Nuno Venturinha

In this note I address two issues in Susan Edwards-McKie’s recent paper “The Cosmic Fragment: Härte des Logischen Zwangs und Unendliche Möglichkeit. Nachlass discoveries and Wittgenstein’s conception of generality and the infinite”. The first has to do with a “von Wright error” that Edwards- McKie found and that I show to have been ultimately corrected by von Wright. The second has to do with her interpretation of Wittgenstein’s reaction to Heraclitus’ idea that “everything flows”, one I interpret as purely grammatical and not as a substantial position in favour or against Heracliteanism, nor even as a third stance between this and Parmenideanism, as Edwards-McKie interestingly suggests.

In this paper, I first introduce the main motivations for the internalism/externalism dichotomy in epistemology and explore different accounts of epistemic justification, mostly externalist, arising from Dretske’s relevant alternatives theory of knowledge, namely the reliabilism of Goldman and Nozick, the contextualism of Cohen and DeRose, which is governed by fallibilist standards, and Lewis’ version of contextualism, to which infallibilist standards apply. I then argue that Wittgenstein critically anticipates many of these strategies and tries to avoid such a dichotomy by assuming a form of infallibilism which is neither internal nor external. After introducing the idea of a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology and how it responds to the problem of epistemic justification and to the particular challenge posed by radical scepticism, I defend the view that infallibility is logically unavoidable when we realize that we are always trapped in one language-game or another, even if we constantly switch between language-games.

This paper explores central themes of Duncan Pritchard’s epistemology intimately related to the Wittgensteinian idea of a “hinge epistemology”. The first section calls attention to the eminently empirical character of our “hinges”. The second section focuses on Pritchard’s notion of “arational hinge commitments”, more specifically his distinction between the pair “über hinge commitments”/“über hinge propositions” and the pair “personal hinge commitments”/“personal hinge propositions”. The third section brings to the discussion Timothy Williamson’s view of “inexact knowledge” and examines another pair of notions introduced by Pritchard, namely “antiskeptical hinge commitments”/“antiskeptical hinge propositions”. I conclude with a reevaluation of the diagnosis made by Pritchard that, confronted with a sceptical scenario, our “epistemic angst” can be surpassed if we follow Wittgenstein’s teaching in On Certainty about the “structure of rational evaluation”, but that an “epistemic vertigo” can never be ultimately dispelled. My argument is that in a moral scenario there is no room for vertigo.

_Illuminates Wittgenstein’s religious epistemology—bridging faith, reason, and cultural understanding across disciplines_ _Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religion_ offers the first comprehensive exploration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion through an explicitly epistemological lens. Fourteen newly commissioned essays from leading and emerging scholars examine how Wittgenstein’s later thought, especially his descriptive and grammatical methods, provides tools for understanding religious belief, practice, and diversity. This singular volume situates Wittgenstein within debates over cognitivism, non-cognitivism, and fideism, while also considering his subtle anthropological and ethnological insights into religion as a form of life. Structured in five parts, _Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religion_ traces key themes that range from the tension between faith and reason to the role of evidence in religious life. Contributors engage with seminal figures such as Locke, Kierkegaard, James, and Malinowski to illuminate how Wittgenstein challenges scientific reductionism and opens new ways of understanding the lived experience of belief. The essays reveal how questions of meaning, context, and practice underpin the epistemic evaluation of religious commitments, as well as how Wittgenstein’s approach helps clarify conflicts that lack a shared evidential framework. Combining historical sensitivity, conceptual rigor, and contemporary application, this landmark collection_:_ Systematically explores Wittgenstein’s religious epistemology across multiple thematic dimensions Challenges scientistic frameworks by emphasizing context and meaning in religious discourse Highlights the relevance of Wittgenstein’s thought for contemporary debates on faith, reason, and evidence Introduces the concept of quasi-fideism as a nuanced position between full rationalism and fideism Expands Wittgenstein’s philosophical reach by applying anthropological and ethnological perspectives to religious belief Addresses current teaching and research needs in epistemology and the philosophy of religion Encouraging cross-disciplinary dialogue between disciplines, _Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religion _is essential reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. It serves as a core or supplemental text in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses such as Philosophy of Religion, Religious Epistemology, Wittgenstein Studies, as well as courses examining belief formation, ritual, and the social dynamics of religion.

