context of meaningful use of an expression, the other is the urge to impose a scientific form of inquiry onto philosophy, the aims of which are quite different from those of science. The former temptation is the deeper one, running through the history of philosophy, while the attempt to model philosophical inquiry onto scientific explanation is the contemporary form taken by this temptation. As an example of the metaphysical spirit Stoutland criticizes Marion David’s defense of the correspondence theory of truth. I argue that David’s progress could have been cut off at an earlier stage, by pointing out that the examples of truth claims David uses as his starting points are themselves bewildering and far removed from anything that would intelligibly be said in the course of a normal conversation.

Most of us, at one time or another, will have been struck by a thought that we might wish to express in the following words: ‘I could have been born in a different time and place, my position in life and all my personal characteristics could have been completely different from what they are; how amazing then that it should have fallen to my lot to live my life, the only life I shall ever live, as this particular individual rather than any other.’ This thought need not derive from a sense that there is anything unusual about one's life; what it expresses, rather, may be the sense that there is something gratuitous or contingent about one's being any particular individual at all. This sense of contingency might be connected with a feeling of gratitude, perhaps of responsibility towards others less fortunate in life; or it might be bound up with envy, or pride, or self-pity, etc.