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 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.

In this introductory piece I summarize the aims and contents of the special section on Wittgenstein and Applied Epistemology, which consists of a selection of papers presented at the 6th Symposium of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society that took place at the Nova University of Lisbon in 2017. After explaining the sense in which “applied epistemology” is here employed in connection with Wittgenstein’s thought, brief comments are made on papers by Natalie Alana Ashton, Anna Boncompagni, Marco Brusotti, Michel Le Du, Andrew Lugg, Sofia Miguens, Constantine Sandis, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, and Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte and Chon Tejedor.

ABSTRACT This review discusses Uffelmann’s thesis that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar underwent important changes in the different phases of his philosophizing. I claim that if we do not accentuate the shifts in approach and terminology that naturally exist in Wittgenstein’s thought, we can see that grammar and logic go hand in hand all along the way, from the Tractatus to the very end, and that grammar was simply a mode he found to conceive of logic in a completely different way from what Frege and Russell did.

O tradicional problema do conhecimento do singular mantém-se hoje em dia: o impasse assinalado por Aristóteles prevalece na maioria das ciências actuais que lidam precisamente com casos particulares, contingentes, imprevisíveis, que escapam ao enquadramento nos modelos categoriais. Este Colóquio sobre O Estatuto do Singular constituiu um desafio para todos aqueles que em diversas áreas filosóficas e científicas se enfrentam com a necessidade de repensar modelos e estratégias aplicáveis ao caso prático, à decisão, à acção, à inovação, à invenção; noções como o incerto, o provável, o casual, o frequente, o diferente, o imprevisível - exigem um novo modo de pensar e uma revisão das formas típicas da racionalidade. O tópico convocou, além da filosofia, uma ampla gama de domínios: desde as ciências e artes médicas, a biologia, até ao direito e às ciências humanas e sociais, passando também pela literatura e a arte. O que se pretendeu foi apresentar uma sinopse de diferentes olhares e perspectivas sobre um ponto de mira comum: «o estatuto do singular» foi o leit motiv para abrir um horizonte de pensamento e de diálogo profícuo e abrangente.

Cet article vise à examiner la critique wittgensteinienne d’Héraclite et des idées de ce dernier selon lesquelles « tout coule » et « on ne peut entrer deux fois dans la même rivière ». Dans la première section, j’examinerai les sources et les interprétations traditionnelles de ces idées. Dans la seconde section, je discuterai le lien établi par David G. Stern entre les remarques de Wittgenstein sur l’image de la rivière et l’étude qu’il a faite de Platon à partir de 1931. Dans la troisième section, je m’attacherai aux notes sur Héraclite antérieures à 1931 et je les relierai à la question d’un langage phénoménologique. Puis, dans les sections quatre et cinq, je critiquerai le portrait que dresse Hintikka de Wittgenstein en phénoménologue et je fournirai une analyse approfondie de la phénoménologie de Wittgenstein. Enfin, dans la sixième section, je tenterai de faire une synthèse de l’ensemble et de porter un nouveau regard sur la dernière philosophie de Wittgenstein.The aim of this paper is to focus on Wittgenstein’s criticism of Heraclitus and his ideas that « everything flows » and that « one cannot step into the same river twice ». In the first section, I review the sources and the traditional interpretations of these ideas. In the second section, I discuss David G. Stern’s association of Wittgenstein’s remarks on river imagery with his study of Plato after 1931. In the third section, I scrutinize the pre-1931 notes on Heraclitus and link them to the question of a phenomenological language. Then, in sections four and five, I criticize Hintikka’s portrait of Wittgenstein as a phenomenologist and provide an in-depth analysis of Wittgenstein’s phenomenology. Finally, in section six, I attempt to draw everything back together and take a fresh look at Wittgenstein’s later philosophy

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.

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.

This paper explores the epistemological problem of holding something to be true while building on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I claim that it was Frege’s criticism of psychologism in logic that gave a boost to Wittgenstein’s reflections on this issue, an issue that already occupies a central place in Kant’s theory of knowledge. I shall endeavour to show that Wittgenstein’s considerations on rule-following and the systematic character of belief not only make evident the shortcomings of Frege’s explanation of how the mind works but also take a step forward in overcoming the flaws of Kantian epistemology. The later Wittgenstein, I argue, goes further than Kant in the recognition that truth cannot attain more objectivity than the expression of our holding for true, but this does not mean endorsing any subjectivism.