In this paper I begin by scrutinizing classic approaches to the question of agrammaticality, with a particular focus on Frege and the early Wittgenstein, and try to show that a further step is needed in order to adequately address this topic. I then focus on the later Wittgenstein’s treatment of nonsense-poems and claim that the failure of the Philosophical Investigations as a book is actually connected with Wittgenstein’s recognition that philosophy should be written under the form of poetry. The therapeutic consequences of this view are discussed in connection with Deleuze’s comments on Melville and with Read’s comments on Sass, which offer very different views of agrammaticality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein é unanimemente reconhecido como um dos pensadores mais marcantes do século xx, tendo influenciado decisivamente o debate filosófico da contemporaneidade. Apoiando-se não nas edições clássicas mas no espólio do autor, problematizando a formalidade sui generis característica daquele, esta obra propõe-se acompanhar o evoluir do pensamento wittgensteiniano, nos seus diferentes planos, determinando a metodologia que o vai definir, enquanto possibilidade concreta de compreensão da visão filosófica que lhe subjaz. Ao indagar toda a trajectória reflexiva que se estabelece entre o anúncio inaugural do Tractatus e o do livro que no princípio dos anos 30 é projectado em contraposição àquele mas que nunca será concluído, Lógica, Ética, Gramática assume, na verdade, um carácter propedêutico, pretendendo lançar as bases para uma nova leitura da «segunda» filosofia wittgensteiniana, crítico-geneticamente definida em relação à «primeira». Este livro interessará, assim, a estudantes e investigadores de várias disciplinas filosóficas, nomeadamente Epistemologia, Ética, Filosofia da Linguagem, Lógica e Metodologia Filosófica, onde os apuramentos de Wittgenstein são incontornáveis, bem como a todos aqueles que trabalham em Filologia ou Teoria da Literatura.

To what extent is the form of our life fixed, i.e. is there a form of life or forms of life? How does this bear on the nature of experience? These are two Wittgensteinian questions in need of clarification. Wittgenstein on Forms of Life and the Nature of Experience sheds light on a much exploited but rarely analysed topic in Wittgenstein scholarship while addressing central themes of contemporary philosophy. Bringing together essays from some of the leading scholars in the field, the book concentrates on Wittgenstein’s concept of Lebensform(en), and more specifically its evolution in the author’s thought until his death in 1951.

3.1 Bolzano’s understanding of the matter—Some classic views: Aquinas, Kant and Wittgenstein —Lewis ’ criticism—Rapports between our cognition and the world: a question of justification—Rejection of an anthropocentric position—Varieties of intelligence. 3.2 The lack of a comprehensive perceptual apparatus or integration scheme in animals – Knowing and simple being acquainted with—Challenging the canonicity of the human intellect through an extended conception of knowledge: difference between knowledge proper and knowledge*—Sosa on metaphorical knowledge attributions—The manifold correspondences and truths that a multispecies perspective entails—Notion of agreement structure: parallels with Davidson’s “conceptual scheme”. 3.3 Correspondence and relativism—Kant on the “thing in itself”: its unknowability—Why correspondism is inconsistent: aspectual and full knowledge—Bolzano contra Kant—The shortcomings of transcendental schematism—Bolzano’s “propositions in themselves”: consequences of this view. 3.4 How a proposition in itself works—Our mental impressions include many more details than what is propositionally synthesized—The Aristotelian concepts of “substance”, “accident” and “form”: the circumstance of there existing accidents of accidents—Processes of differentiation—Phrasing and propositional instantiation—Helmholtz’s “unconscious inferences”—The primacy of the world over any subjectivism. 3.5 Bolzano’s “truths in themselves” and the performativity of our judgments—Knowledge as an acknowledgement of truth: the bedrock that resists all correspondences—Tragesser on Bolzano and Frege.

10.1 Husserl’s version of transcendental subjectivism—Challenging the self-evidence of Descartes’ ego—Factual recognitions and ontological claims: suspending all non-self-evident claims, including modal ones—Being as an appearance of validity—The decisive maintenance of the phenomenological suspension—Our natural connectionism seems to undermine a complete bracketing. 10.2 Beyond the Cartesian-Kantian “I think”: phenomenology as the study of the stream of consciousness—What distinguishes it from a contextualist epistemology—The Husserlian insistence on modality—The notion of “as if” applied to perceptive, retentive and recollective states—Explaining as-if experiences by means of faults and fictionalizations—Modal issues at the core of Husserl’s concerns: “certainty of being” as stubbornly present. 10.3 Intentionality—How awareness is impregnated by otherness—The world and our intentional activities—Is an interdependent relationship sound?—External things as things meant—The spectrum of Husserl’s self-repudiated psychologism. 10.4 Imaginative and suppositional capacities: Husserl after Aristotle on phantasy—The rationale of our thinking through images that are anchored to a hypoleptic background—Aquinas’ misunderstanding of the Aristotelian doctrine of supposition—Pros and cons of Husserl’s immanent philosophy—Hermberg’s and Beyer’s readings: a “lifeworldly” contextualism?

