Denis McManus

This paper explores difficulties that resolute readers of the early Wittgenstein face, arising out of what I call the ‘sheer lack’ interpretation of their ‘austere’ conception of nonsense, and the intelligibility of philosophical confusion—there being a sense in which we rightly talk of a ‘grasp’ of philosophical nonsense and indeed of its ‘logic’. Such readers depict philosophical and ‘plain’ nonsense as distinct psychological kinds; but I argue that the ‘intelligibility’ of philosophical confusion remains invisible to the kind of psychology that the ‘sheer lack’ interpretation would make available to Wittgenstein. These concerns relate to well-established worries concerning whether the Tractatus’s ‘ladder’ can be climbed by thinking through arguments—or indeed by thinking full stop—if it is austerely nonsensical. Though I argue that these worries can be met, doing so requires another interpretation of ‘austerity’, which I call the ‘equivocation’ interpretation, and reveals the difference between resolute and non-resolute readings to be less clear cut than has been thought. Key here is the failure of some hard-and-fast distinctions that inform the literature—distinctions shaped by intuitions about mind, meaning, inference, logic, and nonsense—to serve us well.

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests, and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands, I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject-matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like

Paul Boghossian has pointed out a ’circularity problem’ for dispositionalist theories of meaning: as a result of the holistic character of belief fixation, one cannot identify someone’s meaning such and such with facts of the form S is disposed to utter P under conditions C, without C involving the semantic and intentional notions that such a theory was to explain. Alex Miller has recently suggested an ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’ (modelled on David Lewis’s well known version of functionlism) and has argued that this version of dispositionalism escapes Boghossian’s ’circularity problem’. Miller argues, nonetheless, that another of Boghossian’s criticisms of dispositionalism, ’the infinity problem’ still applies to this ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’: C will still draw upon a potential infinity of mediating background clusters of belief. The present paper argues that the feature that ’the infinity problem’ presents as problematic is a feature of a host of familiar explanations. Our fundamental difficulty in this area is not our inability to understand how a more general model can be applied to a particular domain (the intentional understood as dispositional) but our failure to understand that general model itself (dispositional explanation).

This paper explores the place of realist and idealist themes in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It takes as its starting point Adrian Moore’s denial that transcendental idealism is present in that text only as an “enemy”—to be “diagnosed and dispelled,” as Peter Sullivan puts it. I question whether reflection on TI can perform the positive task which Moore’s reading assigns to it—in particular, whether coming to recognize its ultimate incoherence leads us to a recognition of “the forces that give this nonsense the appearance of sense in the first place.” On the basis of an understanding of those forces that is present in Moore’s own work, I argue that reflection on the quasi-realist themes manifest in Wittgenstein’s remarks on picturing perform that task more successfully. In this way, I question the special status that Moore assigns to TI in the Tractatus, his claiming—“with... myriad qualifications”—that “Wittgenstein is a transcendental idealist.”

The paper presents an interpretation of the thinking behind the early Wittgenstein's "general form of the proposition." It argues that a central role is played by the assumption that all domains of discourse are governed by the same laws of logic. The interpretation is presented partly through a comparison with ideas presented recently by Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan; the paper argues that the above assumption explains more of the key characteristics of the "general form of the proposition" than Potter and Sullivan suppose, including, in particular, its claim that the bases from which all other propositions are derived must be elementary propositions.

Recently the attempt has been made to demonstrate Heidegger's relevance to the concerns of analytic philosophers. A focus for this effort has been the criticism in his early work of Cartesian ontology. While a number of important works have mapped out this area of Heidegger's thought, a crucial task has not been carried out, namely that of assessing how Heidegger can accommodate those phenomena which motivate the Cartesian to adopt his highly counter-intuitive ontology. As long as we fail to examine how Heidegger's early ontology copes with the possibilities of error and of hallucination, the suspicion will remain that Heidegger is simply insensitive to those phenomena on which the Cartesian focuses. Neither Heidegger nor the Cartesian have been done any favours by commentators showing little inclination to bring the opponents into closer combat. This paper attempts to correct that omission

This paper identifies a problem that Aristotle revealed and that Heidegger’s own insights, into the diverse forms that the Being of entities takes, exacerbated: the problem is whether there is sense to the idea of ‘Being in general’—‘Being as a whole’—and this is a problem because there not being such sense threatens the very possibility of the discipline of ontology. The paper proposes that Heidegger envisaged the project which a completed Being and Time would have carried out as an attempt to solve this problem. The project considers what the subject who intends ‘Being as a whole’ would have to be like; crucially this requires reflection on what it would be for that subject itself to be a whole; and we find such reflection in Heidegger’s discussion of authenticity. By looking in particular at his notions of ‘guilt’ and ‘Being-towards-death’, and the role that they play in identifying an ‘ecstatic’ form of temporality, we can identify a ‘horizon’ against which the authentic can be seen as ‘being-a-whole’ and as living in the light of an understanding of what might indeed be called ‘Being as a whole’.

The paper presents an interpretation of the thinking behind the early Wittgenstein's “general form of the proposition.” It argues that a central role is played by the assumption that all domains of discourse are governed by the same laws of logic. The interpretation is presented partly through a comparison with ideas presented recently by Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan; the paper argues that the above assumption explains more of the key characteristics of the “general form of the proposition” than Potter and Sullivan suppose, including, in particular, its claim that the bases from which all other propositions are derived must be elementary propositions.