Hans-Johann Glock

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Even among Wittgenstein's admirers, his conception of philosophy as a therapy for conceptual confusion is generally considered to be the weakest part of his later work. It seems to consist of slogans, which are unsupported by argument and belied by his own 'theory construction'. It may even be self-refuting--a philosophical theory that denies the possibility of philosophical theory. ;Unless these objections can be met, current attempts to apply Wittgenstein's philosophical methods remain problematic. I have therefore sought to provide a systematic account and defense of Wittgenstein's position. I have identified the common ground between Wittgenstein and the philosophical tradition, distinguished five basic features of his position and shown how they are linked. ;I go on to argue that his conception of philosophy is consistent and appears untenable only because of a failure to appreciate its connection with other aspects of his work, notably his understanding of logical necessity and of language. I have not examined Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy in isolation, for only by pitting it against its major rivals can its cogency be properly assessed. Throughout, I have examined the links between methodological issues and problems in philosophical logic, epistemology and metaphysics. ;The principle threat to Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy is Quine's assimilation of philosophy and science. His rejection of the distinctions between the a priori and the empirical and between analytic and synthetic propositions represent a profoundly important challenge to Wittgenstein's normative conception of language. However, I argue the challenge can be met by reducing Quine's behaviorist model of language to absurdity

v. Savigny's commentary is a remarkable achievement and essential reading for all scholars of the Investigations. It brings to the exegetical enterprise something new and important — the challenge of an immanent approach and the tool of German philology. However, some of the potential gains may be lost by his leitmotiv of a tight master-scheme. In my view this ‘central theses’ scheme presses Wittgenstein's multifaceted masterpiece into an unsuitable Procrustean bed and tends to impoverish v. Savigny's account. Nevertheless there remains the palatable pattern-recipe (for me partly spoiled by an overdose of community-views). Most importantly, v. Savigny approaches most of the material in an innovative and illuminating way. He provides good reasons for questioning, although not necessarily overturning, many key claims of recent scholarship

This lucid and accessible dictionary presents technical terms that Wittgenstein introduced into philosophical debate or transformed substantially, and also topics to which he made a substantial contribution. Hans-Johann Glock places Wittgenstein's ideas in their relevance to current debates. The entries delineate Wittgenstein's lines of argument on particular issues, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and shed light on fundamental exegetical controversies. The dictionary entries are prefaced by a 'Sketch of a Intellectual Biography', which links the basic themes of the early and later philosophy and describes the general development of Wittgenstein's thinking. Extensive textual references, a detailed index and an annotated bibliography will facilitate further study. Authoritative, comprehensive and clear, the volume will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in Wittgenstein - his life, work or influence. Each Blackwell Philosopher Dictionary presents the life and work of an individual philosopher in a scholarly but accessible manner. Entries cover key ideas and thoughts, as well as the main themes of the philosopher's works. A comprehensive biographical sketch is also included

This paper discusses conceptual relativism. The main focus is on the contrasting ideas of Wittgenstein and Davidson, with Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Hacker in supporting roles. I distinguish conceptual from alethic and ontological relativism, defend a distinction between conceptual scheme and empirical content, and reject the Davidsonian argument against the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes: there can be conceptual diversity without failure of translation, and failure of translation is not necessarily incompatible with recognizing a practice as linguistic. Conceptual relativism may be untenable, but not for the hermeneutic reasons espoused by Davidson.

Kalhat has forcefully criticised Wittgenstein's linguistic or conventionalist account of logical necessity, drawing partly on Waismann and Quine. I defend conventionalism against the charge that it cannot do justice to the truth of necessary propositions, renders them unacceptably arbitrary or reduces them to metalingustic statements. At the same time, I try to reconcile Wittgenstein's claim that necessary propositions are constitutive of meaning with the logical positivists’ claim that they are true by virtue of meaning. Explaining necessary propositions by reference to linguistic conventions does not reduce modal to non‐modal notions, but it avoids metaphysical accounts, which are incapable of explaining how we can have a priori knowledge of necessity.

