Nuno Venturinha

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 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.

Sixty years after its first edition, there is an increasing consensus among scholars that the work posthumously published as _Philosophical Investigations _represents something that is far from a complete picture of Wittgenstein’s second book project. G.H. von Wright’s seminal research on the _Nachlass_ was an important contribution in this direction, showing that the Wittgenstein papers can reveal much more than the source of specific remarks. This book specifically explores Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical_ _Investigations_ from the different angles of its originary conceptions, including the mathematical texts, shedding new light on fundamental issues in twentieth century and contemporary philosophy. Leading authorities in the field focus on newly published or hitherto unpublished sources for the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work and a Wittgenstein typescript, translated for the first time into English, is included as an appendix.

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.