This paper explores Wittgenstein’s lifelong interest in music. The first part offers an overview of the various authors mentioned throughout Wittgenstein’s corpus, particularly in the posthumous publications Culture and Value and Movements of Thought. The second part specifically examines some of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Beethoven focusing on the peculiar religious realism that Wittgenstein attributes to Beethoven’s work. Recent interpretations put forward by Matthew Lau and Béla Szabados are discussed. It is argued that these commentators fail to address the religious basis of Wittgenstein’s admiration for Beethoven.

This book approaches classic epistemological problems from a contextualist perspective. The author takes as his point of departure the fact that we are situated beings, more specifically that every single moment in our lives is already given within the framework of a specific context in the midst of which we understand ourselves and what surrounds us. In the process of his investigation, the author explores, in a fresh way, the works of key thinkers in epistemology. These include Bernard Bolzano, René Descartes, Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but also contemporary authors such as Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, David Lewis, Duncan Pritchard, Ernest Sosa and Charles Travis. Some of the topics covered are attributions of knowledge, the correspondence theory of truth, objectivity and subjectivity, possible worlds, primary and secondary evidence, scepticism, transcendentalism and relativism. The book also introduces a new contextualist thought-experiment for dealing with moral questions. Contextualism has received a great deal of attention in contemporary epistemology. It has the potential to resolve a number of issues that traditional epistemological approaches cannot address. In particular, a contextualist view opens the way to an understanding of those cognitive processes that require situational information to be fully grasped. However, contextualism poses serious difficulties in regard to epistemic invariance. This book offers readers an innovative approach to some fundamental questions in this field.

5.1 Why a thought is invisible for Frege: Travis on the abstractedness that can be extracted from our “representing-as”—Thoughts and concepts: the “conceptual” as a referential domain, which does not possess the objectivity of the “non-conceptual”—The intermediation made by the “representing-as” as a form of judging—Travis’ rejection of any internalism—Reassessing psychologism: Russell ’s criticism of Frege’s conception of thought—Travis’ suggestion of a Wittgensteinian view that takes into account the sociability of thinking. 5.2 Travis’ reluctance in admitting unthought thoughts beyond the workings of language—Problems of perception: perceptive presentations and representations—The case of analogical, non-perceptive representations—Language and thought reconsidered—Frege on fictional and real thoughts: a problem of modality—The anonymous character of thought. 5.3 Aquinas and the recognition that there are truths which escape our attention—Knowing and guessing: the transcendental impossibility of representing what we do not know—Scientific predictableness—Aquinas’ two kinds of intellection: “divine” and “human”—Distinction between actual and potential knowledge—The peril of determinism.

6.1 There is an apparent freedom of the will—Our actions presuppose free decisions—Is there a natural necessity in the world?—Feldman ’s rejection of a contextualist solution to the problem of free will: determinism and scepticism—Wright on even-handedness and factivity—Contextualism at work: Lewis’ infallibilist view and Williams’ concerns. 6.2 Aristotle’s structural account of the actualization of potentialities in contrast with Aquinas’ totalitarianism of the “divine intellect”—Is creativity at risk?—Our making in general as necessitated. 6.3 The question of possible worlds: Lewis’ modal realism—What does it mean for a possibility to be unactualized?—The lack of a hierarchy of importance among possibilia—Idea of interdependency of choices—Does it make sense to talk about alternatives to the actual world?—Infinite variations comprise both infinite actions and infinite reactions—Inoperability of a unique source of causation—The need for the right multiplicity, which nevertheless results in an abstract possibility.

12.1. Ricœur and the distinction between ethical goodness and moral normativity: how one does not imply the other—The intimacy of ethics contrasts with the publicity of morality—Acquiring moral norms and ethical principles: both work in a context-sensitive way—Ethical formality as empty: morality provides the content for an application of ethics—Actions are reflected in the world—The dispelling of epistemic vertigo: moral commitments as hinges—The question of deriving moral norms from ethical principles. 12.2 Rawls’ contextualist “veil of ignorance” in political philosophy—A parallel thought experiment in morals: the disclosure principle (DP)—If nothing of what I did were concealed, would I care about it?—The Epicurean dilemma—Pragmatism and shame—Refusal of any sensible interferences with one’s actions when it comes to moral responsibility. 12.3 The peculiarity of akratic actions—Doing w instead of r as resulting from a conflict of reasons, not from ignorance—Impossibility of knowing how to act—Our legitimations are of equal value. 12.4 Is there a randomness of practical justification?—Positive and negative ethical experiences: the satisfaction for having done r and the dissatisfaction for having done w—Applying DP to each case: peace and torment—The Socratic involuntariness of ignorant choices collides with the impracticality of moral knowledge—How DP goes along with the context-sensitivity of our rational decisions being itself context-sensitive—Recognizing the fluidity of r-w standards.