Early analytic philosophers like Carnap, Wittgenstein and Ryle regarded ontology as a branch of metaphysics that is either trivial or meaningless. But at present it is generally assumed that philosophy can make substantial discoveries about what kinds of things exist and about the essence of these kinds. My paper challenges this ontological turn. The currently predominant conceptions of the subject, at any rate, do not license the idea that ontology can provide distinctively philosophical insights into the constituents of reality. I distinguish four main sources of analytic ontology—Strawson's descriptive metaphysics, Kripke's realist semantics, the Austro-Australian truth-maker principle, Quine's naturalistic conception of ontology—and indicate briefly why the first three do not rehabilitate ontology. In the remainder, I concentrate on the most influential and promising position. Quinean ontology seeks to bring out and reduce the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories through logical paraphrase. Against this programme, I argue that Quine's conception of ontological commitment is inadequate, and that his logical paraphrase cannot contribute to the exploration of reality, but at most to the clarification of our conceptual framework.

This paper considers the question of whether there is a human-animal or ‘anthropological difference'. It starts with a historical introduction to the project of philosophical anthropology. Section 2 explains the philosophical quest for an anthropological difference. Sections 3-4 are methodological and explain how philosophical anthropology should be pursued in my view, namely as impure conceptual analysis. The following two sections discuss two fundamental objections to the very idea of such a difference, biological continuity and Darwinist anti-essentialism. Section 7 discusses various possible responses to this second objection - potentiality, normality and typicality. It ends by abandoning the idea of an essence possessed by all and only individual human beings. Instead, anthropological differences are to be sought in the realm of capacities underlying specifically human societies. The final section argues that if there is such a thing as the anthropological difference, it is connected to language. But it favours a more modest line according to which there are several anthropological differences which jointly underlie the gap separating us from our animal cousins.

There is a growing feeling that analytic philosophy is in crisis. At the same time there is a widespread and prima facie attractive conception of analytic philosophy which implies that it equates to good philosophy. In recognition of these conflicting tendencies, my paper raises the question of whether anything could be wrong with analytic philosophy. In section 1 I indicate why analytic philosophy cannot be defined by reference to geography, topics, doctrines or even methods. This leaves open the possibility that analytic philosophy is a style of philosophizing. According to what I call a rationalist conception, the distinguishing feature of analytic philosophy is that it is guided by the ideal of rational argument. This conception implies that ' analytic philosophy' is an honorific title. In section 3 I point out that the rationalist definition yields a different extension for ' analytic philosophy' than commonly recognized. Section 4 defends the appeal to ordinary use in debates about the nature of analytic philosophy. Section 5 grants that there is an honorific use of the label, while also pointing out that the rationalist-cum-honorific conception is at odds with a more wide-spread and entrenched taxonomic practice. Section 6 alleges that the rationalist conception boils down to a 'persuasive definition' of analytic philosophy, and argues in favour of a more neutral philosophical taxonomy. Section 7 argues that analytic philosophy is an intellectual tradition held together both by lines of influence and by family-resemblances. The consequences for my topic are two-fold. First, there could obviously be something wrong with this intellectual tradition; secondly, the question whether there is something wrong needs to be raised separately with respect to individual phases or sections of that tradition

The debate about concepts has always been shaped by a contrast between subjectivism, which treats them as phenomena in the mind or head of individuals, and objectivism, which insists that they exist independently of individual minds. The most prominent contemporary version of subjectivism is Fodor's RTM. The Fregean charge against subjectivism is that it cannot do justice to the fact that different individuals can share the same concepts. Proponents of RTM have accepted shareability as a 'non-negotiable constraint'. At the same time they insist that by distinguishing between sign-types and -- tokens the Fregean objection cannot just be circumvented but revealed to be fallacious. My paper rehabilitates the Fregean argument against subjectivism. The RTM response rests either on an equivocation of 'concept'--between types which satisfy the non-negotiable constraint and tokens which are mental particulars in line with RTM doctrine--or on the untenable idea that one and the same entity can be both a shareable type and hence abstract and a concrete particular in the head. Furthermore, subjectivism cannot be rescued by adopting unorthodox metaphysical theories about the type/token and universal/particular contrasts. The final section argues that concepts are not representations or signs, but something represented by signs. Even if RTM is right to explain conceptual thinking by reference to the occurrence of mental representations, concepts themselves cannot be identical with such representations