Joachim Schulte

This paper is an attempt at presenting a convincing reading of the first sentences of PI § 109, especially of its third sentence. There Wittgenstein mentions what he calls "the pneumatic conception of thought", which by Miss Anscombe is translated as "the conception of thought as a gaseous medium". By comparing the relevant sentences with their sources in Wittgenstein's manuscripts and additional parallels it is found that Anscombe's rendering is liable to be misleading. Wittgenstein's notion of "pneuma" is likely to be inspired by a conception of the kind elucidated by Oswald Spengler, for instance, according to whose account pneuma is to be understood as a sort of body (Seelenkörper). If you take this as your central image, the pneumatic conception alluded to in PI § 109 is one which can be tracked down in Wittgenstein's early as well as in his middle-period work. In this remark (PI § 109), Wittgenstein tries to mention both helpful and misleading features of his earlier ways of thinking, and what he now calls the "pneumatic conception" can be seen to be the foil for both sorts of features. The central idea is that the core of language contains a scaffolding of rules whose ("pneumatic") substance is the same as that of our thought. In accordance with this view the logical structure of thought is held to be identical with that of language and reality—a notion which fits parts of the Tractatus as well as parts of the original "grammatical" conception developed in the early 1930ies.

Partly by way of contrast with a conception described by Kleist, Wittgenstein's notions of world‐picture and mythology are explained and three types of statement playing a particularly important role with respect to our world‐picture or pictures distinguished. Problems concerning sentences which contain normative elements are discussed and a test for what to count as a statement giving information about our world‐picture is proposed. A mythology in Wittgenstein's sense is characterized as a structured, systematic set of models permitting analogical development and the gradual change of previous paradigms.

Wittgenstein's last work, On Certainty , is widely regarded as his third masterpiece of philosophy and one of his most enigmatic writings. On Certainty explores the ways in which claims of indisputable knowledge are expressed, and how language forms the basis of such claims. On Certainty has largely been read as representing a break with Wittgenstein's previous thinking, but this study places these ideas firmly in the development of his thought since the 1930s. Wittgenstein on Certainty and Doubt illuminates Wittgenstein's examination of the logical features of epistemic terms—such as 'know', 'believe' and 'doubt'—and his interrogation of the foundations of human knowledge, the extent to which our knowledge is immune from doubt, and the conflicts between different articulations of knowledge

In 1929 Wittgenstein left Vienna for Cambridge, and Waismann grew into the role of spokesman for his absent hero. The story of his relation with the man so greatly esteemed by his much-admired mentor Schlick contains dramatic elements: there were moments of friction and of coldness, announcements of withdrawal from a shared project, accusations of plagiarism or, at least, insuffi cient acknowledgement. What we know of this story has been told by Brian McGuinness and Gordon Baker. If one wishes to gauge the extent to which Waismann succeeded in fulfi lling his task as spokesman for Wittgenstein, one must start from the basic fact that between 1929 and 1936 the two men collaborated, trying to realize the common plan of producing a systematic exposition of Wittgenstein’s philosophy

In the context of a published Lecture on Aesthetics recorded by Rush Rhees the editor quotes a lengthy passage from Smythies’ Notes of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Description (1940). Here,Wittgenstein is reported as observing: “Take Brahms and Keller - I often found that certain themes of Brahms were extremely Kellerian.” In my paper, I try to spell out what Wittgenstein may have had in mind in making this observation. As Wittgenstein himself remarks, his words have an historical dimension that needs to be taken into account if one wants to arrive at a fruitful reading of his observation. At the same time, the suggestion that Brahms is a “Kellerian” composer can be seen as relying on insights developed by Wittgenstein in the course of his later reflections on aspect-seeing and other topics in the philosophy of psychology as well as his ideas on the immediacy of certain connections between linguistic meaning and the expression of feelings.

It is often claimed that certain remarks by Wittgenstein reveal him to have been an unsympathetic reader of Shakespeare and an unappreciative judge of the latter’s achievements. In the present paper, I attempt to show that this sort of observation is not only wrong but due to an inadequate perspective. An examination of the relevant remarks may bring to light a number of more or less interesting principles of evaluation, or aesthetic maxims and appraisals, but these do not say much about Shakespeare’s works, nor are the meant to be instructive in this way. What Wittgenstein’s remarks are really about is his own intellectual physiognomy: it is by way of contrast, by comparing certain features of Shakespeare with what he supposes to be characteristic of himself, that he hopes to learn about the limits and potentialities of his own personality.

Wittgenstein's rule‐following considerations have often been discussed in terms of the debate occasioned by Kripke's interpretation of the so‐called ‘paradox’ of rule‐following. In the present paper, some of the remarks that stood in the centre of that debate are looked at from a very different perspective. First, it is suggested that these remarks are, among other things, meant to bring out that, to the extent we can speak of ‘reason’ in the context of rule‐following, it is a very restricted form of reason – one which is basically to be understood as a kind of conformity. Second, by telling part of the story of the genesis of the relevant remarks it is pointed out that there is a certain tension between the ‘liberating’ character of earlier remarks bearing on rule‐following and the ‘sinister’ side of later remarks like §§198–202, which helps explain why it took Wittgenstein such a long time to arrive at the views expressed in his rule‐following considerations

I think that our concepts of past and future are so basic and so all-pervasive that I find it difficult to believe that anyone could even begin to make it appear plausible that one could dislodge them from their accustomed habitats. But Michael Dummett, in his paper Bringing about the past, while leaving no doubt about the fact that we are well-advised to leave the past where it belongs, arrives at the conclusion that under very special circumstances one might consider it not completely impossible to regard a situation as one in which the past has been brought about. In spite of Dummett’s very sophisticated arguments I continue to have doubts about this. But before going into these doubts, I shall try to remind you of the substance of Dummett’s paper.

This paper aims to clarify certain aspects of the connections between music and (word) language alluded to in various manuscript passages by Wittgenstein. Three points are emphasized: (1) Wittgenstein’s willingness to speak of music as a language; (2) the importance of context; (3) the possibility of distinguishing various ways of explaining our hearing certain sequences of sounds as expressive of gestures or states of mind etc. Several attempts at elucidating the idea of understanding music lead to the realization that, according to Wittgenstein, a prior grasp of his notion of a language-game is required to make headway in this area